Introduction

For a long time now, disciplinary mistrust and methodological gaps have prevented fruitful dialogue between intellectual historians working in the Anglo-American tradition and sociologists of ideas working in France. It is now a commonplace to celebrate the “international” or “global” turn in history that has taken place in the past 20 years or so. In the United States, intellectual history has gone through a remarkable revival during the past 15 years. In sociology, after Homo Academicus and The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, which called for a renewal of the historical sociology of the social and human sciences, Bourdieu delineated his research program on the social conditions for the international circulation of ideas in his seminal 1989 paper of that name. French “theory,” like German critical theory, also worked as a bridge between intellectual history and other disciplines, even as it too was criticized by historians as a kind of fuzzy unhistorical thinking.