SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE SINCE 1945: DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF APHILOSOPHY WITHOUT SUBJECTAuthor(s): PIERRE BOURDIEU and JEAN-CLAUDE PASSERONSource: Social Research, Vol. 34, No. 1, Focus—Contemporary French Philosophy (SPRING1967), pp. 162-212Published by: The New SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40969868 .Accessed: 22/08/2011 05:33

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SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE SINCE 1945:

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF A PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT SUBJECT BY PIERRE BOURDIEU

AND

JEAN-CLAUDE PASSERON

JL he reader will find in this paper neither a systematic history of the sociological or philosophical events and schools which have succeeded one another in France since 1945, nor a philosophy of the history of philosophy or of the history of sociology, but a sociology of the main trends of sociology which, in order to restore their full meaning to works and to doctrines, tries to relate them to their cultural context, in other words, tries to show how posi- tions and oppositions in the intellectual field are connected with explicitly or implicitly philosophical attitudes.1 It is with this in mind that we have prepared this outline of a sociology of French sociology, which aims at uncovering unconscious affinities rather than describing declared affiliations, and at deciphering implicit purposes rather than accepting literally declarations of intent. For, as A. O. Lovejoy remarks,

"There are, first, implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or a generation. It is the beliefs which are so much a matter of course that they are rather tacitly pre- supposed than formally expressed and argued for, the ways of thinking which seem so natural and inevitable that they are not scrutinized with the eye of logical self-consciousness, that often are

i Cf. P. Bourdieu, "Champ intellectuel et projet créateur," Temps Modernes, No- vembre 1966, pp. 865-906.

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more decisive of the character of a philosopher's doctrine, and still oftener of the dominant intellectual tendencies of an age." 2

Whether they deplore it or welcome it, French and foreign observers are agreed in recognizing the close link which has always existed between French sociology and philosophy. The excep- tion proves the rule: those who date the appearance of a truly scientific sociology in the post-war period (i.e., from the moment when certain sociologists openly repudiated any philosophical motivation) unconsciously express by that very fact a philosophy of science and at the same time reveal their place in the French intellectual field, where any taking of a position which is objec- tively defined in terms of its opposition to other positions has philosophical implications. Similarly, when Michel Crozier wel- comes, in the autonomization of the social sciences, "the emer- gence of a new conception of rationality" or "the more and more far-reaching appropriation of action by scientific intelligence," 8

is he not proposing, in spite of himself, a philosophy of history

2 A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, A Study of the History of an Idea, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936, p. 7.

» M. Crozier, "La Revolution culturelle," Daedalus, December 1963. It is evident that throughout this article we are going to deal with American sociology less as what it has actually been in its main stream of ideas than as its social image in the minds of most intellectuals in France, whether they used this synthetical representation of American sociology as a bogey or as a mythical guarantee for their own work. It is irrelevant that in the 'fifties some French neo-positivists wrongly claimed kinship with sociological empiricism, which had, in fact, ceased to dominate research in the United States since the 'thirties, or that the ignorance of the great sociological theories of the 19th century could hide behind the example of an American sociology that had rediscovered the theoretical significance of Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Pareto already before 1939 (through the works of Parsons and Mills, for instance). The failure to appreciate the American schools of sociology and their diversity constitutes an objective fact of the history of ideas. This is the object of our study. More generally, we are going to consider the authors, works, and streams of ideas through the representations that have been the conditions of their penetration of an intellectual public, rather than examining their effective con- tributions to the history of philosophy or to the history of science. Besides the fact that these contributions could not be discerned except by a limited number of specialists, their evaluation would necessitate a thorough epistemological analysis, which was not the intent of this paper. Moreover, this would ultimately make us adopt the point of view of posterity, something we obviously could not pretend to, if only by way of omission or lack of cautiousness.

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which is ultimately nothing but a neo-positivism that seeks its guarantee in American sociology and civilization?

Is it not the same presupposition that leads some scholars to see in quantitative research, as it has developed in the United States, the fitting end of the history of rational sociology and, by the same token, the test of the scientific character of all socio-

logical research, past or present? Again, when a writer of history in the future perfect represents as a defeat of scientific sociology the victory of Durkheimism over such competing tendencies as those of Le Play, Tarde, Worms et al., is he not basing history's judgment of the facts on a philosophy of science? To explain the

triumph of Durkheimism by the positions of power occupied by Durkheim and his followers in the universities is to ignore the extent to which the apparently scientific disputes about Durk- heimism were part of the political and religious conflicts of the time; it also gives away something of the philosophical tenets

underlying what is apparently only a sociological description. Similarly, whether what French sociologists or philosophers bring into the debate over Durkheimism is guilty awareness of a denial of origins or whether it is triumphant satisfaction resulting from

emancipation, or again, unconditional attachment to unchallenged tradition, do they not invariably manage to conceal the only real

subject of discussion? Are not many of the descriptions which

appear to deal with questions of fact regarding the history of French sociology really dealing with an epistemological question which is never formulated? If, in all its phases, sociology expresses, whether it means it or not, whether it knows it or not, philosoph- ical options, cannot the relations between sociology and philos- ophy assume very different forms and significations, or can, for

example, philosophical questions which absolve or remove one from any sociological practice or which sociological practice feels

compelled to take into account in deference to the philosophical fashion of the day be confused with those questions which socio-

logical practice poses to philosophers and, more importantly, those which are posed to sociological practice by and in that

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practice itself? If, in this way, one substitutes an explicit episte- mological question for descriptions governed by an implicit epistemology, determined more by the relationship of the investi-

gator to his peers than by his relationship to the object, one cannot avoid reinstating the question concerning the history of sociology posed by neo-positivism: instead of wondering by what miracle

sociology escaped from the metaphysical darkness to which the

triumph of Durkheimism had condemned it, ought we not in fact to be asking ourselves why it is that French sociology has been able to assimilate and, more particularly, master empirical techniques only by rediscovering a scientific philosophy which is not so dif- ferent from that of the Durkheimians?

One could easily be convinced of the appearance of a new

philosophical orientation, both in the social sciences and in

philosophy itself, judging by the combined cry of alarm from certain philosophers confronted by the development of a sub-

jectless anthropology, in which they perceive, a little belatedly perhaps, a radical questioning of the spiritualistic conception of the human person, or, more generally, of humanistic values. In a review of a work offered as an "attempt at a philosophical inter-

pretation of the present status of criticism, in an existentialist

perspective, as against traditional thinking and the social sciences," Jean Lacroix, the authorized spokesman for Christian personalism and, as such, a keen guardian of the rights of the free mind, reassures himself:

"The philosophy of the subject is not dead, if the thinking of Sartre can inspire such a profound study as this. In opposition to excessive structuralism, the author shows that language is not

absolutely exhausted by its linguistic being, nor its signification by its functioning." 4

At the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum, Lucien Gold- mann points out, in the name of the rights of "historicity," how

"important it is, in a humanist context, to criticize this sociology

*L<? Monde, pp. 16-17, October 1966.

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and combat it." 5 A similar anxiety makes Roger Garaudy, a Feuerbachian reader of Marx, take fright at the theoretical anti- humanism that Louis Althusser brings out in the Marxist tra- dition.6 And there is no doubt that, when the first momentum of the fashion of the day is spent, the destruction of the subject, and consequently of humanism, will be detected in Michel Foucault's last book, Les mots et les choses ("Words and Things"), the "archaeology of the social sciences." 7

The ethnologists and sociologists, after all, have only made themselves guilty of "treating social facts as things," as Durkheim expressly taught almost a century ago. And how is it that this crime so long escaped the defenders of the mind and of freedom if not because all the conditions for their error were present in the corpus delicti?

To speak of "structure" rather than "social body," of the "un- conscious" rather than the "collective consciousness," of the "sav- age mind" rather than the "primitive mind;" to formulate the new scientific philosophy, which revives Durkheim's approach, in the language of structural linguistics - much more appealing to the taste of the day than somewhat coarse references to biology; to recognize the Durkheimian ancestry only through the most respectable relatives - the English cousin Radcliffe-Brown, or the

testamentary executor, Marcel Mauss, whose position as glorious assistant saved him from the ridicule usually evoked by theoret- ical professions of faith of the crudest kind - all these are so many euphemistic channels for hiding, from others and from oneself, the truth of a scientific intent suspect for its archaism or over-simpli- fication and, at the same time, hostile to the credo of any philo- sophical humanism, whether Christian or atheist. Did it not take all the prestige and all the daring of a "heroic mediator" like Maurice Merleau-Ponty to make the transition from dying phe-

5L. Goldmann, Sciences humaines et philosophie, Paris: Gonthier, "Mediation" Series, 1966 (to be published).

« L. Althusser, Pour Marx, Paris, Maspero, 1965. 7 M. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, Paris: Gallimard, series "Recherches en

sciences humaines", 1966.

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nomenology to renascent anthropology? In an article on "Le

philosophe et la sociologie" ("The Philosopher and Sociology") which appeared in 1951 in the Cahiers internationaux de sociolo- gie as well as in the course of lectures he gave the same year (Les Sciences de l'homme et la phénoménologie - "The social sciences and phenomenology"), he stressed, while specifically attacking the "naturalist" naivety of the Durkheimian definition of religion, the absolute priority of the eidetic analysis. Some years later, in an article entitled "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss," 8 he granted ethnology its philosophical emancipation, but he did not fail to reserve to philosophy the right to re-interpret - or, better, to arouse - the existential significance of the inanimate structures built up or discovered by the ethnologist. But the philosopher did not have to do it all himself, for at the same time, in 1950, Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a foreword to Sociologie et Anthropologie, in which he presented the work of Mauss as a preface to his own work, also brought out in the role of the ethnologist what must have surpassed the fondest expectations of a phenomenologist: "The apprehension (which cannot be objective) of the uncon- scious forms of the activity of the mind nevertheless leads to subjectivation; for, after all, it is a similar process that, in psy- choanalysis, enables us to recover our self, however alienated and, in ethnological investigation, to reach the most alien of other persons as if he were another self of ours." 9 Far from supposing that the sociologist must have had to advance in disguise to gain philosophical recognition, we should perhaps conclude that it was no easier for him than for his contemporaries to realize the sin- cerity of his scientific intentions. For, speaking more generally,

8M. Merleau-Ponty, "De Mauss à Lévi-Strauss," republished in Signes, Paris, Gallimard, 1953. Simone de Beauvoir published in Temps Modernes a review of Structures élémentaires de la parenté ("Elementary structures of relationship") as early as 1949, i.e., upon the publication of the work, the proofs of which she had asked to see while she was writing The Second Sex. This is an example of the intercommunication which exists between French intellectuals in different fields and of different persuasions.

9C Lévi-Strauss, "Introduction à l'Oeuvre de Marcel Mauss," in Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris, P.U.F. 1950, p. xxxi.

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all the social sciences now live in the house of Durkheimism, unbeknownst to them, as it were, because they walked into it backwards.

