Knowledge for Whom?

Public Sociology in the Making

Christian Fleck, Andreas Hess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409434580
• eBook ISBN: 9781317108849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This ground-breaking volume is a follow-up to Intellectuals and Their Publics. In contrast to the earlier book, which was mainly concerned with the activity of intellectuals and how it relates to the public, this volume analyses what happens when sociology and sociologists engage with or serve various publics. More specifically, this problem will be studied from the following three angles: How does one become a public sociologist and prominent intellectual in the first place? (Part I) How complex and complicated are the stories of institutions and professional associations when they take on a public role or tackle a major social or political problem? (Part II) How can one investigate the relationship between individual sociologists and intellectuals and their various publics? (Part III) This book will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of the sociology of knowledge and ideas, the history of social sciences, intellectual history, cultural sociology, and cultural studies.

PART I Public Intellectuals and their Afterlives: Biographies, Reputation-Building and Academic Disciplines

DOI: 10.4324/9781315591162-2

Chapter 1 Biography in the Social Sciences: The Case of Marcel Mauss

Marcel Fournier

DOI: 10.4324/9781315591162-3

The Status of Biography in the Social Sciences

Today very popular when it comes to politicians, writers, artists or even movie stars, biography remains a secondary genre in the social sciences, particularly in a Francophone environment. In the Anglophone world, biographies of pioneers are numerous: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, etc.

We owe the only biography of Émile Durkheim to Steven Lukes, a professor of English origin. Things have changed a bit over the past 20 years. First there was the (re) discovery of the life story as a tool and object of research, then as a clinical intervention and a therapy. We also saw a “rehabilitation” of autobiography by some historians of the Annales school: Georges Duby and his Guillaume Le Maréchal, a knight of the Middle Ages, Jacques Le Goff and his Saint Louis and later his Saint-François d’Assise. In a similar approach, micro-history has focused on people’s ordinary everyday life: Carlo Ginzburg depicted the world of a miller of the sixteenth century in Le fromage et les vers (The cheese and the worms) while Alain Corbin rebuilt the world of a Norman shoemaker of the nineteenth century (Le monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot).

But concerning the history of our own discipline, biography is still viewed with suspicion. I can see several reasons for this. First of all, a certain Puritanism: in academia, gossip abounds about colleagues here and elsewhere but we do not accept that a book about a scientist, writer or artist, should disclose the details of his private life. It is always assumed that by making private information public, the greatness of the works would be undermined. Who wants to know that Marx had mistresses, that Max Weber had mental problems, that Durkheim was suffering from neurasthenia, that Beethoven had suffered from syphilis, that Althusser killed his wife or even that Foucault frequented gay bars in San Francisco? The temptation of sensationalism is present now more than ever: insatiable publishers and readers wanting more of it. On several occasions, researchers, mostly American, asked me intrusive questions about Marcel Mauss: his close relationship with his friend Henri Hubert, his relationships with women, the role of his mother, etc. … Mauss married late, at 60, a few years after the death of his mother, a strong woman.

Secondly, the opposition that lies between science and literature. In his magisterial study on Les trois cultures (Die drei Kulturen: Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft, 1985), Wolf Lepenies notes that sociology stands at the confluence of two quite different modes of thinking and writing: science and literature. Literature and literary thinking irritates and fascinates sociology. It is as if we could not stretch or pretend to the status of science unless we deny the literary aspect of a scientific activity. The biography is certainly the result of a long research and requires the collection of a considerable number of data, but it has, because it is a story (of life), a specifically literary dimension. There is obviously a chronological view; thrillers and mysteries. One not only seeks to convince by force of arguments and rigorous demonstration, but also to move and to communicate this emotion in style. Writing a biography is like writing a novel, or at least the writer is hoping that the reader will read it like a novel, on a beautiful summer day on a beach in Kent.

