ABSTRACT
The French sociologist Antoine Hennion, member and former director of the influential Sociology of Innovation Centre based at the Écoles des Mines in Paris, may not seem an obvious choice for a case study of the relationship between intellectuals and cultural policy in France. An academic researcher in the sociology of music for over thirty years (he was born in 1952), he has engaged with cultural policy matters only occasionally and his status as a “French intellectual”, in that iconic sense these inverted commas imply, is problematic. This is partly due to a long-standing uncertainty in France as to whether those in university employment deserve inclusion among a select group of freelance public thinkers like Sartre or Camus; and partly because Hennion’s self-styled “pragmatic” sociology is, at one level at least, quite remote from the high abstraction associated with the French intellectual, coming closer to the Anglo-American empirical tradition. He himself occasionally displays a dry scepticism about some of the theory produced by his compatriots. “Theoretical work”, he insists (Hennion 1981, p. 16), “is valuable by virtue of the limits that its coherence allows us to set, the contradictions that its concern with rationalisation brings out, not by virtue of its armourplating. Perhaps one writes less with one’s ideas than against them”. Similarly, he demarcates himself from the intelligentsia’s traditional disdain for mass culture. In a broadly sympathetic ethnography of French pop music (Hennion 1981), he is ironic about intellectuals who, because they are unable to make sense of a musical taste they do not share, assume that pop music is empty of meaning, rather than trying to understand the meanings it has for its fans.