But as the philosophical importance of the social sciences in- creases, we see the sociologists becoming more and more fully aware of the philosophical import of what they are doing, whereas the philosophers, at one time accomplices, revert more and more to their traditional discourse about the "reductive" nature of the scientific explanation. It is this which makes one wonder whether it was not because he had explained the philosophical "whereases" of his sociology that Durkheim at once provoked the reaction of the spiritualistic elements. The division of the intel- lectual field between the Durkheim school and its adversaries of every stripe had been so deep that it still dominated the French sociological scene as described by Marcel Mauss in 1933 and Raymond Aron in 1937:

"The old rivals have not put down their arms; antagonisms persist and multiply. In France especially, the philosophers have energetically practiced their role as critics. For example, M. Brunschwicg, in his Problème de la Conscience, still sees the sociologists as trapped by a dilemma which, in his view, had already held Comte prisoner, like de Bonald before him, and from which he does not think Durkheim escaped - as if such dialectical and historical arguments were of any importance in the progress of a science! H. Bergson, in his book, Les deux sources de la

religion et de la morale, while prepared to recognize the part played by the sociologists, including Durkheim and others, in

advancing knowledge of those sources, nevertheless relegates the

subject-matter studied by sociologists to the realm of the 'closed', the solidified. He reserves to psychology, philosophy and even to mysticism, the scrutiny of what is open, alive, truly psychical and creative in matters of morals and religion/' 10

io M. Mauss, "La sociologie en France," 1914, La Science Française, Vol. I, La- rousse, 1935.

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"The complex character, philosophically and scientifically, of Durkheimian sociology explains the controversies it has aroused, the various kinds of opposition it has encountered: opposition from the philosophers - in the name of positive science Durkheim cast out philosophy only to end up, it seems, with a new, so-called scientific philosophy; opposition from independent sociologists - less systematic, anxious to keep the aspirations of the new science (particularly as regards morals and religion) within narrower limits; opposition, lastly and above all, from Catholics who saw in this creation of government teachers an expression of the lay mentality and of modern materialism, a weapon against religion and spirituality - sociology found itself willy-nilly drawn into the traditional conflict between the Catholic Church and Reason, and that is why, in France, a distinction must be made between Catholic sociology and university sociology, the latter primarily under the influence of Durkheim/' n

As can be seen from the obituary on Durkheim written by the sociologist Paul Bureau, one of his Catholic adversaries, the conflict between university sociology and the Le Play school occurred in the sphere of ultimate values, where no holds are barred:

"Consequently, the time seems auspicious: the recent death of the undisputed leader of the French school of sociology has left that school in some disarray, as was inevitable the day when the brilliant gifts and prophetic mastery of the incomparable dialec- tician in Emile Durkheim were no longer there to mask the over- weening rashness of conclusions deduced from an a priori philosophical system rather than from a methodical analysis of the facts."12

Thus, when translated into the logic of the intellectual field, where opposing views, whatever their real nature, must be pre-

11 R. Aron, "La Sociologie" in Les Sciences sociales en France: enseignement et recherche, Preface by C. Bougie, Paris, Hartmann, 1937, pp. 16-17.

12 p. Bureau, La science des moeurs: introduction a la méthode sociologique, Paris, 1923, preface.

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sented in the trappings of scientific argumentation, the conflict appears in an even more deceptive and effective disguise, that of the opposition between fidelity to facts and the dogmatic a priority, to which its opponents reduced Durkheimism. It may be observed in passing that those who deplore the fact that the triumph of Durkheimism in the universities meant the triumph of dogma- tism over empirical research, have adopted the view for which the opponents of Durkheim had sought to gain acceptance but, at the same time, refuse to accord any scientific value to Durk- heim's criticism of the "microscopic sociography" of his op- ponents.

What religious orthodoxy had failed to impose completely on Durkheimism, the orthodoxy of university philosophy succeeded in securing, if not from Durkheim himself, at least from his fol- lowers. There is, even today, a philosophia perennis of teachers of philosophy which, unaffected by the succession of schools of

philosophy, is handed on through and by the teaching process in the form of outlines of thought and compulsory problem-questions (as, for example, dissertation subjects). It is not surprising that his very university success compelled Durkheim to make con- siderable concessions to this sort of academic good manners, which

requires one to recognize, if not a pre-determined system of values, at any rate the value of the subject, either individual or collective, by whom values are posited. The records of the discussions of the French Philosophical Society reveal how Durk- heim had to fight on his opponents' ground, accepting the role of defendant by the very fact of offering a defense and in the end yielding to his opponents by explaining the reasons for his action in terms of the reasoning of his opponents.13 Compelled constantly to see his work in the objective terms forced upon him

is The fact that Durkheim's thinking was profoundly affected by the categories of classical philosophy, and especially of Kantian philosophy as taught at French universities (as is particularly evident in his sociology of knowledge), explains why Durkheimism was so quickly perceived and contested by the philosophers, why it was susceptible to objections which it itself regarded as valid, and lastly, why it could so easily provide material for routinized instruction and official pedagogism.

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by his university entourage and the entire intellectual field, Durk- heim was led, at one and the same time, to protest vainly against the misreading of his Règles de la méthode sociologique ("Rules of sociological method") by the spiritualistic philosophers (as can be seen in the preface to the second edition) and, contradictorily, to enter into polemics and put forward - as a challenge and out of spite, as it were - such an extravagant and provocative version of his ideas (one may remember, for example, certain mechanistic and biological metaphors) as to give his work, to the eyes of a superficial reader, an antiquated appearance; or, again, he was led to retranslate into spiritualistic terms what the hypothesis of collective consciousness had previously made it possible to regard as most positive achievements.

Moreover, there is no doubt that what Durkheim's disciples passed on was that aspect of his work which had been taxed the most by the demands of the environment, for they were closer to the social conditions in which the shift in Durkheim's thought took place than to the utterly inaccessible experience of the scientific revolution which the master had wrought. In the Année sociologique of 1925, Marcel Mauss contrasts the situation of the second-generation Durkheimians with that of the first members of the school:

"They were young and, unlike Durkheim and his first collabora- tors, they had not had to fight, but merely to exploit a victory already won. They no longer had to devise a method. They could, and they did, apply it."

But, remarked Mauss in 1925, most of the newcomers, who had been recruited mainly from the classes from 1902 to 1910 of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, were dead, nearly all of them in the war. Although Mauss continued to exercise great influence, although Durkheimian works, like those of Granet and Meillet, were published after 1920, the Durkheimian school tended to become no more than a university form of support for an official ideology. Institutionalized and routinized, and - the more it became a subject of instruction, the more it was completely iden-

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tified with that prophet-like sanctification of society so profoundly shocking to the heirs of the Enlightenment - Durkheim be- came indistinguishable from a stereotype of a secular and Radical France, which, even before the war of 1939, a new generation of intellectuals, the generation of Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau- Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, rejected lock, stock and barrel.14

The philosophical reaction, which became apparent just before the outbreak of the war, found fertile soil in the social and intel- lectual conditions of the Occupation and the Resistance, and

subsequently the Liberation.15 There is no need to go into a detailed sociological analysis of the intellectual life of this period to realize how much so many of the themes and "commonplaces" of philosophy and literature owed to the crisis through which France had just passed.16 Behind what might have appeared to

i* However, the scholastic continuation of a Durkheimian tradition was at least useful for the transition: Célestin Bougie collected around him, in the Social Documentation Center of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, those who, after 1945, were to provide the impetus for a renewal of sociological research - Raymond Aron, Georges Friedmann and Jean Stoetzel. L'Année Sociologique (that was agonizing since 1914, as only two issues were published since then) officially ceased to exist in 1927. After 1930, the publications of the Durkheimian school became rarer and rarer, as J. Stoetzel notes (J. Stoetzel, "Sociology in France: An Empiricist View" in H. Becker and H. Boskoff, Modern Sociological Theory, New York, Dryden Press, 1957). The Année Sociologique was replaced by the Annales Sociologiques in 1934, which surveyed in the form of separate booklets the various fields of study that the Année had dealt with together. For instance, the booklet on general so- ciology was committed to the care of C. Bougie and R. Aron, but Mauss also pub- lished a few articles in it. The Année Sociologique was resuscitated in 1945, but it is no longer the center of French sociology that it was in other days.

is As Sartre observed in 1960, in his preface to the new edition of Aden Arabie by Paul Nizan, the generation which dominated the post-war period had already before the war broken with the philosophy of its teachers and in particular with the dynasty of neo-Kan tians who followed one another from Ravaisson to Brunschwicg. Apart from Les chiens de garde by Nizan - an aggressive expression of this desire to break away - the 'thirties saw the publication of Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel by Jean Wahl, various articles on Hegel and the Hegelian studies of Alexandre Koyré, Georges Gurvitch's Les tendances actuelles de la philosphie allemande, and Raymond Aron's La sociologie allemande contemporaine.

i« Even though the resemblances pointed out by observers remain superficial, they do express the sense - still keen among those who went through this period - of a profound connection between the historical experience and the works it inspired. Jean Wahl notes that "certain Stoic echoes in the thought of Sartre and in particular,

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contemporaries to be a teeming mass of trends and arguments, it is only too easy to see today a whole system of common assumptions. The philosophical choices which, at the time they were made, must have been felt as complete breaks with the philosophies that dominated intellectual life before the war, were in reality essen- tially related to the philosophy of the subject, whether in its Brunschwicgian or in its Bergsonian form. "Existentialism," Jean Wahl observes, "certainly opposed Bergsonian tendencies, although today we can see many common characteristics and com- mon tendencies between Bergson and the existential philoso- phers." 17 For it is rather by what might be called its "meta- physical tone" or, as Lovejoy says, its "mood," that the philosophical thinking of this period, at least where its expression is most impregnated by the atmosphere of the time, renovates themes and problems which remain unchanged in their basic assumptions. Thus, in Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philo- sophie de l'histoire ("Introduction to the Philosophy of History"), although it claimed to be a critical philosophy of history and, through Weber and Rickert, linked itself to Kantian rationalism, readers of the period, sometimes readers least likely to be confused, found a mine of dramatically existentialist queries on the con- flict of values or the ambiguities of political commitment. The philosophical semantics of the time could easily be summed up in a few consecrated words and phrases - those, in fact, which formed the headlines of the main reviews such as Esprit or Temps Modernes: historicity, or the debate between morals and politics; class consciousness, or the debate between existentialism and Marxism; commitment, or the debate between the genuine and

the idea that our freedom is intact even when we are slaves, relate to a problem which was felt in the Resistance" (J. Wahl, Tableau de la philosophie française, Paris, NRF, Idées, 1962, p. 152). The relationship suggested by Jean Wahl might be endorsed by Sartre himself, who wrote in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, of the novel- ists of the inter-war period that "their morale, which could buoy up the spirit in daily life, and which might perhaps have been able to do so during World War I, proved inadequate for a great catastrophe. In such times, men turn to Epicurus or to Stoicism." (Paris, Gallimard, 1948, p. 247).

it J. Wahl, op. cit., p. 150.