Thirdly, the opposition that exists between life and work. When the sociologist (it is the same for the philosopher, the economist or the physicist) discusses the history of his discipline, he focuses on the history of ideas, theoretical discussion and the rereading of texts. In the words of Dirk Kaesler, a German sociologist and author of a biography of Max Weber, “a scientist has no biography, he only has a bibliography”. Of course, one can introduce some biographical notes in a book about a particular author, sometimes even an entire chapter, but the reader or even the publisher will wait for one thing: the presentation of the scientific contribution, the ideas of the author in question. My intention was to build upon an educational and theoretical background when writing an intellectual biography, the first of Marcel Mauss. But what really is an intellectual life? Is it the writings? Thoughts? Beliefs? As good a structuralist as Claude Levi-Strauss was more discreet than that when I interviewed him, sending me a clear message that the knowledge of his life would add little to the understanding of his work. I wanted to publish his correspondences – a dozen letters written with Marcel Mauss between l936 and l944, from Rio or from New York – but he refused. Was it a defensive reflex or a theoretical position? Would it not be better to let the texts “talk” to each other? The premise of any socio-biography which is in fact the sociology of knowledge appears to be quite different: a text can only be understood in context.

Finally, the main opposition between the individual and the society. Sociologists are rightly wary of what Pierre Bourdieu, who was the director of my doctoral thesis, called “biographical illusion”. Bourdieu himself had warned me against “scavenging”, a trend that can be found in intellectual circles: the biographer is a kind of scavenger, who lives with corpses and finds pleasure in devouring them.

Or some sort of parasite that wants to grow up on the shoulders of the great. Any biography seen as a story has a philosophy of history implicit in the sense of a succession of historical events. But what if life had no meaning, in both senses of significance and direction? The advent of the modern novel, as noted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, smashed to pieces this vision of history and the history of life: “The reality is discontinuous, consisting of juxtaposed elements, each of which is singular, and more elusive they arise so constantly unexpected, irrelevant, random”.¹ The sociologist is more than willing to recognize the contingent nature of social action, of any social life, and he knows the importance of structural and cyclical factors. One can easily identify the determinants that have influenced Mauss: his rabbi grandfather, a son of a family of merchants and small manufacturers, a child of Epinal in the Vosges, a nephew of Émile Durkheim (Durkheim was born in l858 and Mauss in l872, only 14 years apart). Mauss etymologically means “seller of books”. Jewish, provincial, and “petit-bourgeois” (petty-bourgeois): this is a position, in Sartre’s sense of the term, and a mentality that exerted a deep influence on the young Mauss. The challenge for the socio-biographer, is to reconstruct the context, the “social surface” on which the individual acts in a plurality of sectors or fields, at every moment. The use of an prosoprographic approach and to a structural perspective analysis, for example, in terms of scope and structure of social relations, will not only help to define the terms that reflect the social positions and trajectories, but also to identify margins involved and the opportunities for innovation within the system. I have developed since the beginning of my academic career a research program that emphasizes a historical approach, which is in the fields of sociology of science, sociology of the university system and the sociology of intellectuals. My book on Marcel Mauss includes, to a large extent, collective biography: the presentation of the team members of L’Année Sociologique, a study of institutions of higher academic education, a development analysis of scientific disciplines (such as anthropology, sociology, history of religion, economy politics, etc.). This is even more true for the book that I have written on Durkheim and the French sociological school, whose title could have been Durkheim, Mauss and Co.

1 Robbe-Grillet, A. 1984. “Le Mirroir qui revient”, in P. Bordieu (1986), L’illusion biographique, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 62–3: 70.

The Difficulty of the Task when it Comes to Writing a Biography of Marcel Mauss (or Émile Durkheim)

The problems are numerous. I will mention only two: the first one, broadly, refers to the (implicit) theory of action, while the second one, with a more methodological approach, refers to questions of sources and data interpretation. First problem encountered: Who is Mauss? An individual or a character? A free thinker, without ties, or a social character crushed by the weight of determinism? Is the main character of the story rational or non-rational? Is he guided by his interests or by his passions? Any biography contains an implicit theory of action. The natural tendency for the author of a biography is, as noted by historian Giovanni Levi, to draw upon a model that combines an ordered time sequence, a consistent and a steady personality, actions without inertia and decisions without uncertainties. But life is not so simple, and individuals far more complex to understand. There are inconsistencies, contradictions, moments of indecision … prevarications are often more numerous than the decisions themselves: we postpone until tomorrow, we deliberate, we expect time will solve the problem, etc. Things do happen and we do not know why, but we do not take decisions. Habitus and cultural backgrounds are at play.

