ABSTRACT
MC: Did Paris prove to be a more intellectually stimulating environment than London?
MA: I was very lucky in having godparents in Paris. It didn’t cost me anything to stay. It didn’t cost me anything to eat. My godfather was professor in administrative law at the Sorbonne. I started attending classes and there structure arrived. It was almost like one of those gestalt experiences. It arrived in the form of an accumulation of experiences over a very short period of time. So, for example, it was now 1966, Raymond Aron and his 18 lessons on
industry in society. He was a huge name and he was writing a little box every day that was on the front page of Le Figaro, about some social question of the moment. He was giving a series of lectures and obviously I went, I’d never set eyes on him. I went into a small amphitheater that was three-quarters empty. I thought this was bizarre, as he’s even better known in Paris. Maybe they’ve all done it before? I asked some fellow students, ‘Where are all the others? Why such a small
turnout?’ It’s actually typical for lecturers in Paris. Why would you come to the lecture when you go around the corner to Press Universite de France and you can buy the course booklet? The course booklet even contained student answers to particular questions. You could get the content and you could get the form and you could splice the two together. Most students, according to my companion, decided why bother getting out of bed when you can do it the easy way? These experiences just accumulated. Yes, you can call it selective perception
and that came into it. Aronwas about to retire, so I set off asking fellow students very benign questions such as, ‘Will his replacement go on teaching to the same booklet?How free are they to change the course, change the reading, change the arguments?’ They said, ‘Well, you know, it’s not as bad as school.’ It’s a national curriculum. Mid-60s. It’s the same everywhere. Haven’t you
heard about this apocryphal Minister of Education who looked at his watch and said, ‘Ah, it’s 10:45, every pupil in a French Lycee throughout the country will be looking at page 94 of Virgil.’ I laughed and they said, ‘Yeah, we laughed too but it’s really rather a sick joke.’ It means no teacher, school teacher certainly, could come across a novel that impressed them greatly and say let’s give a couple of lessons to reading a chapter of this and discussing it. No space for that whatsoever. It was all regulated. On the ground, I began to learn what centralization felt like. Very different
from my year two of freedom at LSE, pick what you like and do what you like with it. It was following up on that which gave me the central idea for Social Origins because the difference between a decentralized structure and a centralized structure was obvious phenomenologically, it was obvious experientially over a tract of time, and it was obvious in some of its effects on who got in, what happened to them when they were inside, what they came out and did,
orwere directed to do at any rate. In otherwords, themain questions that the first book actually sought to try and answer.