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the ungenuine.18 While it is true that this dramatization ex- presses itself naturally in the double language of philosophy and the theatre, as can be seen in Sartre or Gabriel Marcel, it is Camus' L'homme révolté, a universal history of the existential tragedy, that brings together and condenses the colorful cut-out figures which constitute the popular image of existentialism.

Never before, perhaps, has there been so complete a manifesta- tion of the logic peculiar to the French intellectual field that

requires every intellectual to pronounce himself totally on each and every problem. Every intellectual felt himself perpetually put on notice by all the others (as can be seen from a sociological analysis of the most characteristic phenomenon of the period -

the political petition) to justify his intellectual status by a political commitment in keeping with his public image, and, more speci- fically, to examine all the political consequences of his philosophi- cal options, as also to justify philosophically his political options.19 It is significant that the bibliographies of the philosophers of the

period show theoretical works alternating with political works which throw into discussions of the problems of the day the entire

weight and reputation of their theories. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, although more closely bound than Sartre to the canonical texts of phenomenology, and in his theoretical works -

which drew upon the latest discoveries of the social sciences - more removed from that existential contact with the century always reflected in the work of Sartre, follows La structure du comporte- ment ("The Structure of Behavior") with Sens et non sens ("Sense and Nonsense"), a collection of essays on such diverse subjects as

is "And as there is no theater unless all the spectators have been united, it is necessary to find situations that are so general that they are common to all. We have our problems: those of the end and the means, of the legitimacy of violence, of the consequences of action, the relationship between the individual and the group, between indivdual initiative and historical invariables." (J.-P. Sartre, quoted by F. Jeanson in Sartre par lui-même, Paris, Seuil, 1958, p. 12).

i» Students linked to intellectual life by reason of their studies and especially those in philosophy classes still adopt today- the lag is inevitable- not only the intellectual interests of this period but also the complete attitudes of such modern classics as Malraux, Sartre and Camus, who are studied in their senior year.

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the art of Cézanne, the cinema and the novel, and La phénoméno- logie de la perception ("The Phenomenology of Perception") with Humanisme et terreur ("Humanism and Terror"), a comment on the historical actions of communist parties. While, in general, all European social thought - from Weber, Pareto and Durkheim to Aron and Lévi-Strauss - differs from the American tradition in that Marx and Marxism are of major im- portance as points of reference, in France the whole of intellectual life is affected by the existence of an organized and long-standing Communist Party, and by the pres- ence of a sizable group of Marxist intellectuals. Every intellectual is consequently called upon by the de facto situation to justify his adherence or non-adherence. For example, the first concern of Sartre in most of his political writings is to explain the reasons for the position he is taking at the moment vis-à-vis the Com- munist Party, ranging from painful disassociations to unity of action, with or without mental reservations. While the impera- tive to commit oneself is particularly compelling in the political sphere, it applies equally to all fields of activity connected with intellectual life defined in very broad terms: "We must miss nothing of our time," Sartre wrote in the manifesto with which he introduced the first number of Temps Modernes.™ The works of Sartre, in which we see him take positions on refusal of military service and help for the Algerian resistance, as well as on the art of Nathalie Sarraute, the painting of Lapoujade and the plays of Jean Genêt, and above all, the Temps Modernes, are perfect illustrations of this policy of being present at all the outposts of the intellectual front and participating in all the avant-garde movements, which may also be identified, with hardly a variation in sense, by the desire to "miss nothing." From the diary of a prostitute to the memoirs of a priest, from the military reminis- cences of an Indo-China war veteran to the confessions of a taxi- driver, from wars of independence to anti-semitism and the de-

20 Sartre, "Présentation des Temps Modernes", Situations III, 1949, pp. 126-127.

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colonization of women, it is always the same chasing after the latest "alienation/1 However, in choosing all the above examples from the same district of the Left Bank, we do not wish to suggest that the unity of the intellectual field extends no further. A comparison of the review Esprit, representing Emmanuel Mou- nier's personalist movement, with Temps Modernes reveals strik- ing coincidences in the choice of causes and campaigns. Here again, it is largely a matter of tone that - given the same serious- ness of spirit, if not the same spirit of seriousness - distinguishes thoughtful and always good-natured readiness from premeditated and always ready ferocity.21

Such a to and fro of themes and thoughts suggests intensive integration of the intellectual domain, which might be gauged from the high degree of intercommunication among the different categories of intellectuals. The organization of the intellectual field in France undoubtedly provides more opportunity for con- tact than is the case elsewhere. The best known periodicals are, in fact, distinguished by their undifferentiated receptivity, which enables them to print, side by side, a structural analysis of a myth and an article on twelve-tone music or modern painting. Such periodicals encourage and attract a special class of intellectuals -

specialists in generality - who are often marked by their ability to

21 The titles of the special numbers of these two reviews are enough to bring out the convergence of preoccupations. That is to say, in 1945, for example, when Sartre wrote La Question Juive ("The Jewish Question"), there appeared a special issue of Esprit entitled "Les Juifs parlent aux nations" ("The Jews speak to the nations"). In 1946, Esprit published a special number entitled "L'homme améri- cain" ("The American") while Temps Modernes put out an issue on the United States. In 1947, Esprit published two special numbers on Germany and fascism, and in 1949 Temps Modernes devoted an issue to Germany. Lastly, in 1951 there appeared a special number of Esprit entitled "Condition prolétarienne et lutte ouvrière" ("The state of the proletariat and the workers' struggle"), while in 1952 Sartre published "Les Communists et la paix" ("Communists and peace") in Temps Modernes. From 1955 onwards, social problems of a new kind (leisure, education, working women, "the new working class," etc.) and economic problems, began to make their appearance in the two publications, but the difference of ideological mood is shown by the time-lag before Temps Modernes tackled these problems and by its greater fidelity to old approaches to problems, in contrast with the receptivity of Esprit toward the concerns arising out of the economic boom.

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move, always at the same level of generality, from one area to another - from electoral sociology, for example, to structural an- thropology. Thus there arises a small republic of letters, a kind of koine, or sometimes a lingua franca common to the novelist who discusses his works in philosophical terms, the philosopher who delivers himself of judgments on the novelist's art and the jour- nalist who talks about everything and everybody.

An intellectual world of such strong integration - "terminolo- logical," logical and moral - conceals beneath patent sectarian disputes the unspoken acceptance of an orthodoxy. The shatter- ing ruptures which punctuate biographies and mark off the phases of intellectual history are possible only when based on a com- plicity which may not be known because the pass-words are the master words of rejection and repudiation: naturalism, material- ism, positivism, explicative reduction and analytical atomization. Thus Sartre, who entered upon the intellectual scene by making an attack upon Brunschwicg's university idealism, ended by find- ing that they both had the same absolute enemies - Comte, Taine, Durkheim:

"Open a biography where you will and that is the kind of de- scription you will find, interrupted by the recital of external events and by references to the great explanatory idols of our era:

heredity, education, environment, physiological constitution."

And at the conclusion of a polemical attack on all the scientific acts of positive practice, the inviolable rights of subjectivity are reaffirmed:

"This unity which is the being of the man in question is free unification. And unification can never come after a diversity that it unifies."

When he lays down that this "unity of responsibility . . . must be personal unity," Sartre is reverting to both the letter and the spirit of personalism.

"Being, for Flaubert, as for any subject of 'biography', is unifi- cation in the world . . . , it is the unification of a novel project,

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a unification which is to reveal itself to us as a non-substantial absolute/' 22

The wholesale rejection of the rights of scientific positivity which found syncretic and indeterminate support in a German tradition confusedly understood as a sort of confederation to combat positivism, is reminiscent of the way in which spiritualistic eclecticism piled on Durkheim's head all the sins of materialism.23 As G. Davy notes with regard to P. Bureau, "under the name of sociological materialism he rejects simultaneously liberal eco- nomics, Marx's scientific socialism, Durkheim's sociologism and social science itself, and all this, in the Catholic sociologist's own words, in order to 'accept the demands of freedom.' " 24

In relating the historical and social environment of intellectual life to the attitude of an entire generation - an all-embracing at- titude characterized rather by the desire to reject utterly than by any clear consciousness of what is being rejected - we are only indicating what Sartre suggests, with more detail but also perhaps with the corrections of retrospective illusion, in the fragment of

22 Sartre, L'être et le néant, Paris, NRF, 1943, p. 648. 23 it is common at this time to deploy in extended battle array the criticisms of

Dilthey or Weber against Comtian positivism, the teeming argumentation of Hus- serl against the naturalism of the psychologist or the sociologist, the holism of Goldsteinian biology, the Hegelianism culled from the teaching of Kojève, the existential certainties of Kierkegaard or the excommunicatory prophecies proffered by Heidegger against "ontics," but the means of familiarizing oneself with German philosophy were, perhaps, rarely so poor as at the time when the prestige of German philosophy was at its height. The few translations, frequently of minor works - whose deliberately laborious word-by-word rendering gained added prestige from a baroque use of hyphens and parentheses - made any attempt at historical per- spective impossible by the very sequence of their appearance. The Heideggerians who did not know German (and they were more numerous than one might think) had to wait twenty-six years after the French translation of Was ist Metaphysik? before they saw the French of Sein und Zeit; and in the biographies written by a number of Husserlians, the Cartesianische Meditationen came before Ideen I and Logische Untersuchungen, Consequently, since it was commentary that replaced direct contact with the original work, the concealed commentator could turn the prestige of the work to his own account, while the open and authorized commenta- tor could glory in the recognition reserved for the words received directly from the lips of the master.

24 P. Bureau, Introduction à la méthode sociologique, quoted by G, Davy in Sociologies d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, Paris, f. Alean, 1931, p. 11,

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intellectual autobiography to be found in the first pages of La

Critique de la Raison Dialectique: "Under the influence of the war and the Russian revolution,

we set up violence - only in theory, of course - in opposition to the gentle dreams of our teachers. It was a sick violence (insults, brawls, suicides, murders, irreparable catastrophes) which could have led us to fascism. But its merit in our eyes was that it placed the emphasis on the contradictions of reality. . . . We plunged blindly along the dangerous path of a pluralist realism directed at men and things in their 'concrete' existence. . . . For a long time, we confused the totality and the individual/' 25

The fact that, in order to define the philosophical attitudes of the period, one has to rediscover the very language used by its actors to describe the period reminds us that it would be extremely naïve to describe as naïve the relationship of the philosophers to their objects. Nevertheless, this philosophy managed for some fifteen years to keep the "natural naïveté" of scientific practices at the lowest level of intellectual prestige and thereby helped to hold back the development of the human sciences and especially the social sciences. While, in the prevailing philosophical cli- mate, psychology naturally benefited from a theoretical tolerance as offering a pre-eminent pretext for phenomenological reworking, sociological work proper, which outside the Sorbonne had con- tinued only in the fringe areas of electoral sociology and religious sociology - reduced to their most sociographical aspects - and which had scarcely begun to experience the first reactions to American research had, as one can imagine, little or no chance of attracting the most enterprising minds.