Between habitus and circumstance, how much room there is for the actor? Very little, and often no more than as a margin of error. One does not act as one should. While he was at it, Marcel Mauss kept going; he has researched and written hundreds of articles. His life, like any, is characterized by uncertainty and prevarication: remaining single, teaching at the École Practique des Hautes Études, being a member in good standing of the Socialist Party or staying in Paris during the Second World War, etc. Mauss had surely “nice reasons” not to do this or that, but nice reasons are often rationalizations, that is to say ways of presenting as rational actions things that are not. Life is destiny. Mauss was in line with, though a little against himself, what Bruno Latour calls a “cycle of credibility”: get published, become renowned, get more grants, etc. His friends urged him to stand for a seat at College de France. Though he kept in mind that this venerable institution gave his teachers a lot of authority, he hoped to find his place in this “asylum of liberty, independence, and pure science”. The fame came on top of it, late in his life. But too late…In l938, when in Copenhagen, he was invited as a vice-president at an international congress of anthropology; one of his friends, Paul Fauconnet, gently teases him: “You did, without trying, surely apply for fame”. I once felt like painting Mauss as a young man, drawing my inspiration from the René of Chateaubriand, known as the first great poet of “primitive civilization”. Mauss did read Chateaubriand. The “mal de l’infini” (the correlation of sadness with the feeling of the infinite) which Durkheim speaks of in Suicide is truly the world-weariness depicted by Chateaubriand:

I am accused of having fickle tastes, of not enjoying the long same dream, of being addicted to an imagination that is rushing to get to the bottom of my pleasures, as if she was overwhelmed by their duration; I am accused of passing the goal that I can achieve… Alas! I am only seeking unknowns goods, the instinct for which pursues me. Is it my fault if I bump into frontiers everywhere I go? What if that is finite has no value for me?²

2 Chateaubriand, R. (de) 1992 [1805]. Atala–René. Paris: Flammarion, 155.

René poured into melancholy, thinking about suicide and fled to America; “Blessed are the uncivilized!”, he exclaims. Has Mauss been fascinated by the dandy’s character? His own life was, until his late marriage, that of a bachelor, but can we really talk about Bohemia And what about the painful dialogue between the finite and the infinite? Durkheim criticized his nephew’s “moral unconsciousness” and he feared, indeed, more than any, the “domestic chaos”, deploring in Suicide the poor situation of a single man. What was he thinking about when he was writing this to Mauss? We know that Mauss, much to the chagrin of his entourage, refused to make patterns and to set limits. Had it not been for the presence of his uncle, what would Mauss have become? Would he, like his younger brother Henry, have followed in the footsteps of his father and mother, or would he have followed his inclination for politics (he was a friend of Jean Jaurès) and tried to get elected as MP? What skills and ability to assign to the actor? The ability to overcome obstacles, to overthrow the determinism and to face the animosity?

By trying to highlight the strength of an individual, we run the risk of getting caught into the trap that awaits any biography, namely hagiography. Mauss pioneer of the humanities, Mauss founding father of modern anthropology, Mauss, another Durkheim but a “better equipped one”. When he presented Mauss’s candidacy at the College de France in l930, Charles Andler praised his candidate as follows: a workforce of uncommon self-sacrifice, a huge range of mind, a knowledge of several languages, an extensive training as an ethnologist and a competent museographer, etc. As a counterbalance to an overly rationalist or proactive view, we can now try to show where the actor failed. At least early in his career, Mauss was a loser. His family, especially his uncle and his mother despaired of him: laziness, a position in an institution that was, under his mother, a “trap”, an uncompleted thesis, an unmarried status, low pay. Should we talk about failure or success? The whole question is how the small Jewish Mauss from Epinal, Mauss, who passed the aggregation exams without being a regular student at the École normale supérieure, Mauss the nephew of Durkheim in the shade, became the “father of modern anthropology” (Condominas 1972), thus providing a highly ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Public Sociology in the Making
• Part I Public Intellectuals and their Afterlives: Biographies, Reputation-Building and Academic Disciplines
• Part II Serving the Public or Serving the State?: Trials and Tribulations of Organizational and State-Related Histories
• Part III Intellectuals and their Audiences
• Index