French Sociology

Johan Heilbron

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801456633
• eBook ISBN: 9781501701160
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Französische Geschichte

French Sociology offers a uniquely comprehensive view of the oldest and still one of the most vibrant national traditions in sociology. Johan Heilbron covers the development of sociology in France from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century through the discipline's expansion in the late twentieth century, tracing the careers of figures from Auguste Comte to Pierre Bourdieu. Presenting fresh interpretations of how renowned thinkers such as Émile Durkheim and his collaborators defined the contours and content of the discipline and contributed to intellectual renewals in a wide range of other human sciences, Heilbron's sophisticated book is both an innovative sociological study and a major reference work in the history of the social sciences.

Heilbron recounts the halting process by which sociology evolved from a new and improbable science into a legitimate academic discipline. Having entered the academic field at the end of the nineteenth century, sociology developed along two separate tracks: one in the Faculty of Letters, engendering an enduring dependence on philosophy and the humanities, the other in research institutes outside of the university, in which sociology evolved within and across more specialized research areas. Distinguishing different dynamics and various cycles of change, Heilbron portrays the ways in which individuals and groups maneuvered within this changing structure, seizing opportunities as they arose. French Sociology vividly depicts the promises and pitfalls of a discipline that up to this day remains one of the most interdisciplinary endeavors among the human sciences in France.

Chapter 1

The Establishment of Organized Social Science

Organized social science, however fragile and contested, was the outcome of the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The intellectual origins of the social sciences can be traced much further back in time, to the renewed secularization of thought during the Renaissance, the intellectual consequences of the Scientific Revolution, and the fervor of the Enlightenment, but it was only when the institutional structures of the old regime were swept away that the social sciences obtained their place as a distinct and organized branch of scientific inquiry. The knowledge that these new sciences promised to deliver was expected to provide guidance to national elites that could no longer rely on the dogmas of divine right and the structures of absolutist rule.¹ What kind of economic, social, and political processes could be expected to emerge under conditions of political liberty? And how might these be regulated and controlled by the authorities? The institutional recognition of the social sciences took the form of a national and centralized institution that was preoccupied with the issues raised by governing a society that was founded on political rights and civil liberties.

The Politics of Social Science

The institutionalization of the social sciences was in France part and parcel of the country’s revolutionary transformation. The abolished royal academies were in 1795 replaced by the newly founded national institute. It was divided into three classes that symbolized the intellectual order of the new era: the natural sciences formed the First Class, the “moral and political sciences” the Second Class, and literature and the fine arts, suspected to have been aristocratic pastimes, the Third Class. The Institut de France thus exemplified Wolf Lepenies’s characterization of the modern intellectual world as a constellation of three cultures, with the social sciences situated somewhat uncomfortably between science and literature.²

The origins of the newly instituted social sciences can be traced back to the first efforts to reflect on the art of government. For centuries the Aristotelian tradition of practical philosophy, with its threefold structure of politics, ethics, and economics, provided the matrix for such issues in the curricula of European universities. In the early modern period, cameral or state sciences had emerged alongside the universities as a response to the formation of national states, while a plurality of secularizing moral, political, and economic writings had come into being around learned societies, which had expanded since the Renaissance. But whatever their precise standing and significance, the early modern approaches to the social world were only loosely connected to one another, and they lacked the institutional autonomy that had been granted to the natural sciences, literature, and the fine arts.

As a consequence, discourses on human society had been strongly bound to the doctrines of the clergy and the doxa of political rulers. Learned societies, for example, could not discuss religious, moral, and political questions unless they were treated in accordance with the “authority of the king, the government, and the laws of the monarchy.”³ Plans for an academy of political studies had existed in France ever since the latter part of the seventeenth century, but they had been systematically thwarted by the absolutist monarchy for fear of political dispute and opposition.⁴ In such a sensitive domain, it was more desirable to have individual councilors and governmental services than to rely on an academy, which would elect its own members and publish its own proceedings. Governmental services, on the other hand, were under direct control of state officials and the knowledge they produced generally remained confidential. In the late 1770s an anonymous author noted: “All over I see academies for all branches of knowledge, but nowhere do I see one for the moral and political sciences. What could the source of this exclusion be?”⁵