However, when it enlisted the phenomenological method in

25J.-P. Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Paris, NRF, 1960, p. 24. One must also reread the preface to Aden Arabie, published in 1960, in which Sartre describes - in all likelihood, more authentically - the existential posture which determined his philosophical attitude and surreptitiously opposed him to a Nizan, who "spoke little about the human condition but much about social matters" and who found in Spinoza and Freud the answers to his questions (P. Nizan, Aden Arabie, preface by Sartre, Paris, Maspero, pp. 14 and 29-30).

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the service of the insistent demand for the totally concrete, that intellectual generation broke completely with the canonical rules and subject-matter of university philosophy, and thereby liberated anthropological science from the conventions that had held it prisoner. By decreeing that the most ordinary situations of

everyday life were worthy of phenomenological analysis, by oblit- erating any borderline between literature and philosophy, by allowing into the most theoretical writings the café waiter, the man suffering from brain damage, the experimental monkey and the rat in a maze, the drawings of a child and the photographic image, this new type of philosophical discourse, which made

everything philosophizable, laid the groundwork for a social sci- ence intent on seeing in every object an object of science. The

play on words and on things of Raymond Queneau or Boris Vian, philosophical parodies like Saturnini slang monologue in Le Chiendent or the irreverent jokes in L'Ecume des jours about "Jean-Sol Partre" are all part of the same effort to obliterate the distinction between noble and unworthy subjects, between philo- sophical good manners and down-to-earth things, and in their own

way, along with their humorous detachment from the everyday life, they introduce the methodological detachment called for by the social sciences.

While the empirical research which began in the early 1950's

by borrowing the methods and techniques of American sociology answered the need for basing analyses on something other than the

experience of the analyst, the objects to which this research was

immediately directed postulated an intellectual field haunted by Marxism, the working class and the exploitation of labor. This is the case whether we look at Chombard de Lauwe's urban studies or the research encouraged by Friedmann on industrial and handi- craft workers. This approach no doubt owed its attraction to the fact that it appeared to reconcile, more realistically than the mar-

riage between verbal political commitment and philosophical theory, the demand for a total choice and, at the same time, sci- entific rigor, The traces of Sartre's influence are still sufficiently

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 181 numerous in Alain Touraine's last work to prove that the choice of empirical investigation as a total experience can co-exist with the philosophy of commitment. Everything in Sociologie de V action 26 - from the refusal to "reduce sociology to the study of social determinisms considered as the pressure of a situation on behavior" to the effort to provide as an object of sociology not only the functioning of social systems but also the "agent, either collective or individual, who constitutes his social existence by his commitment as a participant in discussions, disputes and de- mands" - shows that the "sociology of freedom" (an expression already used by the school of Le Play) is a form of philosophy with subject. Just as Bergson left to the sociologist what was "closed" and solidified, so Touraine concedes to structuralism and func- tionalism the study of social systems and symbolic systems, while reserving to "actionalism" what he calls "the totality of forces and forms capable of breaking up the game," that is to say in Bergson's language, what is open, vital, psychic and creative. And it is Bergson's approach and even language that Touraine borrows when he gives preference to the moments in which "the faith of the believer overwhelms the life of the church, the belief of the militant upsets political strategy, the conviction of the teacher goes beyond pedagogic communication." 27

The same desire to reconcile total theoretical commitment with a concern for the concrete is reflected also in a kind of literature which has been appearing since 1958 and whose prophetic pathos has as its favorite themes the collective tragedies of "mass civiliza- tion," the science-fiction marvels of an "affluent society" and the "anthropological mutation" brought about by the efficient magic of modern means of communication. This commentary on our age, which does not exclude the empirical any more than it is excluded by the empirical, has proliferated so much only because all the sociological conditions for its success were present: (1) The

26 A. Touraine, Sociologie de l'action, Paris, Seuil, 1965. 27 Touraine, "La raison d'être d'une sociologie de l'action/' Revue Française de

Sociologie, Octobre-December 1966.

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availability of intellectuals who had been excluded from or had left the Communist Party, after the crisis of conscience provoked in them by the Budapest events, brought into sociological or para- sociological production some Marxist part-timers who found in Utopian sociology a substitute for the total, or the tortured, com- mitment which adherence to Stalinism had been for many of them. (2) More generally, the members of this new intellectual genera- tion brought up in the period when existentialism was trium- phant, were inclined to adhere to old intellectual attitudes in their manner of approaching new fields, especially as their uni-

versity training had more often introduced them to a pathetic vulgate of existentialism, which was like manna from heaven for the hypokhagnes 28 of the late 1940's, than to phenomenological thought, something more ascetic and therefore something only for those whose university specialization (itself, of course, the pro- duct of a socially conditional hierarchy of intellectual reputations) led them to the study of the necessary reference works. Lastly, (3) the fragmentation of major problems and the disintegration of the old allegiances promoted the appearance of new systems of affiliation in the intellectual field. For a few years, for example, the review Arguments - which is to Temps Modernes what a

group of minor prophets is to a circle of disciples around the master - proposed a world-wide meditation which found the

brightest of its marvels in a mutual assistance pact that made pos- sible polemics on the fine distinctions of Marxology without any humor and without any consequences. This marginal intelli-

gentsia found its favorable public among students, especially in Paris, where the mere effect of numbers is enough to cause a

feeling of loneliness and confusion - the basis of all Utopian dreams. It is obviously no accident that the mystique of group dynamics and psychotherapeutic utopias briefly assumed the features of canonical religiosity in a sectarian hubbub of recipro- cal excommunications.

28 University slang for students showing a serious but still immature approach to life's problems, with a connotation somewhat similar to that of "sophomores."

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 183

In setting itself up as an autonomous sub-system of the intellec- tual universe, the world of the sociologists was reverting to a principle of structuration not unlike that which governed the organization of philosophical life in the preceding period: the ostensible confrontation of American-inspired positivism with the humanism of historicity or the pathos of world-wide modernity actually conceals a deep-seated complicity based on a common social situation and a common intellectual past. The Arguments group, like the preceding generation, carried to its degree of per- fection the art of maintaining a coquettish relationship with selected works within a man's total work, thereby replacing the relationship of the reader to the total work as a systematic inter- rogation and an effort to follow the sequence of arguments, with a relationship between readers who are united in their taste for the mutual excitation derived from allusive and elusive reading.

During the same period, the methods and techniques of Ameri- can sociology - which owed part of their high reputation to the fact that they were little known and, more importantly, poorly understood - fulfilled a function, in a different sector of the intel- lectual world, almost identical, except for the difference in style, with that which was exercised among the ideologists by the writ- ing of the young Marx, of Lukàcs, Korsch, and later, Moreno and Rogers, or again, in a different period, by the works of German philosophy.

A journey to the United States now reaps the same rewards in prestige as did once a pilgrimage to the Black Forest, and a stay at Harvard or Columbia now represents the same kind of initiatory rite as did once a visit to the Husserlian archives at Louvain.

Although the shortage of translations, which began to appear only after 1960, certainly was not as great a barrier to acquain- tance with English sociological or anthropological literature as the lack of translations had been in the past with respect to Ger- man philosophical works, the inadequate facilities of specialized libraries and the shortage of the most essential information tools, our university tradition which undervalues the technical side of

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intellectual work (translations, annotated editions, intelligent bibliographies) in favor of risky improvisation and solitary reflec- tion, and, more specifically as regards the social sciences, the meagerness of means and financial allocations, the absence of a sociological teaching tradition oriented toward research, the re- cruitment of the first wave of research workers who could not but resent the inferior position of sociology in the hierarchy of intellectual disciplines and the fact that the creation of the CNRS

(National Scientific Research Center) freed these researchers from the need to attend, at least for their own instruction, the basic courses in sociology, which no one had ever taught them and which the current intellectual fashion tarred and feathered - in short, a whole combination of factual conditions explains why the mere conversion to experiment and measurement could have been regarded as something heroic and have seemed to those who had been so converted as an absolute beginning and an absolute end.

Thus, because empirical sociology in France was founded on the illusion of a first beginning and, by the same token, on ignor- ance of the epistemological problems posed by any scientific

practice, as well as on a deliberate or unwitting disregard of the theoretical past of European science, it could not but succumb to positivist temptations, especially as the logic of differentiation which governs the intellectual field condemned it, if not to adopt a positivist philosophy outright, at least to find a substitute in the form of a modernist profession of faith.29 Thus, in order to

29 In 1961 J. D. Raynaud, destined by his philosophical training to act as spokes- man of the empirical sociologists to the philosophers, devoted an article entitled "Sociology and Dialectical Reasoning" (Revue française de sociologie) to the book, Critique de la Raison Dialectique. The aim of the article was, by means of the often legitimate irony of the practitioner, to neutralize the impugnations which Sartre's theoretical terrorism sought to lay upon the sociologists. Along with other signs, such as the simultaneous appearance, in 1960, of a number of new sociological journals (Archives Européennes de Sociologie, Communications, Etudes Rurales, L'Homme, Revue française de sociologie), the establishment of new research labora- tories or the strengthening of older centers, such self-confidence reflects and pre- supposes a profound change in the balance of forces in the intellectual field.

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 185

exist in a field in which one cannot exist without justifying one's existence, initial post-war empirical sociology guarded itself from any intellectual test of strength and, in order to avoid coming to grips with the theoretical misgivings which would have allowed it, if not compelled it, to go beyond positivism, it was to invoke America, the image of the civilization and science of the future, as a total vindication; fall back upon the automatic aspects of the most humdrum ' 'methodology'

* and, in extreme cases, upon auto- matic multi-copiers as the absolute answer; cloak itself in a self- assurance born of belonging to a small world recruited by the method of co-opting, and therefore safe from competition and outside questioning; use systematically as a bogey academic soci- ology long entombed in theoretical routine or in taxonomies which were as frivolous as they were ponderous; 30 and, lastly, indulge in those easy refusals available to the technician: opposing theoretical queries in the name of his techniques, and political challenges in the name of scientific neutrality.

But apart from the assurance and the reassurance provided by the intellectual climate for the growth of a neo-positivism, it is undoubtedly the development of French society and, more par- ticularly, economic expansion, which constituted the terrain par excellence for a sociology predisposed, in appearance at any rate, to become an applied science. Just as in different periods the intellectual world is dominated by one or another of the scientific disciplines, so it seems that one can identify without difficulty the different periods of sociology by the particular branch of that science which ranks first in discussion and research. Thus, labor or industrial sociology gradually gives way, between 1950 and 1960, to organization sociology, including administration soci- ology. When sociology, which up to then had been an almost exclusively academic discipline, becomes an applied science in

so As Jean Stoetzel says in a reference to Georges Gurvitch, "Most recently, this great exercise in taxonomy has finally produced some results proclaimed under the title . . . Déterminismes sociaux et liberté humaine (Paris, 1955)" (J. Stoetzel, loc. cit.).

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response to the demands of a bureaucracy, either public or private, it tends not only to lose its freedom of choice as regards research options and to approach reality looking for answers to the ques- tions asked by its patrons - for it owes its subject-matter and its re- sources to a bureaucracy and makes administrative organization its favorite object of study - but it more than ever risks turning into administrative sociology or sociological administration.

