Contenu du sommaire : Faire des sciences sociales du politique

Turning Back on the Twenty-Five Years of a “Militant” Journal
As members of the founders of Politix and as members of its editorial board, J.-L. Briquet and F. Sawicki offer an “ego-sociology” of this journal. Since its creation, in 1988, Politix has constantly defended a conception of political science anchored in the social sciences and promoted an interdisciplinary approach. The challenge is now to maintain its intellectual and editorial project, dealing with the weight of the new standards of the academic and editorial activities in the field of social sciences.

Politix, 1988-2012 : Generational Change, Paradigm Shift
Since its creation in 1988, Politix has evolved considerably. In twenty-five years, a new generation has replaced the founding one and a new paradigm has emerged, replacing the previous. Originally a journal devoted to critical political sociology, Politix has progressively adopted the international standards of publication in the social sciences. For a long time, the journal had been dominated by a constructivist approach ; now constructivism is either criticized or ignored. Whereas most of the first issues of Politix were including many historical papers, recent issues mostly focus on non socio-historical studies and contemporary as well as foreign case studies. In the past, empiricism wasn't highly enhanced ; it has now become a core subject. Recently published research is also much more cumulative than the previous. Although the journal was focused on critical approaches of canonical objects of the discipline for a long time, it now addresses new research fields. This profound change of a journal that keeps the same title, the same presentation and the same way of working, has to be explained through inquiries inspired by the sociology of science. This article offers a research agenda for such inquiries.

Interview with Michel OfferléIn this interview, Michel Offerlé looks back on the institutional, intellectual and scientific context in which Politix was born. That allows a better understanding of how the journal has been part of a wider movement that transformed the social sciences of the political, a movement that was active before Politix grew up and that was also supported in other places, especially the journal Genèses, among the founders of which is Michel Offerlé.

What Is a Case the Case Of ?
Though ethnographic methods seem to have gain credit and legitimacy these past decades in France, whether or not this method can produce theoretical results that are relevant beyond the case studied is still quite debated. By retracing the various steps of a fieldwork research conducted on voluntary associations of young migrants, this article makes two epistemological points. In keeping with Ragin's analysis on casing, it demonstrates that producing a theory based on a case study is necessarily an iterative process and that one only finds out what his case is a case of once the research is over. More specifically, it focuses on limit cases, and offers to conceptualize two forms of such cases, depending on how they are used to produce theory : negative cases are used to test the robustness and the degree of expansion of an existing theory ; limit cases are used to test an existing theory in order to refine it, specify its conditions of validity and reconstruct it.

What Field Studies Can Bring to Electoral Analysis
Nowadays, electoral analysis relies mainly on atomistic data surveys. The explanatory model of rational voter, producing his vote without being influenced by anything surrounding him, and from a study of supply policy is further reinforced by such a model. This paper emphasizes the scientific interest of going back to field studies to allow a better understanding of what voting is really made of. It uses several research experiences based on observational methods confined to an area. On the one hand, because case study allows the accumulation and the crossing of verified data of a different kind, it leads to a precise logic of behavior which further investigations can then determine in terms of mapping. On the other hand, case study apprehends voters in their environments – family, friends, and area of residence – which allows the analysis of the collective dimension of voting. The socio-demographic characteristics of individuals, their academic, professional, or residential evolution are then understood as embodied predispositions to abstain or to vote, or to do so in a certain sense. The researcher can then observe if such predispositions can turn into voting practices or if, on the contrary, they seem neutralized by the environment. Therefore, field studies lead to a different and in-depth analysis of voting practices.

Observation of a working class activist group
Based on fieldwork carried out with unionized railway workers, this contribution concerns certain stakes in ethnographic work conducted with activist groups. While activist socialization is most often studied after the fact – that is, based on interviews where activists recount their history and motivations – our research aims to document this socialization in situ, by observing activist activities over the course of many years. At the same time, conducting interviews and documentary work still prove to be invaluable in accounting for the relationships of force that constrain the observed situations and contextualizing activist activities in the configuration of the organization. The adopted research strategy requires accepting the partially unpredictable character of the methodology's construction. It also offers the possibility, under certain conditions, of discussing one's research hypotheses with one's informants-become-allies.

