ABSTRACT
What makes both Durkheim’s and Bourdieu’s contributions so typically French to non-French eyes? What gives such different approaches as Raymond Aron’s theory of industrial society and Bruno Latour’s ‘actors-network theory’ the common taste of a ‘French touch’ in sociology? To begin with, we will mention two main factors: one intellectual, the other institutional. There is, at first, a common philosophical background. From Durkheim to Bourdieu, almost all major figures in French sociology were intially trained as philosophers: Durkheim himself, for a start, as well as a large number of his disciples, passed the typically French ‘concours’ (entry test) of the ‘agrégation de philosophie’, which is a scholastic and the most selective ‘rite of passage’ in French academic institutions. Half of the contributors to the Année sociologique’s first series graduated in philosophy at the famous elite school ‘l’Ecole Normale’, that is, the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris Rue d’Ulm, where all France’s intellectual elites were trained: from the first wave of Durkheimians with Celestin Bouglé, François Simiand, Maurice Halbwachs, Marcel Mauss, Gaston Richard, René Fauconnet and Georges Davy to Raymond Aron, Julien Freund, Jean Stoetzel, Paul-Henrt Chombart de Lauwe after the Second World War and beyond, they all have been intellectually structured by this common institutional and theoretical background in philosophy with its broad humanistic focus.1 Until 1958, when a specific curriculum was opened with sociology as a part of the bachelor’s degree in moral philosophy, French sociologists were self-trained, self-instituted intellectuals. Durkheim’s steady and systematic work and networking had to struggle against the longer established disciplines’ intense cultural reluctance to accept this somehow threatening academic ‘newcomer’, though born in France.2 A second factor pointing out the ‘French difference’ in sociology is the battle for academic recognition. It appears to have been more intense (and for quite a long time, also, fruitless) in France than anywhere else. Sociology was, and still is, in a certain sense, an academic outsider in the disciplinary standards that remain – independently of all reforms French academia have to cope with – scholastically structured. We propose a historical perspective focused on highlighting current developments in France’s sociological research.
