Contenu du sommaire : Traditions nationales en sciences sociales

This article reports on the birth and historical trajectory of the statistical discipline in Hungary, a major sector of the emerging social sciences in the country during the long 19th century. Its organization is connected to the nation state established following the 1848-1849 War of Independence and the historic Compromise of 1867 with Austria. Its main institutional vehicles, the Central Statistical Office and the Budapest Bureau of Statistics competed for professional preeminence, duly recognized internationally. The uniquely composite nature of Hungarian society in terms of ethnicity and confessions and the political stake of cultural assimilation of minorities gave rise to exceptionally refined patterns to capture structural data related to the social order broken down by ethnic and religious clusters (demography, linguistic skills, socio-professional stratification and mobility, schooling, migrations, lodgings, economy, taxation, etc.). The production of social statistics having reached their summit in the last years of the Liberal Era after 1900, the discipline is still capable of some improvement in the authoritarian and anti-Semitic regime installed in the inter-war years. It will though not escape perversion and decline under the process of Nazification and later during the Communist turnover after 1945. It will fall victim of Stalinist dogmatism, so as to be officially suppressed between 1949 and 1957 as a « bourgeois science ».

Using a comparative approach, we try to understand René Worms' and Émile Durkheim's approach to position their sociology within a national or international framework. In the former case, we show that Worms was an internationalist entrepreneur of sociology. This attempt proved to be a failure at the national level, notably given Worms' relative absence from the French academic field. In the latter case, we analyze Durkheim's intellectual strategy for sociology, building a national history of sociology. We show that one element of the Durkheimian success was a specific combination of international scientific resources and of positioning sociology within a national tradition.

This paper claims that, from Comte to Durkheim and the Durkheimians and up to Bourdieu, there is a French intellectual tradition in which the sociologist appears as a critique of political economy. The paper starts with a brief presentation of the three main forms of economic sociology and then focusses on the possible explanations of the position advocated by these leading French sociologists, emphasizing the intellectual filiation that runs from Comte to Bourdieu when it comes to deligitimizing political economy as a science. The role given to social representations, whether stemming from economic activity itself or from a social construction, notably tyhe one associated with teachng institutions, is then considered as the central analytical point that gives this tradition its intellectual power.

The paper aims at evaluating the place of sociology in Central and East European societies after the World War ii, basing itself on a comparative research into the discipline's institutionalization. It uses a set of four indicators to describe sociology's institutional progress in countries of the Soviet Bloc in Europe. Two types of deve-lopment are distinguished: the rapid « Revisionist » type, and the late « Soviet » type. After discussing some common features of sociology in the communist Europe and the main differences between the two types, the paper confronts them with the types of development in the rest of Europe. Building on this comparison, the paper discusses the roles diverse factors (pre-war traditions, professional job market, conservatism of the academia, and the political regimes) played in determining sociology's institutional progress after World War ii in Europe. It concludes by addressing the questions how did the Soviet-type regimes influence the development of sociology, and to which extent did the East-West divide really dominate the landscape of European sociology between 1945 and 1989.

The social sciences in France must deal with resistances to it notably from philosophers who pose as defenders of the prominent position of their discipline in the space of academic disciplines. Through its hierarchies, its values and especially its rhetorical and cognitive patterns, the school tends to provide agents with a conception of philosophy elaborated more than a century ago. Being the « highest discipline », located above the knowledge of other disciplines, philosophy pretnds to be a discourse on the ultimate principles.The case of Sartre is of a major interest insofar as it provides an illustration of the tensions between the legacy of the school and the quest for originality which may include, among other challenges, to exist, at least theoretically, on the ground of the social sciences. If Sartre's interest in these disciplines was very strong, we can understand some aspects of his work (others, the dialectic) as an effort to preserve the philosophical hierarchies.

As the importer of American empiricist and applied social sciences in France, Jean Stoetzel is perceived as an architect of the rupture with Durkheim's sociology after the Second World War, but he also remained faithful to spiritualistic and perso-nalistic influences. His career is distinguished by a tendency to reconcile preferences and positions which are usually mutually exclusive and his « intellectual ambivalence » helps to understand his position on the borders between the academic world and world of expertise. Impregnated with personalistic philosophy, these social sciences fit in with the intellectual movements of the 30's, beyond they partake of the technocratic and modernizing tendencies of the employers and of the high public service which rose up during the Occupation and after the second world-war and they meet their preoccupations and their demands.

Our study shows the specificity of the work of fabrication and sociological sanctification of « Weber » in France. Given the central place of « Weber » in the US-American sociology and the force of attraction of American sociology among French sociologists in the nineteen-sixties, the German author becomes sanctified. Though, the actual reason for achieving in very little time the status of the « sociologist par excellence » is rather due to the specific social, political and intellectual conditions in France at that time. The sanctification of « Weber » gets possible especially thanks to the dispositions and resources of its import agent Raymond Aron and particularly his alliance with Éric de Dampierre, the person in charge of the translation project of the work of the German author at the publishing house Plon. The article reveals first the process of selection and marking of « Weber » by Aron in the context of the institutionalization of French sociology around 1960. Starting from a count of the occurrence of references to « Weber » in the Revue Française de Sociologie and the Archives Européennes de Sociology in the nineteen-sixties, it discusses then the reasons of the fading of his recognition as a « antipositivist », « antimarxist » and « academic » symbol towards the end of the decade.

In our paper we are presenting our analysis of several documentary sources. Our paper has the institutional production of sociological knowledge about Latin America in the United States during the 1960's as subject. We are examining the relevance of Sociology within Latin American Studies. We are presenting a typology of the studied researches. We are examining the zones and countries of interest within the Sociology of Latin America for which we are also outlining the themes of research. In conclusion, we are presenting the state of research during the 1960's in the larger context of the Twentieth Century.

Around 1880, many studies in Aesthetics were published in France. They are now quite forgotten. Some of them were little different from the works of Winckelmann or Quatremère de Quincy, but the main reason of this increase is a deep modification in methods and principles wich sought to give Aesthtetics a true scientific approach. Jean-Marie Guyau, Gabriel Séailles, Eugène Véron and others are not an homogeneous group, but they all wrote a new Aesthetics, wich principles were the refusal of any metaphysical idea of Beauty and the willingness to make use of the discoveries in Physiology, Psychology and Anthropology. With this development and valorization of experimental sciences, Aesthteics took a positivist turn, in France as in Europe.Eugène Véron, historian, philosopher, journalist and director of art reviews, contributes to this epistemologic change of paradigm and wrote in 1878 an Esthétique that reveals most of its caracteristics : the experimental sciences as a foundation and an ideal, the valorization of an expressionistic art and a left leaning liberal theory of History.