Localizing the Field of the International
Transnational forms of activism partially involve practices and configurations in which the superposition between society and the state is even more problematic than it already is when action is considered “local”. Their observation can therefore involve specific empirical and theoretical strategies. This articles aims to expose some of them, linked to the identification of “the field” and of internationalization processes. The article examines the ways to grasp the division of labor in those international organizations, and to track individual trajectories as a way of mapping the worlds of transnational activism. It then examines the opportunities offered by collective surveys in international activist events.

Doing Fieldwork in Political Theory
This paper aims to articulate a properly ethnographic approach for the study of political thought. It draws on a fieldwork carried out among the French mediators of the US philosopher John Rawls and of US theories of distributive justice. The article starts with the presentation of the general theoretical framework endorsed in this research, intended as a contribution to a historical sociology of political ideas. This approach takes place among the recent renewal of intellectual history in France and abroad. The article then turns to the reasons which motivated the recourse to an ethnographic inquiry, and details how the fieldwork was delineated and which sites were selected. The ethnographic dimension of the fieldwork relates both to the type of inquiry carried out (based on participation and interviews), and the standpoint endorsed, characterized by reflexivity, attention to alien categories, and the analysis of bodily and material apparatus.

How to Not Be a Constructivist ?
Social scientists who profess allegiance to constructivism often have difficulty to hold to the end the notion that reality is a social construction. Therefore, it is common to see them yielding to the temptation to secretly renaturalize some part of the social world, renaturalization they deem necessary to avoid falling into relativism. This strategy, that became the standard, is totally regressive regarding the ambitions of sociology : it not only leads to serious inconsistencies, which this article identifies under the names of ontological gerrymandering, derealization, and criticism of artificiality but it severely limits the critical potential of constructivist posture by making it a regional theory rather than an universal one. A much more consistent approach can be found in the Durkheimian thesis on the social origins of categories, provided to read it with sufficient care to reassess an aspect which is generally neglected : the importance that Durkheim ascribed to the control by experience in explaining the transformation process of categories.

Habitus from Outside
This short article aims to revisit what researchers do when they launch, through questionnaires, interviews, or archives, in collecting actors' beliefs about highly regulated and established events (for examples exams, ceremonies, official talks, etc.). He questioned three cases of non-response in surveys, attempting to interpret these silences : What do they say about the situation ? At the end of this review, two points are advanced. On the one hand, the collection of “good reasons” is often vein because it leads to certify the infinite diversity of actors' reactions. On the other, it is a problem because the quest of beliefs led the researcher to forget what goes without saying, especially in activities where individual actions can be carried by institutions.

Why Do Anthropologists Get Interested in Beliefs Only When They Are Located at Least Two Hundred Kilometers Away ?Why do social anthropologists prefer to study beliefs that are located far away in time or in space (like medieval ghosts or non-western shamanism) and why do they often ignore beliefs that develop inside our scientific society (like contemporary astrology or UFOlogy), except to debunk them ? This article shows that the refusal to study our beliefs is closely connected to the refusal (or the incapacity) to study scientific practices, by fear of the relativism stemming from the confusion between “scientific facts” and “mere beliefs”. It also outlines that the some pieces of work that claim to take beliefs seriously mostly have not done so : they have just extended the debunking of beliefs by debunking some specific scientific practices as if they were beliefs. It finally shows that the rare pieces of work that succeed in studying beliefs from a symmetrical point of view often forget to mention the contribution of the science studies that made that symmetrical treatment possible. As a result, the problems that social anthropologists meet when it comes to beliefs are closely connected to the fact that scientific practices remain a sort of blind spot – particularly in France.

Editing a Social Science Journal Today
These pages present the communications of a roundtable held during the workshop organized by Politix in preparation of this hundredth issue. Relying on their personal experience, the participants engage in assessing the opportunities and constraints defining the edition of a social science journal in nowadays context.