Contenu du sommaire : Penser par Écoles

This article explores the types of labelling used during the establishment of geography in the university system, at the turn of the 20th century, by placing these labelling processes in a social field that goes beyond the intellectual field usually given priority by historiographical research. Looking closely at the discursive situations in which a “school of geography” was defined, it analyses two successive sequences. The first one, which is internal to the educational sphere and supported by an international scene, is characterised by the promotion of a university teaching group and is accompanied by the disqualification of rival programmes. The second, made up of labellings endogenous and exogenous to geography, is structured by the internal rivalries affecting an amorphous grouping of emerging “social sciences”; then the word “school” finds itself in competition with other terms (“method” and especially “discipline”) which turn out to be more effective when categorising groups of scholars.

This article analyses the history of the formation of two opposite hypnotic schools in the cities of Paris and Nancy. In the capital, at La Salpêtrière's hospital, Charcot appeared as a very powerful physician and as a master followed by many disciples. In Nancy, near Germany and eastern frontiers at that time, his rival Bernheim highlighted a very influential and popular doctrine and practice of suggestion, but he was not entirely supported by his colleagues, members of the so called École de Nancy. How did the actors labellize themselves (or were labellized) as members of two schools in professional reviews and newspapers? With what emotions did they stage their controversies? What sociologies did they mobilize to understand their school formations? How did the Parisians and the Nanceans ally with other international scientific communities? Some of these questions could be, perhaps, transposed to other school formations.

Comte founded his “positivist school” against “theological” or “ metaphysical” schools in philosophy and “retrograde”, “revolutionary” or “stationary” schools in politics. Education was a major issue. His disciples broke up into different currents. Some, following Émile Littré and the journal La Philosophie positive (1867-1883), adopted positive philosophy, while refusing some tenets of political and religious positivism. The so-called complete positivists, under the leadership of Pierre Laffitte, found an outlet in La Revue occidentale (1878-1914). Controversies and schisms arose. A new association, and yet another journal, Revue positiviste internationale (1906-1940) were established. In this complex history the dissidents defended a corrected doctrine, whereas the orthodox followers were divided between the development of a school as education or a school as church, and the political choices varied as well. Positivism as a school of thought, which is associated with a multiplicity of networks, is a protean and enduring label.

This article aims at explaining the way economists identified as industrial economists tried to build an intellectual collective in order to impose their own definition of industrial organization in the field of economics. The paper deals with the history of this group, which as also been called “French industrial organization school”, from its frist years (at the middle of the 70') until the beginning of the 90'. At this time, this group appeared as unable to reproduce and imposing its own jurisdiction of industrial organization. This work aims at describing social mechanisms which produced this impossible reproduction, exploring the way French economists tried to build a community but also the way social positions of its actors in the field of economics have been a drag for its success and expansion.

To the embarrassing question of knowing what a school is in sociology, this article tries to provide a reasoned answer. The examination of the occurrences of the term in general sociological histories written by French sociologists shows that the school is first of all a category of historiography whose meaning is imprecise since it applies as well to a current of thought as a group. Since some of these groups have been identified as schools by the scientific community, they have been studied as socio-historical objects. But we cannot give a typical ideal definition, because they are all different. All that remains is to admit that the term school functions as a label that allows a group to have its conception of sociology recognized and to exist in the scientific space. On the contrary, it is because the school is a label which, with regard to this hegemonic school that was the Durkheimian school, cannot be in France only deprecative, that no group of French sociologists, since 1945, did not claim this name.

This article investigates Walther Heissig's National Socialist commitment and academic beginnings between 1933 and 1945. It aims to place the early developments of Mongol studies in Germany in their political and ideological context. These studies pursued the goal of extending the German influence in Asia and of increasing the available knowledge about a people who was still scarcely known. Heissig's first studies, which were published before and after his departure to Manchukuo (1941) display a progressive transition from geopolitics and ethnology towards a less ideologized philological research. Heissig's first texts came close to applied research for the sake of war propaganda. At the same time, his fieldwork allowed him to confront his theories to empiric realities and to enlarge the scope of his investigations. This article raises therefore the question of the personal and thematic continuities in German oriental studies between the late 1930s and the postwar period.