We have accordingly seen - particularly since the introduction of the Fourth Plan, which placed some rather large "orders" in the field of sociological research - the development in France of a movement which had begun much earlier in the United States, especially in the sphere of labor sociology:

"With the shift from a reform-minded public to an audience of

stability-minded administrators and bureaucrats, with the shift of

many sociologists from academic and scientific to extra-academic and technical roles, we noted a decreasing concern with the theory of conflict and a tendency to replace analysis of conflict by the study of 'tensions', 'strains' and psychological malfunctioning. While early American sociologists addressed themselves to an audience of conflict-oriented groups - lawyers, reformers, radicals, politicians - later American sociologists have found their audi- ence largely among groups and professions concerned with the

strengthening of common values and the minimizing of group conflict: social workers, mental health experts, religious leaders, educators, as well as administrators, public and private. The relative weakness of reform movements in the later period and the rise of bureaucratic structures requiring the services of social scientists in the task of administration have helped to bring about this shift in audience. Accompanying this shift, the self-image of

many sociologists has changed from that of self-conscious advo- cates of reform to that of a 'trouble-shooter' and expert in human relations." 31

The widening of the audience of sociologists to include the

si L. Coser, The Function of Social Conflict, Glencoe, Free Press, 1964, pp. 28-29.

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administrative occupations contributes, at least as much as the

purely material pressure of the orders placed by administrators, to shaping the intellectual intent of sociologists. This helps to explain why, even in France, where the role of the great univer- sity research bodies (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme) would ordinarily be sufficient to make scientific research at least relatively independent, we can see the shift described by Coser even in the sociological literature that is not as directly dependent upon de- mand as the output of the company research divisions, which have multiplied so greatly, especially in the last decade. In order to win recognition for a discipline whose scientific legitimacy is still challenged, and in order to avoid the customary charge of futility or uselessness made by men in authority or in business, some sociologists tend to identify themselves a priori with the expecta- tions of an audience which is at the same time their preferred ob- ject of study, going so far as to reduce administration sociology to a mirror-image of the image which administrators have of ad- ministration.

This can be seen from the appearance in this literature of the new style - something between an administrative report and dis- tinguished journalism for administrators (of which Le Monde represents the perfect example) - that is cultivated in the new exchange-places/'clubs," study groups and intellectual sects - such as the X-Crise of pre-war days or, today, the Club Jean Moulins, Prospective and the Futuribles - where senior officials and so- ciologists of the upper echelons of administration pool their com- mon ideas on the "administrative phenomenon."

The last Congress of the Société française de sociologie (October 1965) reflects this rapprochement of the two cultures both by its principal theme, "French Society - Trends and Desires," and by the participation in it of responsible leaders of the economy and the national administration such as R. Grégoire, whose name is linked to income policy; C. Gruson, Director of the National Institute of Statistics; and P. Massé, Director of the Plan.

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Thus, in the French intellectual field a new, portentous refer- ence position has emerged in the form of a group which had never before been active in French intellectual life, for the Saint- Simonians began to play a part in the industrial boom of the Second Empire only by cutting themselves off from the intellec- tuals. No doubt French centralization, both administrative and intellectual, along with its facilities - all in Paris - for exchanging opinions, such as the reviews like Esprit which have opened their pages to this dialogue for the past fifteen years or so, is contribut-

ing greatly to this restructuring of the field by authorizing and

encouraging direct contacts at the highest level. Owing to the

very special susceptibility of the French intellectual field to the

temptations of the intellectual fashions of the day, this restructur-

ing is accompanied by spectacular transfers of personnel from one sector of intellectual production to another: a philosopher who in 1949 wrote a Heideggerian article on Maurice Blanchot in

Temps Modernes is today responsible for science policy in a large international organization. More broadly, an analysis of census results indicates that between 1954 and 1962 those in the "tradi- tional" intellectual occupations decreased in proportion - and sometimes in absolute numbers - to those in the intellectual oc-

cupations more directly linked to industry or large-scale adminis- tration.32

32 A comparison of the 1954 and 1962 censuses shows that, in those branches of activity directly linked to the economy and the social needs resulting from growth, the number employed in intellectual occupations has expanded at a faster rate than the personnel of the branch taken as a whole, and even than the number of persons employed at the senior levels of the branch. Contrariwise, in the branches of activity characterized by the sale of services to individuals, where intellectual work has the status of a liberal profession, the number employed in intellectual occupations in each branch has increased at a slower rate than the total number of employees and the number of senior personnel in the branch. Similarly, the artistic occupa- tions have constantly declined in relative size, the more sharply where the artistic activity lay in a traditional sector: for example, there has been a net decline in the numbers employed in artistic occupations connected with the theatre. Lastly, the numbers of those engaged in the legal professions are declining, both in the public sector and in the liberal professions (which more and more women are entering). Since, at the same time, the law schools have recorded an increase in the numbers

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 189

Similarly, we see the latest phase of snobbery taking on a new coloration by borrowing from current fashion the " tradition of the new" and finding in the advocacy of modernity the modern form of the search for originality. Teilhard de Chardin and, in the opinion of some, even the review Planète, which mixes as- tronomy with astrology, metapsychology with psychology, archae- ology with mythology and science with science-fiction, retranslate for the benefit of the scientifically inclined, who are starved for spiritual nourishment, the old eschatological beliefs. So the taste for the latest refinements of componential analysis and the theory of graphs serves the same psychological and social func- tions as the refinements of style and manners did in an earlier period. Even the literary world has been reached by the conta- gion: the traditional weapon of all avant-garde movements, that of denouncing the opposition for its backwardness, takes on new meaning in a context in which backwardness is a challenge no longer simply to a fashion but to "modernity" and in which, for example, "art for art's sake" gives way to "art as a strict science."

This shift is felt not only by the small group of sociologists who are in direct contact with administrative demand but also through- out the intellectual world, because it involves a redetermination of the relationship between social demand and intellectual life and, thus, a redefinition of the function of the intellectual. Ex- cept for their value judgments, sociologists as diametrically opposed in their philosophical options as L. Goldmann and M. Crozier feel this real redefinition of the status of the intellectual keenly:

"Such a change [says M. Crozier] implies two essential innova- tions: first, the upgrading of the social sciences, which are assum- ing greater and greater importance vis-à-vis the traditional norma-

of their students, it must be assumed that the students graduating from these schools will be going more and more into business management or public administration at the expense of traditional careers, which, because of the way in which the old legal professions were exercised, offered independence for and the free pursuit of intellectual interests.

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tive disciplines - law, philosophy, the humanities - and which are penetrating and renovating those disciplines; and secondly, and more important, the transformation of the role of the intel- lectual, who finds himself much more directly involved in action. While he does not thereby become a man of action, his thinking comes much closer to action, much more pertinent to it, and directly usable. Action is no longer a world apart. Compromise and bargaining are no longer shameful but may be studied ra- tionally. The intellectual no longer spends his time denouncing them in the name of the ideal but tries to understand them and to rationalize them." 33

"Future historians [says Goldmann] will probably identify the years 1955 to 1960 as the sociological turning-point in France between crisis capitalism and organization capitalism, accom- panied by a transition from philosophical, historical and human- istic sociology to the a-historical sociological thinking of today. . . . In the intellectual life of Western Europe, and particularly in France, the social sciences (sociology and anthropology) are more and more occupying the ideological place once held by philosophy. If one should ask who are the thinkers filling the role in French intellectual life today that once belonged to Bergson, Meyerson, Brunschwicg, Sartre, Jean Wahl and Merleau-Ponty, there is no doubt about the answer: they are first and foremost Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, and R. Aron, a sociologist, who began his intellectual career as a philosopher of history during the preced- ing period." 34

Whatever the diagnosis, the case comes down to the same re- definition of the mission of the intellectual which observers asso- ciate with economic growth, once this is perceived and accepted as the "main objective of society," to use Comte's expression.

Lipset comments that the disfavor in which abstract intellectual

33 Crozier, op. cit. One cannot help noting a revealing slip of tongue in the last word of this quotation, bearing in mind the meaning psychoanalysis has given to the term "rationalization."

34 Goldmann, Sciences humaines et philosophie, Paris, Gonthier, 1966, pp. 6 and 8.

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activities, art for art's sake and the contribution which intellec- tuals may make to politics are held in the new states has been encouraged by their interest in material progress in the economic and social fields. The desire to catch up with and surpass the former colonial power has made it necessary, both for politicians and for the intellectuals themselves, to relegate objectives having no practical significance to a secondary level of preoccupations.35

This description could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to France, where a reference to the United States could, factually speaking, replace the reference to the former colonial power. One could find a thousand examples of this, for instance in a certain national- istic posture - which is simply the reverse image of its model - or in the changes of style, purpose and spirit which directly reflect the transformation of a weekly like Express or, in a more round- about way, that of leading reviews like Esprit and Temps Mo- dernes, which retranslate the obligatory themes of the present period into language consistent with their particular coloring and philosophical purpose, in short, with their ideological mood.

These references to the relationship - at least in time - in which France's entry into a phase of continuous economic growth is accompanied by the reorganization of the physical structure of the economy, by the appearance of an explicit consciousness of the phenomenon and of a desire to control it, and, at another level, by a whole set of social transformations, of which the struc- tural changes in the intellectual world are one aspect, make it necessary to look into the nature and the significance of that relationship.

There is a structural affinity between the atmosphere of eco- nomic and social crisis that dominated France after 1945, against a background of international tension, and a subjectivist philos- ophy which was characterized by a tortured narcissism and a pathetic interest in history. And today, the economic prosperity and concomitant security reflected at the level of profound atti-

35 S. M. Lipset, The First New Nations, New York, Basic Books, 1963.

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tudes both in a high birth-rate and in the optimism that charac- terizes the intellectual mood of the period, and, even more pro- foundly, in a faith in the autonomous and anonymous efficiency of demographic and economic mechanisms capable of producing their own regulatory machinery or, at the very most, requiring only limited management - do not these things have a direct con- nection with the intellectual trends as well as the art forms that dominate this period? 36 The development of an empirical soci-

ology of a positivist kind - like the appearance of the "new theater" or the "new novel," which first represented an objectivist litera- ture of "personal non-existence," or, again, the triumph of struc- tural anthropology 37 extending far beyond the circle of specialists - entails a weakening of the previous interest in history and in the subject as the agent of history as well as of fictional narrative.

Obviously, we would have to describe in greater detail all the intermediate connections by which the economic situation can be related to intellectual attitudes: for example, the greatly in- creased importance of sociologists as a result of the recognition accorded them by policy makers; the enlargement of their audi- ence as shown by the larger editions of works dealing with the

86 The history of the French word "contrôle" is a perfect illustration of this. Whereas, by a change of sign, the post-war generation had shifted its meaning from its Durkheimian connotation, in which it had expressed the ideal of a moral integration of society, to one that was strongly negative, in which it designated the hidden organized constraints of an invading social order exemplified by "the American way of life," it is gradually recovering a positive connotation as it under- goes semantic contamination from the English word "control," but with two dif- ferent colorations: the technocratic literature uses the word to designate the ideal of rational management, while for the "new Left" the word is associated with the ideal of the participation of the greatest number in decision-making, as exemplified by Yugoslav self-administration. It is, of course, necessary to go beyond these partial lexicological notations and, as Trier suggested, delve into the restructurings in linguistic areas that reflect the history of ideas.

