ABSTRACT
The centralised French state had served as the model for other nations, but French sociology had never produced a Max Weber—though the term 'bureaucracy' itself had been coined in France as a critical weapon around 1760. A sociological study of French bureaucracy perhaps had to commence from a position somewhat outside the traditional thought-reflexes of French Sociology. Historically, one change was the suppression of French cultural diversity, and the encouragement in the state service itself of a common set of attitudes. The price for the descriptive vividness of the culturalist approach, then, was a neglect of other structural and political influences. If the intellectual activities of the Club are strikingly reminiscent of the Fabian model, its political role related closely to the specifics of the French mid-sixties scene. Given the fundamental data of interest and power, a quasi-Fabian reformist strategy in contemporary France may effectively be condemned to an activity best characterised as quixotic.
