Contenu du sommaire : Comment on se dispute

If the history of science has sought rigorously to define the analysis of controversies as a methodological tool, for its part the history of literature seems often to hesitate between a dialogical and a polemical approach to the “querelle littéraire”. This article provides a critical examination of recent work about intellectual controversies in the early modern period. It highlights some of the most important issues, such as the arenas in which these controversies take place, the way they reshape the fields of knowledge, and the disputed question of their public.

The article considers the analysis of scientific controversies studies have been since their first appearance in the 1970s and studies the main transformations/exportations of that tool (for example, the social controversies around such objects as GMO). It looks at the way that this micro-historical methodological tool requiring the close following of actors in interaction has been used, the limits it induces, the ontologies of the social and the individual that it suggests, and what is at stake in political terms.

This contribution has two goals. First, it proposes an analytical framework devoted to the study of controversies that takes into account recent changes in intellectual history and sociology. Drawing upon the innovations brought about by science studies, it describes the main characteristics of situations of controversy. Second, it seeks to test this analytical framework in order to account for a singular and famous controversy, the one that opposed Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida about the interpretation of Descartes'first Meditation.

The debate around this book recalls a double scandal: first, on the occasion of the inaugural lesson given by Renan at the College de France in 1862, and then through the debate following the publication of the book one year later. In hiding the fundamental purpose of the book, this controversy has been responsible for a misunderstanding fraught with consequences. It has promoted a judgement on Renan as being a successful writer but, ultimately, a dilettante. By concealing the scientific nature of the work, it has since prevented the possibility of founding the history of religions in France as a discipline acknowledged by the University.

The modernist quarrel can be analysed at three different levels: as controversy, as crisis, and as condemnation. This fragmentation was a reflection of the process of laicization and secularization of French society at the beginning of the twentieth century which permitted the unfolding of a veritable intellectual crisis around a religious question, whilst at the same time a crisis and condemnation shook and divided a Catholic world that remained profoundly hierarchical.

The thinker Georges Sorel, a well-known polemicist, was one of the protagonists in the celebartated debate around “the crisis of Marxism”. However, a close examination of the strategise that he adopted shows that the confrontation with the thought of others was not a self-concious search for conflict.

In 1903, François Simiand, one of Durkheim's most brilliant followers, became engaged in a heated controversy with the historians. This was the first of a series of polemics between the sociologists and the neighbouring disciplines during the first years of the 20st century. It has been mostly understood as a methodological and epistemological conflict. It may also be understood as a crucial episode in the rivalry among academic disciplines at the very moment when the social sciences began to be institutionalized in the French academic system. The same controversy reappeared throughout the century, but over different issues and in different contexts.

By studying the nature of the dispute between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz about the origins of Spanish identity, the purpose of this article is to analyse how the review of a book can be used in an intellectual controversy. Whether positive or negative, a review uses a special rhetoric worth analysing to understand how it assesses a book; it also tells us a lot more about the strategies displayed in the dispute than about the contents of the book itself. As a means of conveying knowledge, it represents an invaluable source of a study about intellectuals and their practices.

In 1963 Barthes published a collection of articles, Sur Racine. The following year, a further selection of articles, Essais critiques, developed this interpretation. It provoked a critical response from Raymond Picard, professor of literature at the Sorbonne and an acknowledged specialist on Racine, in a pamphlet entitled Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture, published in 1965. Very quickly this controversy developed a dimension that did not limit itself to the confines of the university. Newspapers and weekly magazines entered into a debate which remains famous in the history of literary criticism. It was a debate the examination of which concerns more than solely the history of interpretations of Racine.

Amongst the public controversies relating to science, those concerning the effects of radioactivity have a special place due to the fact that they have regularly returned into the public stage. This article examines the birth of these recurring controversies by analysing the role of this particular form, controversy, in the public formulation of an issue and in its political treatment. It deals especially with the Cold War period during which the principal terms of a debate between science and politics were formulated and paradoxical answers to crisis management were formed.

The interactions between science, society and politics at work in the influenza epidemic of 1918 – a huge event – constitute an analytical frame for studying controversies which take place in times of emergency and under censorship. What was at stake in these controversies concerning scientists, experts and politicians, was the competition between forms of knowledge, facts, the provision of proofs, and the manner of their validation. Implicated in this were the linkages between publics and various regimes of truth, from popular belief to scientific proof.

This paper builds upon the study of science and the French “sociologie des épreuves” (“sociology of trials”) in order to give an analytical definition of the notion of controversy. It examines the consequencies of such a definition regarding the role played by argumentations in this kind of dispute, the control of mutual violence by the participants, the way a controversy may come to an end, and finally, the ability of the researcher to maintain a position of axiological neutrality in analyzing a controversy.

From the thought of Georges Sorel, the English vorticist artists and their friend T.
E. Hulme derived an essentially pessimistic vision of a fundamentally limited humanity. The illusion of the infinite progress of man through his rational faculties was central to what they called “romanticism” as a name for the decay of their era. In reaction, thet called for the making, through the power of images, of a sensibility and a way of thinking that would define a new classicism: the programme of Vorticism and the anticipated effect of its paintings, was intended to be the coming into the present of a violent, hard, and order-loving humanity.