87 in a guide to contemporary conversation that recently appeared in France, we find the following extreme example of the extent to which structuralist holy writ has spread among laymen: "Claude Lévi-Strauss has studied the family struc- tures of primitive peoples, raw and cooked foods, do-it-yourself techniques, and the natives of South America. The thoughts these subjects suggested to him form one of the bases of 'structuralism* (which see)."

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 193 social sciences and by the specialized collections put out virtually simultaneously by the most important publishing houses; the increased demand for scientific application, which is expanding opportunities for engaging in sociological work outside the uni- versity framework, as well as university recognition of sociology, which, along with the multiplication of research and teaching posts, provides careers frequently promising more rapid advance- ment than those in the traditional university disciplines - all of this helps to create a kind of security that is perhaps not uncon- nected with the prevailing intellectual optimism of sociologists.38

Aside from the changes which have taken place in the strictly vocational world of the sociologists, the occasions for commitment which created the objective conditions for the kind of thought that characterized the late 1940's have grown increasingly scarce. This is due in the first place to the disappearance of the great issues such as the choice between the socialist and the Western camp, or of the Algerian war which was the last of the great causes of the French intelligentsia. It is due also to the routine of today's economic and social life, which provides material for eclectic round-table discussions rather than for indignant peti- tions, and no longer calls for spectacular commitments or dramatic challenges. The optimistic Utopian literature which looks to the horizons of the years 1980 or 2000 has taken the place of the old millenarian literature, while the sociological approach, when it does seek to oppose the euphoric neutralization of sociological problems, is directed toward finding still another impersonal pat- tern of the problems of the affluent society by deliberately looking at them from a distance and from an unaccustomed angle - at the risk, it is true, of confusion arising in the public mind with

38 The licence de sociologie (Degree in Sociology) was created in 1957 upon the initiative of Raymond Aron, who had been appointed Professor at the Sorbonne in 1955. Now, ten years later, there are in Paris as many students registered for this new degree (which has also been gradually introduced in all the provincial univer- sities) as there are candidates for the Degree in Philosophy. The teaching staff has shown a parallel increase: the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lille, for example, which in 1960 had only one faculty member in sociology, now has nine.

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the literary predilection for dramatizing the most obvious, i.e., the most superficial, changes in modern society by presenting them as something absolutely unheard of.

Nothing expresses better this alteration in the intellectual cli- mate than the successive changes in the public image of the work of Raymond Aron: the same philosophical or critical text which underwent reinterpretation in the late 1940's in the light of the pessimistic mood of the period, today appears to offer - through the same selective logic and reinterpretation - a philosophy that

justifies the general demobilization of the intellectual army and the end of ideologies. And, indeed, if one were to read Raymond Aron as one would read Burnham, one could see in the work of the theoretician of the relative autonomy of the political order the closure of the great debates on the value of political systems and on the effectiveness of politics, and find in his "Eighteen Lessons on Industrial Society" the theoretical justification for an attitude of indifference encouraged by the intellectual atmosphere of a society whose future, foreshadowed by the American example, appears to depend on morphological and economic determining factors rather than on the wishes of the subjects of history.

But an analysis of the successive images of the work of Lévi- Strauss would be no less illuminating. What Simone de Beauvoir saw in it in 1949 expresses the intellectual expectations of the

period much more than the intrinsic truth of the work, and is

diametrically opposite to what Ricoeur or Sartre is able to read into it today. The review which Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 on the Structures élémentaires de la parenté ("Elementary Structures of Kinship") presents the picture that a philosopher might have of structuralism and makes it possible to see how Lévi-Straussian anthropology, which reconciled concern for the

experimental with theoretical purpose, succeeded, by its very philosophical handiness, in provoking the fascinated interest of

philosophers and becoming one of the poles of the philosophical world:

"French sociology had been wrapped in a long sleep: Levi-

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 195

Strauss' book must be welcomed as an event marking a brilliant awakening. The efforts of the Durkheimian school to organize social facts intelligibly proved disappointing because they relied on questionable metaphysical hypotheses and on no less dubious historical postulates. In reaction, the American school called for abstention from any speculation: it confined itself to amassing facts without attempting to explain their apparent absurdity. Lévi-Strauss, who inherited the French tradition but who was trained in American techniques, has sought to pursue the same endeavor as his masters while avoiding their weaknesses." 39

Thus, Simone de Beauvoir can discern the resurrection of social science only by failing to see, in a blunder which is all too obvious today, the philosophical implications of this science, and thus feels entitled to attribute to it a then current philosophy, thereby, in effect, dissociating it from Durkheimian science and philosophy: l 'Lévi-Strauss has refrained from venturing upon philosophical ground; he never allows himself to stray from rigorous scientific objectivity. But his thinking is clearly part of that great humanist mainstream which considers human existence as bearing within itself its own justification. . . . The book not only has Marxist echoes; to me it often seemed to reconcile felicitously Engels and Hegel - for man originally appears to us as an anti-physis, and what his action achieves is the concrete position of confrontation with self, with a different self, without which the first would be unable to define itself. I also found singularly striking the agree- ment between certain descriptions and the propositions put for- ward by existentialism: existence, in establishing itself, by the selfsame momentum establishes its laws; it is not governed by any internal necessity, and yet it escapes contingency by assuming the conditions of its springing forth." 40

However, as Lévi-Strauss* anthropological scheme takes on a more precise shape by reference to linguistics, and makes its

39 S. de Beauvoir, Temps Modernes, Nov. 1949, p. 943. 40 de Beauvoir, loe. cit., p. 949.

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scientific philosophy more explicit, and as, similarly, structuralism - which has only really called itself that since 1958 - imposes more and more upon philosophers the cipher-stencil by which it insists on being deciphered, philosophers are agreed in seeing in it a philosophy without subject, even though they are still not sure about the exact identity of this new philosophy.

"Structuralist philosophy, it seems to me, is condemned to fluctuate between a number of roughly outlined philosophies. At times one would say it was a Kantian philosophy without transcendental subject, or even an absolute formalism which would lay down the very correlation of nature and culture. . . . There is thus in Pensée sauvage, in addition to the hint of a transcendentalism without subject, the outline of a philosophy in which structure plays the part of mediator, placed between praxis and practice. . . . There is, in Pensée sauvage, the outline of a very different philosophy in which order is an order of things and itself a thing. . . ." 41

As one can see, everything combines to make Lévi-Strauss' ideas "both fascinating and disturbing," to borrow the words used by Paul Ricoeur in concluding the discussion on structuralism sponsored by Esprit.

The ambiguous attitude of Lévi-Strauss with regard to the philosophical debate which is developing around him is not un- related to the success of structuralism, and no doubt explains the diversity of his audiences as well as the ambiguities which philos- ophers find in his philosophy. Unlike Durkheim, who could establish sociological science only by brutally asserting the rights of the philosophy that made it possible, Lévi-Strauss is able to adopt an attitude of ironical detachment with regard to the philosophical attention being shown him because this attention itself demonstrates that the social sciences, now irrevocably estab- lished, impose the question of their philosophy on philosophers

4i Paul Ricoeur, "La pensée sauvage et le structuralisme" (The Savage Mind and

Structuralism), Esprit, Nov. 1963, pp. 618-619.

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and no longer need to impose a philosophy on themselves, in order to be able to impose it on philosophers.

Called upon by Ricoeur to state whether the philosophy of structuralism is necessarily implied in the practice of the scientist or whether it is injected by the philosopher living in the scientist, Lévi-Strauss leaves, the philosophers free to choose, which is the most elegant way of reserving one's right to a philosophy of scien- tific positivity without risking being charged with the crime -

inexpiable today - of positivism: "I confess that the philosophy which seems to me implied by

my research is the most down-to-earth, the briefest of those you outlined in your study when you wondered about the philosoph- ical orientation of structuralism and observed that more than one was conceivable. I would not be alarmed, therefore, if it were to be proved to me that structuralism leads to the restoration of a kind of crude materialism. I am too well aware, however, that such an orientation is contrary to the trend of contemporary philosophical thought not to impose upon myself a cautious atti- tude: I read the sign-post and I prevent myself from taking the road it shows me." 42

Such diplomatic courtesy - which is not without irony - is made

possible by the position won for themselves by the social sciences, particularly linguistics and ethnology. Insofar as Lévi-Strauss has awakened these sciences in France from their empiricist slumber, it is often easy to see in the rebirth of theory a break with the neo-positivist inclinations of the immediately preceding period rather than a revival of Durkheimian approaches. It would, however, be very easy to find in the work of Durkheim, and in the theoretical capital bequeathed by the group that put out the Année Sociologique, the outlines of most of the queryings of structural anthropology. A second beginning entails the per- sistent reaffirmation of principles and an almost obsessional pre-

42 Esprit, loc. cit., p. 652.

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occupation with epistemological problems. Furthermore, a new division of scientific labor has led anthropology to confine itself to ethnological research (even if it still harbors, and above all

inspires, the hope of a total knowledge of man, as is shown by the

change in the meaning of the term ' 'anthropology,") 43 and to avoid bringing out all the implications and all the consequences which would inevitably result from the extension to our societies of the ethnologist's approach. In agreeing to wear - often un-

knowingly - the mask of exoticism, the ethnologist risks collecting a specious following. The success of Tristes Tropiques ("Sad Tropics") can only be understood in the light of the fact that, whatever the scientific qualifications of this "philosophical essay," its readers have been able to find in it ambiguous satisfactions

procured by the objectivizing perspective produced by ethnology, without running the risk of performing a similar objectivizing reduction upon themselves. For proof of this, one has only to observe the furor aroused by the anthropological approach when, in keeping with the Durkheimian tradition, which made no dis- tinction between ethnology and sociology, it is rigorously applied to familiar behavior and institutions, whether with reference to the functions of a university or to attitudes to works of art.44

In sketching out a sociology of the audience met with by the

43 As Paul Rivet points out in his introduction to Volume VII of the Encyclopédie française, the term anthropology which had retained its Kantian meaning of the general science of man up to the second half of the nineteenth century, for example in the writings of de Quatrefages de Bréau, thereafter became specialized and was applied only to physical anthropology, while the bulk of its meaning was inherited by the terms ethnology and sociology, depending on the groups of scientists con- cerned. By re-introducing the concept of anthropology in the sense accorded it in the English expressions "cultural anthropology" and "social anthropology", Lévi- Strauss relegitimatized the broader and older meaning of the word, almost simul- taneously with M. Foucault's new translation of Kant's Anthropologie.

44 It is the sociological aspects of knowledge and education which had been at the heart of Durkheimian anthropology that have seen the most recent renewal oí the Durkheimian approach. More broadly speaking, it is among a new generation of sociologists, who started out in philosophy and were schooled in ethnology, that there has been a reunification of the ethnological and sociological interests that had been completely dissociated by neo-positivism.