If the Enlightenment has been seen as a formative period for the social sciences, it was fundamentally because a secular intelligentsia now explicitly claimed and effectively exercised the right to analyze any subject matter, however controversial, independently of official doctrines.⁶ No longer was any domain to be excluded from rational inquiry and public deliberation. Writings on political, moral, and economic issues flourished as never before, and they attained a level of public interest that was unprecedented. One of the symptoms of this movement of renewal was the introduction of new terms and categories. A marked shift occurred from the older frameworks of moral philosophy and natural law to more specialized, and often more scientific, designations like political economy, economic science, political science, ethnography, and anthropology. At the same time, new expressions emerged as a common denominator. The expressions sciences de l’homme and sciences humaines spread gradually after 1770; the notion of sciences morales et politiques came into use at about the same time. The expression science sociale was coined during the revolutionary turmoil by Sieyès and other members of the circle around Condorcet to indicate a broadly conceived new science of government.⁷

Although the institutionalization of the “moral and political sciences” during the revolutionary period was the outcome of changes that had been underway for some time, it represented an innovation of considerable significance. For the first time were the social sciences recognized institutionally as constituting a distinct branch of scientific knowledge that was formally treated on an equal footing with that of the other sciences. The social sciences were no longer reduced to being merely practical arts or crafts, as in the Aristotelian tradition, but came to form an organized and publicly acknowledged scientific domain in its own right. Similar to the natural sciences, the moral and political sciences of the Institut de France would deliver scientific expertise for the government. In the latter half of the 1790s, the members of the Second Class played a key role in public debates about educational reform, legislation, health policy, and economic affairs. Among them were philosophers, political economists, jurists, and historians, most of whom were committed to the objective of stabilizing the revolutionary changes.⁸ Their pioneering role, however, was short-lived. After clashes with the government, Napoleon dissolved the Second Class in 1803, and its members were relocated in one of the two remaining classes. It was not until the fall of the Napoleonic Empire and the end of the Restoration (1815–30) that the Second Class was reestablished on a more permanent basis. The national Académie des sciences morales et politiques (1832) became the official center for moral and political studies under the constitutional regime of the July monarchy (1830–48). Although curiously absent from standard histories of the social sciences, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences was the dominant social science institution in France until the end of the nineteenth century; it was also the leading example for social science organizations that emerged in other countries.

Although hardly any of the Academy’s studies have gained a place in the canon of the social sciences, the Academy played a pivotal role in the early development of the social sciences. As the first public institution in the world devoted to this relatively new scientific domain, it provided a national infrastructure for the social sciences and concentrated, coordinated, and controlled previously dispersed efforts. The historical significance of the Academy is well illustrated by the fact that, by the end of the nineteenth century, representatives of the emerging university disciplines conceived their work in explicit opposition to the Academy. The formation of economics, psychology, and sociology as university disciplines arose primarily out of a struggle against the doctrines and practices of the Academy, and the very success of these university pioneers is the main reason why the Academy has virtually disappeared from collective memory. Academicians lost their supremacy to university professors, on the one hand, and to new policy experts, on the other. It became increasingly rare to pursue a scholarly career while simultaneously having political and administrative responsibilities. The fields of higher education and politics became more autonomous social universes with their own criteria of recruitment and career advancement, thus separating what the Academy had typically combined for the major part of the nineteenth century.

France fulfilled a pioneering role in this relatively long first phase in the institutionalization of the social sciences that was characterized by the emergence of a national coordinating body. In other advanced countries comparable institutions emerged somewhat later, generally after the revolutions of 1848 and in relation to growing concerns about the social consequences of industrialization. While countries such as Belgium, Italy, and Spain followed the French example of establishing an institute for “moral and political sciences,” another model developed in Britain, the United States, and Germany.⁹ In Britain, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1857), just like the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, bore the mark of reform-oriented liberals. French and English liberals opposed conservative elites and radical workers’ movements alike, but the British organization was an associational structure that functioned in a more decentralized manner than the French academy.¹⁰ Driven by an explicit concern for legislative and administrative reform, and carried by a broad alliance of social reformers, the British Association was remarkably effective in proposing social reforms. Contemporaries described it as an “outdoor parliament” that focused on policy solutions for the “social question,” yet showing little interest in theoretical or academic issues and with hardly any connections to the universities. The American Social Science Association (1867) followed the British model without ever achieving its political effectiveness; the German Verein für Socialpolitik (1873) was also closer to the British than the French model, although it didn’t match its British equivalent in reform success either.¹¹

Moral Science in Government Service

As a meeting place for senior civil servants, politicians, and scholars, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences embodied a peculiar form of a science of government or, more broadly, of governance. Continuing the centralized French state tradition and reacting to the trauma of the French Revolution, liberal political elites in France were above all committed to ensuring the stability of the national state. According to the principle of their leader Royer-Collard, authority had to be established first, then liberties could be introduced as counterweights. This peculiar form of state liberalism was not primarily market oriented, but was rooted in a broad, historically oriented political outlook.¹² Like Montesquieu and his inheritors, it considered political questions in relation to the morals and manners of the nation, but within a framework that was more historically grounded than Montesquieu’s with the French Revolution at its center. The philosophical stance of this state liberalism was eclectic, intending to neutralize or overcome postrevolutionary antagonisms, while at the same time remaining uncompromisingly “spiritualist” or idealist in its conception of human beings and human science.

The vast majority of academicians belonged socially to the liberal factions of the upper classes.¹³ They differed in their politics from conservative Catholics and nostalgic noblemen, while resisting the demands of emerging workers movements. In keeping with their juste milieu views, academicians read memoirs, organized prize contests, published proceedings, and commissioned research into the conditions of the urban poor and the working classes. The Academy had been founded by intellectuals who belonged to the liberal opposition under the Restoration, notably the historian François Guizot and the young philosopher Victor Cousin. Their objective was to put an end to the ongoing battles between conservative defenders of the absolutist monarchy and their revolutionary opponents. In Guizot and Cousin’s view only a moderate, constitutional regime could provide a stable basis for the future of the French nation. When Guizot became a minister in 1830, he advised the king to reestablish the class of moral and political sciences in the form of a national academy. Promising to provide “an indirect but useful support” to the new government, Guizot argued that the moral and political sciences were an “indispensable intellectual force.” In no other nation and in no other era had these sciences acquired such importance and gained so much public esteem. Furthermore, for the first time in history, the moral and political sciences had become “truly scientific” in that they were founded on “facts” and promised to be applicable and useful. Since the new constitutional government guaranteed the “union of the interests of the government with those of society,” the moral and political sciences were henceforth in a position to “sustain what they had previously shaken.”¹⁴

Guizot’s proposal was intended to reconcile liberal intellectuals with the political and administrative needs of the new government. In this sense the Academy instituted a long tradition of administrative research and reflections on the art of statecraft, which in France had been carried by the noblesse de robe and upper-level state officials.¹⁵ However, unlike the Second Class of the Institut de France, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences proved a lasting achievement. Up to this day, its characteristic mixture of state officials, professors, and other dignitaries represents the social sciences in its most official guise. Of the national French academies, the Academy of Moral and Political sciences was the one closest to the state and the state nobility. The vast majority of its members, nearly three-quarters, held a political position as parliamentary deputy, senator, or minister, a proportion that was much higher than in any other national academy (it was 16 percent for the Academy of Sciences, 3 percent for the Academy of Fine Arts).¹⁶ Links with the state apparatus were reinforced by the social background of the academicians; three-quarters of them came from families belonging to the “notables,” whereas only a minority had middle-class backgrounds.¹⁷

The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences was comprised of five sections: philosophy, history, morals, political economy and statistics, and legislation. Each section had six regular members plus a number of correspondents and foreign associates made up of a characteristic mixture of diplomats, statesmen, and scholars (among the latter were Thomas Malthus, James Mill, Adolphe Quételet). The best way to understand the role of the Academy is to consider the actual work that was carried out. Between 60 to 80 percent of the academic lectures, book reviews, and prize contests during the first three decades were devoted to policy matters, many of them related to issues of public order.¹⁸ Most frequently addressed were problems of crime, poverty, and public health among the working classes. Studies of these issues were complemented by statistical surveys of specific populations, which, in turn, informed local and national elites about the dangers they faced, while prudently suggesting how these could be dealt with.¹⁹ Be...

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Establishment of Organized Social Science
• 2. An Improbable Science
• 3. Sociology and Other Disciplines in the Making
• 4. The Metamorphoses of Durkheimian Scholarship
• 5. Pioneers by Default?
• 6. Cycles of Expansion and Field Transformations
• 7. Intellectual Styles and the Dynamics of Research Groups
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: What Is French about Sociology in France?
• Notes
• Index