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 199 work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and of the public images through which it reaches and influences the intellectual public and even the public at large, it is not our intention to suggest that the sincerity of this work depends, in the final analysis, on what is grasped in it by a reading oriented by the intellectual expectations of a period or a group. It would be naïve, for example, to attempt to establish a relationship of the same type between, on the one hand, an economic and social situation characterized by contin- uous expansion with its resultant feeling of security and, on the other hand, such different intellectual phenomena as technocratic sociology, which is often scarcely more than an ideological by- product of optimism over growth or of euphoric concern with efficiency, and structuralism as a scientific approach, even though the philosophy without subject that it implies offers a superficial analogy with reliance on automated machinery.

The ideological atmosphere responsible for the optimism of the "young gentlemen" graduating from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, as sure of themselves as of their future, is no doubt very similar to that which Sartre recreates when he tells us of the attitude which the young men of his background and of his generation had toward their future, right up to the years of the great crisis:

"In the century of the airplane and of electricity we did not think we would be exposed to such surprises; it did not occur to us that we were on the eve of anything; on the contrary, we had a vague sense of pride in feeling that we were living in the morning after the last great upheaval of history. Even if we were sometimes worried by the rearming of Germany, we thought we had entered on to a long straight road and we were sure that the tissue of our lives would be woven solely by personal circum- stances, punctuated by scientific discoveries and felicitous re- forms." 45

It will not be surprising to find, at the level of systems of

« Sartre, "Qu'est-ce que la littérature?", Paris, NRF, Idées, 1948, pp. 25&-257.

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thought that have their vision of the future and their philosophy of history, that the existential "mood" of a stratum of administra- tors bent on identifying themselves - as is shown by their taste for "projection" - with all the ascending curves that characterize the century, is closely connected with the forward-looking literature which they finance, inspire, produce or consume, or even with a

theology of growth like that of Teilhard de Chardin, who, recon- ciling the reasons for faith and faith in reason, provides scientific and metaphysical backing for the secular creed of those who be- lieve in everything that grows: 46 the symposia, other kinds of round-table talks and discussion clubs, which are becoming the dominant mode of intellectual exchange, offer a means and a

privileged place for the reciprocal contamination of intellectuals and technocrats. Whereas, in the case of an intellectual output which is closely keyed to the expectations of a special class of consumers, it is almost too easy to identify the intervening ele- ments, few in number and self-explanatory, that link such works to their social context, a similar attempt with respect to a scien- tific scheme like that of structuralism would prove infinitely less fruitful. For it can be seen that works which are produced under such social conditions that they can have no other audience of reference than their peers are objectively constrained to take into account the questions bequeathed by their predecessors and con-

sequently they are linked, above all, to a history of social science, which is not the same thing as a social history of science, in that, as such, science is relatively independent of intellectual history and, a fortiori, of economic or social history. Thus most of the contradictions and outright errors contained in the public image of the work of Lévi-Strauss are due to the fact that, where this link is not made between the work and its theoretical past, the reader is condemned to the illusion of reading something wholly unique or an autodidactic text, which, reversing the order of

importances and disregarding conclusive subordinations, reduces,

46 The review Esprit devoted two special issues in 1963 and 1964 to the ideas of Teilhard de Chardia

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for example, Lévi-Strauss' analysis of the do-it-yourself hobby to an instrument of Parisian-style intellectual do-it-yourself putter.

However, as soon as this link is made, it becomes clear that, in order to develop to its maximum, i.e., into a scientific method, what was in fact only one of the possibilities indicated by Durk- heim, Lévi-Strauss had to refrain from reviving in its entirety an approach that associated the science of the functioning of social systems with the science of their historical development. Is it not this abdication which Lévi-Strauss is concealing when he condemns the ethical assumptions of evolutionism, which, even in the modified form it takes with Durkheim, always owes some- thing to a philosophy of progress? The aim of Lévi-Straussian anthropology, to set up a "basic catalogue" - to echo Leibniz in

referring to a typically Leibnizian scheme - of simple elements and the laws governing their combination, which should make it

possible to explain the combinations actually found in the various historical cultures, leads to the placing of history between paren- theses, almost as is done by structural-functionalism, in which the

overriding interest in the functioning of social systems reduces

history to a subordinate role, or again, as Raymond Aron does, paradoxically, in Paix et guerre entre les nations ("Peace and War between the Nations"), in which he constructs a trans-historical

systematization of international relations. It was the modern anthropological approach in its most ambi-

tious form that Fontenelle expressed with the triumphant self- assurance of the nationalism of the Enlightenment when he set out to deduce from a knowledge of the eternal mechanisms of human nature the universe of all possible histories:

"Human nature is composed of ignorance, credulity, vanity, ambition and wickedness, with a little common sense and honesty thrown in, but in a very small dose compared with the other

ingredients. Consequently, such people will construct an infinite number of ridiculous institutions and a very few sensible ones; they will often fight one another and then make peace treaties, almost always in bad faith; the stronger will oppress the weaker

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and will try to give their oppression an appearance of justice, etc. . . . After which, one could examine all the possible varia- tions produced by these general principles, and juggle with them, so to speak, in all possible ways; one could imagine in detail an infinity of events that either have happened or are very similar to those that have happened. This method of learning history would certainly not be a bad one; one would be at the source of

things and from that standpoint one could amuse oneself by observing the consequences one had already foreseen; for once the general principles have been mastered, one can envisage from a global viewpoint everything that they can produce, the details being no more than an entertainment which can even be dis-

pensed with at times because of their pointlessness or lack of

challenge. ... I would just as much like a man to learn the exact

history of every clock in Paris, at what date and by what craftsman it was made, how often and for how long it has failed to keep time, which clocks strike louder than others; but let him not bother at all to find out how a clock is constructed or what makes it tick." 47

Although a sociology of the history of French sociology as we have outlined it could not but accentuate the contrasts between the various periods in order to do justice to the differences that

separate them, there are nevertheless certain constants presented by the structure of the French intellectual field in its organiza- tion and consequently in the logic of its activities which must be

grasped explicitly and analyzed sociologically if we are to avoid those verbal explanations which bring in the effects of "national character," even though in the guise of an "intellectual tradition."

Among all the characteristics peculiar to the French intellectual world, the physical concentration of the intelligentsia is un-

doubtedly the most obvious and thus the most often remarked

upon. Sartre in 1947 stated a commonplace of sociology which intellectuals like to apply to themselves:

*t Fontenelle, Essai sur l'histoire, Paris, Payot, 1966, pp. 159-161.

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 203

"Within only five years after the appearance of my first book I was on friendly terms with all my fellow-writers. Centralization had brought us all to Paris. With a little luck, a rushed American could meet us all in twenty-four hours and in that time obtain our views on UNRRA, the UN, UNESCO, the Miller Case, the atom bomb. In twenty-four hours a trained cyclist could carry - from Aragon to Mauriac, from Vercors to Cocteau, calling en route on Breton at Montmartre, Queneau at Neuilly and Billy at Fontaine- bleau, as required by the scruples and pangs of conscience which form part of our professional duties - one of those manifestos, one of those petitions or protests for or against the return of Trieste to Tito, the annexation of the Saar or the use of V-3's in a future war, by which we like to show that we belong to our century. In twenty-four hours, a piece of gossip, without benefit of bicycle, can make the rounds of our group, and return fittingly embellished to the one who started it. We can be found all to- gether - almost - in certain cafés, at the Pleiade concert and, in certain appropriately literary circumstances, at the British Em- bassy. From time to time one of us, worn out, will announce that he is leaving for the country. We all go and see him, we tell him that he is doing the right thing, that it is impossible to write in Paris and we see him off with expressions of envy and with our good wishes - we ourselves have to stay in town to look after an old mother, a young mistress, an urgent task. He leaves with some reporters from Samedi-Soir who will take photographs of his hide-away. He gets bored. He comes back. 'After all/ he says, 'there's nothing but Paris/ " 48

But must we join Sartre in regarding the "physical density" of the French intellectual world as the primary and even sole explanation of its "moral density"? In fact, more than simple proximity in space, it is the specific organization of space and time in truly intellectual patterns which account for all the signs indicative of a strongly integrated medium: for example, a sys-

« Sartre, loc. cit., pp. 207-208,

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tem of interdependent attitudes which requires from each that he should define himself constantly by the image he has of the others and/or by the image they have of him; the intense inter- acquaintanceship, which provides the indispensable means for this exercise in reciprocal definition; the logic specific to the diffusion of ideas and fashions, which cannot pass from one point in the intellectual field to another without, each time, undergoing reinterpretation as required by the relative positions of the receiv- ing group and the transmitting group, that is to say, by the struc- ture of the intellectual field as a whole; and the closedness and tendency to self-sufficiency of an intellectual group which is especially inclined to translate into terms of its own logic the events of the outside world and reuse, inter alia, national or inter- national political events in the process of exchanging symbolic images that enables sub-groups to define themselves in terms of opposition.49

It will be understood that in a situation in which the intel- lectual is required to have a quasi-sociological knowledge of the entire intellectual field every intellectual act bears a load of over-determinants which at every instant compels every intellec- tual, by virtue of his position in the whole, to commit his entire position with respect to the whole. Connection with a periodical or newspaper, from the total support of the permanent contributor to the occasional contribution or the fact of being a known faith- ful reader, is one of the preferred instruments for reciprocal

49 Everything seems to indicate that during the last decade the self-contained character of the French intellectual field has increased simultaneously with the attenuation of conflicts which originate outside the field and which formerly gave the intellectuals greater scope for expressing their oppositions in the intellectual idiom. Thus, affiliations which at times used to introduce into the intellectual world the merciless violence of the conflicts between secularists and Catholics, be- tween the Left and the Right, and especially between reformists and revolutionaries, no longer prevent a respectful dialogue. What was long only an exception- whether it was Mauriac benevolently looking over "Sartre, the providential atheist" or the Rev. Calvez devoting his vast erudition to Marx - has now become the rule, as can be seen from the ecumenism of the debates at the Centre Richelieu or the thaw during the discussions of the Semaine de la pensée marxiste ("Marxist Thought Week").

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 205

identification because, in all the spheres which are subject to intellectual interest and judgment, it brings into play, if not a coherent system of philosophical, political and esthetic options, at least a posture, which is recognized and expressed as a totality right down to the imponderables of style and means of support. Just as in a tribal society the passing outsider is subjected to questioning until he can be located in a genealogy, so the intellec- tuals who strive to prove their personal uniqueness and irreduci- bility do not stop until they have eliminated the unclassifiable - even by resorting, if necessary, to an arbitrary taxonomy. Hence the production of all the "isms" suitable for designating total options committing a whole philosophy and employed with the intention of defining both oneself and the others. Hence also the permanent temptation to prophetism which, in Weber's defi- nition, fully achieves the systematization in action of all existen- tial options. Before such complete and compelling expectations even the rejection of philosophy cannot be limited to a simple and innocent statement but must be affirmed as the negation of a field that negates the rejection (which explains the acrimonious coloring of certain positivist professions of faith), unless one is in such an unassailable position as to be able to resort to the supreme deception of false ingenuousness.

Obviously, the functioning of such a system requires, as its first condition, an institution capable of producing people who have fully mastered the game and are wholly determined to play it. Actually, the philosophy classes, as constituted under the French educational system, are fairly successful, with the help of the image of total education which it assumes - and on which it prides itself - in associating in the minds of students the intellec- tual role with the aptitude for giving total responses to total questions. The preparatory classes for the Ecole Normale Supé- rieure, and this school itself, only raise to a higher degree of intensity this special training in the art of determining one's intellectual preferences in accordance with a complex system of expectations and of making ingeniousness in disappointing them

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the supreme test of a perfect knowledge of those expectations. Thus the method whereby a dissertation-monger composes an inimitable product out of the ready-made batch of common erudition and patterns of thought served up by higher academic education is no different from that which enables reviews like

Esprit or Temps Modernes, or periodicals like La Quinzaine, Nouvel Observateur or Express to construct the image of their

originality out of the mandatory batch of subjects imposed upon them by the intellectual atmosphere of each period. At the highest level of intellectual accomplishment, where consecration is im- mediate and supreme, the ' 'great works'* are even more distin-

guished for their virtuosity in the art of meeting expectations created by a system of which the authors are themselves a product and the no less requisite art of disappointing those expectations.

Michel Foucault, the latest of these glories typical of our coun-

try, owes a part of his success with the general public to the fact that he speaks, in each of his readers, to the would-be intellectual who has learned not to demand proof of the greatness of a work which has made it plain that such proof will be shown only to the initiated, while the reputation that he so promptly acquired in the small circle of his peers derives from the polyphonic talent which accompanies his playing in the long discordant registers of the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, the history of the sciences and the philosophy of the sciences to compose a

philosophy of the history of the sciences which is simultaneously a history of the philosophy of the sciences.

In such an intellectual world, self-educated people and foreign- ers, i.e., those who have not been trained at this national school for the upper intelligentsia, the Ecole Normale, can, with a few

exceptions, only hope to achieve a position which is respected rather than admired. Of the philosophers listed in the chapter on contemporary philosophy in a recent widely circulated work, more than half are graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, including Aron, Guéroult, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Sartre and

Vuillemin, while more than half of the remainder are émigrés

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 207 to whom the French intellectual world offered a welcome that was at once warm and reserved.50 The rest are Catholic philoso- phers, except for one semi-self-educated writer, Gaston Bachelard, who owes his very special status as much to the originality of his work as to his own role as an eccentric frankly wedded to cultural non-conformity. It is easy to understand how Bernard Groethuy- sen, who came from Germany to the Nouvelle Revue Française, then one of the summits of Parisian intellectual life, was able to make such a profound analysis of the tragedy of Rousseau, an in- nocent among the wolves.51

This unifying training, which regulates intellectual life by in- culcating in each intellectual a system of exigencies, both with respect to others and with respect to himself, makes itself felt not only in the sphere to which it is most directly related, that of philosophy, and, secondarily, literature, but also in the social sciences, and in particular, sociology whose history owes both its strong periods (from its beginnings, with the group of the Ecole Normale around Durkheim, to today's revival via the new impetus that was provided by the Centre de Documentation Sociale) and its orientations to the activities of those pure products of the French school, the holders of degrees in philosophy, especially those from the Ecole Normale. Obviously, it is because of their philosophical past that French sociologists, at least above a certain level of distinction, feel the need to manifest ambitions or préten- tions to original synthesis, if only by basing themselves on selected authors, rather than on an anonymous cohort of "founding fathers/' or by invoking their desire to remain open to neighbor- ing specializations, of which they are constantly reminded, even in the absence of any inter-disciplinary institution, through the personal contacts facilitated by college chums.

bo The rigidity of the French university, frightened by the entrance of foreigners, is well known. Only the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, with its more flexible organiza- tion, was able to accommodate such scholars as A. Kojève, A. Koyré, and, for a long time, E. Weil.

5i See B. Groethuysen, Philosophie de la révolution française, Paris, Gonthier, 1956. Ch. V.

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Thus, it is not only because French sociology is the heir to an ancient and glorious tradition of philosophical speculation that it constantly rediscovers philosophical stringency but, more pro- foundly, because the organization of the intellectual field, through the permanence of its institutions and of the models it holds in honor, imposes a special method of recruitment and a special style of vocation, and emphasizes to the mind the philosophical significance of the most private preferences and the most technical projects.

It took the blindness to history of a generation, saturated and fascinated by the existentialist credo or paralyzed by the dog- matism of a fossilized Marxism, to believe that the connection between philosophy and sociology had been broken forever. The illusion of an absolute beginning and the myth of a science which was supposed to be its own philosophical justification could never have taken hold of the empiricist generation of the 1950's so strongly, had it not been for the special situation of that genera- tion in relation to its older brother - the intellectual generation of 1939, a generation which, linked to a philosophical past but cut off from empirical practice by the war and, perhaps, even more, by the absence of institutional structures and financial re- sources, was compelled to put off the task of reconciling empirical research and theory.

However, as soon as the development of concrete research and a concern with techniques, social recognition of sociology and, moreover, the rediscovery of the connections between anthro- pology and sociology restore to the social sciences their place in the intellectual world, the very conditions for recruitment to the sociological profession are changed, along with the orienta- tions and philosophical assumptions of research. All but non- existent between 1950 and 1960, research workers with a philo- sophical background, and more especially graduates in philosophy or from the Ecole Normale, find their way into the research in- stitutions that had been established without them.

Suddenly, with this new diversity of intellectual backgrounds,

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competition reappears in a world which believed itself perma- nently shielded from it by the convenient device of co-optation, and this is accompanied by a resurgence of theoretical and episte- mological discussion. For, once the demands of empirical re- search are universally accepted, it is no longer possible to invoke the interlocutory rights of empiricism against stringency of theory. Thus, for example, the spread of statistical culture has helped to dissociate the statistical instrumentality from the irrational func- tions of protection and terrorism which it was able to assume during the period of groping when statistics was still in the hands of the few.

Must the reconciliation, now apparent, between sociological theory and practice be regarded as a necessary element in the history of the social sciences, or is it merely a reflection of special determining influences affecting the current French intellectual scene?52 One cannot sidestep this question, as Marshall D. Sahlins does, by ironical references to philosophy as a "French national resource' ' or, like J. F. Revel, by speaking of the frivolity of Parisian fashions in philosophy.53 Certainly it is the task of epistemology to deal with the theoretical conditions required for a rigorous scientific practice, but where the social sciences are concerned, a sociology of sociological practices may show that the social characteristics of the scientists and, particularly, the kind of education they have received, the position they occupy in the intellectual field, or even their social origin, do not make them all equally susceptible to a scientifically sound and produc- tive concept of the use of philosophical reflection in their scien- tific practice. When a scientist encounters, in scientific practice itself, the need for a theoretical re-examination of that practice,

52 The notion of "theory" nowadays holds several meanings, which often are not precisely distinguished. Here, we intend to mean by this term less a general theory of the social system than the reflection about the effective execution of sociological work, i.e. what the tradition of the philosophy of science calls "episte- mology" and which cannot be reduced to so-called "methodology."

53 M. D. Sahlins, "On the Delphic Writing of C. Lévi-Strauss," The Scientific American, June 1966; J. F. Revel, Pourquoi des philosophes? ("Why Philosophers?")

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and finds in his intellectual training the necessary instruments to meet this need, all he will be able to draw from an intellectual field that associates philosophy and sociology is encouragement to redouble his epistemological vigilance. But in view of the caricatural distortions to which philosophical works are subjected by the oral transmission and hearsay acquaintanceship of Parisian gossips, the French intellectual field is always in danger of foster-

ing philosophical dilettantism and frivolity within the scientific

community itself. For, when a discussion of scientific practices rests solely on the

false familiarity born of the superficial reading of fashionable

periodicals and newspapers, it has little chance of adding any- thing to the philosophy of the social sciences or of strengthening the epistemological awareness of those in research who, rather than bring doubt upon their own practice, as might happen if

they were to engage in real theoretical thinking, are tempted to

prefer the worldly paraphrases which immediately attract the at- tention of the general intellectual public. Similarly, philosophers who apply their minds to the social sciences may, depending on their training and the position they occupy in the field, either use the prestige of philosophy in order to impose their theoretical terrorism by laying down the law concerning scientific practices they know nothing about, or, starting from a real knowledge of the techniques and the questions relevant to a given scientific

practice, proceed to a legitimate review of the epistemological assumptions implicit in any scientific practice.

The relative position of philosophy within the intellectual field and of the various philosophies within the philosophical field has perhaps never been so favorable as it is today, when the test imposed on philosophy by social sciences becoming in-

creasingly aware of their philosophical implications brings to the forefront such works as those of Gaston Bachelard, who sets out to clarify the philosophy of science; Jean Piaget, who estab- lishes experimentally the origin of the processes of logical thought; Martial Guéroult, whose philosophical idea is to found a rigorous

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 211 science of the history of philosophy; Georges Canguilhem, who looks for the philosophy of science in the history of science; and Jules Vuillemin, who endeavors to make philosophy a reflection on modern science and the history of philosophy a history of reflection on science.54

Such philosophies are predisposed, by the very object they choose for themselves and by the way in which they approach it, to lend sociology the theoretical assistance it needs, if only by posing the generic question of the conditions that make possible any scientific practice. But in addition, in refusing to dissociate scientific and philosophical truths from the history of science, in other words, from the totality of historical conditions which make possible each state of science, they are at one with the philosophy without subject which the social sciences also apply, at least implicitly, when they refuse to treat their object, either by omission or by negligence, as a subject which would more or less elude scientific investigation either by the transcendence of its logical categories or by the freedom of its ultimate options.

Ought we not to see in the somewhat aggressive irony aroused, for example, by Claude Lévi-Strauss among certain American positivists, a hint of the recognition that is on the way for the efforts to reconcile theoretical stringency and empirical rigor? Sahlins has pointed out that when the Smithsonian Institution celebrated with great pomp the bicentenary of the birth of James Smithson, Lévi-Strauss was exported from the College of France to be temporarily put on display in Washington, with almost the same fanfare that accompanied the procession of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre to the Metropolitan.55 Just as American soci-

54 When one asks oneself what distinguishes these philosophers from the existen- tialist philosophers, with whom after all they share a common university past, one can see no explanatory principle other than their differences of social and geo- graphical origin, for the former have come from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds and primarily from the provinces. Is there not an affinity between the ethos associated with such a social situation and a morality of the intellectual life which is expressed, at least indirectly, in the motive of rehabilitating science and scientific work?

5ß Sahlins, loc. cit.

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ology was able, for a time, by its empirical rigor, to act as the scientific bad conscience of French sociology, perhaps the time will come when French sociology will, by its theoretical strin- gency, become the philosophical bad conscience of American sociology.