Contenu du sommaire : Les « années 68 » des sciences humaines et sociales

Among the innumerable effects of May 68 on French sociology, the rupture between Raymond Aron and Pierre Bourdieu which outcome was the split of the Centre de sociologie européenne (CSE) into two research centres, is one of the least known episodes. This article first addresses the nature of the relationship between both sociologists. The thesis is that Aron, who occupied a central and dominant position in French sociology from the early 1950s, defined a model of sociology excellence that he projected on Bourdieu. The problem, which lead to the split, was that the one “elected” did not accept to comply with the kind of charismatic transmission that the founder of the CSE wanted him to play. Thus, while staying faithful to the Aron model of French sociological excellence, Bourdieu reinvented its way of handling under the influence of the spirit of the “1968s”.

May 68 considerably modified the structure of sociology, institutionally as well as theoretically. Based on an empirical study on the Centre d'etudes sociologiques (CES), the first and only CNRS laboratory of sociology in this period, this study first presents the researchers' commitment during the events of May 68, the nature of the debates and the outcomes that occurred after one and a half month of strike. Then, we analyze the changes in the discipline after the events of May 68, in which the researchers of the CES were involved. The organization of research was reformed and the laboratory life changed, particularly because the researchers were given a share of its management. The development of sociology in French universities was built by reinforcing the link between teaching and research through the researchers' recruitment. At last, the analysis of the causes of the events of May 1968 was the opportunity for a new generation of sociologists to test theoretical models that were essential to French sociology until the 1990s.

We propose to study here the connections between science studies and the radical critique of science which emerges in different scientific communities from May 68. By tracing the evolution of these critical movements, the trajectories of certain actors and changes in the sociology of science in France, our aim is to identify areas of convergence and to understand the consequences of this convergence for the sociology of science.

This article, based upon discourse analysis, shows how May 68 translated in the field of science and technology studies. The study of journals dedicated to science/society relationship in the 1970s and in the early 1980s sheds light upon two discursive poles: the radical science movement and the emerging sociology of science. There is an institutional and individual continuum between these two poles. But the paper pays more attention to the discursive continuum between them. It analyzes the political issues raised by this continuum and the tensions it provoked. A special attention is given to the articulation between political radicalism during the 1968s and the epistemological radicalism promoted by the “new” sociology of science.

At the end of the fifties, Social Psychology of Group Dynamics was introduced in France, coming from the USA. It produced a significant disruption on the traditional pedagogic practices in the whole University, not only in the psychological studies.The author analyses the National Students Training Group, conduced in 1962 at the Royaumont Abbey for the UNEF Student Trade Union, as a forwarning moment of the Mai 68's events. After those, in the seventies, the psychosociological movement will split up into two trends : one, radical, settled at the University, and the second one, reformist, working in the industrial world to introduce minor changes in the management.

This article examines the way critics regarding psychiatry have evolved following the 68 social unrest. The objective is to appreciate how the psychiatric profession has incorporated this historical moment, so much embedded in our social representations, seen as the time of critical psychiatry but which political chronology differs from the other.This research is based on the work of two psychiatrists, the Italian Franco Basaglia and the French Henri Ey. Their ideas and trajectories diverge, but they both have addressed the issues of medical power, institutionalization and normalization of behaviors in psychiatry ; in other words, the issues that were discussed in the aftermath of the 1968 events.

The history of the journal Actes: Cahiers d'action juridique leads to reconsider how critical approaches of law were reshaped after May 68 events. The journal was initially founded by politically oriented lawyers, and was built upon the conciliation of critical legal theory and new forms of political lawyering typical of the period. Progressively, in relation with the diversification of its members, the journal developed an orientation toward social sciences and humanities, notably under the intellectual influence of Michel Foucault.

This contribution concerns the exploration of a case of disciplinary crossing often referred to May 68: the meeting between social sciences and architecture. This moment possesses a number of characteristics which allow to question the idea of “synchronous disciplinary changes”. From the analysis of landmarks (colloquiums, reviews, debates, “specific scenes”) and experiences of actors of this moment, it is a question of treating in a symmetric way changes arisen in the fields of the architecture and the sociology in the trail of their meeting after 1968.

In 1968, the West German Academic Geography was under pressure : a new generation of students and professors radically questioned the disciplinary identity and the unifying concept of Landschaft (region-landscape). This intellectual, political and social movement reveals professional and institutional tensions and a difficult change of paradigma which broke out during the controversial German Geographical Congress (Geographentag) of Kiel 1969. The various groups within the disciplin theatrically developped strategies and logics which have to be studied here. This “68/69 revolution”, whether significant for yesterday's and today's radical geographers or illusiory for more traditional specialists, was in any case a major step in the 20th century history of European geography.

This article summarizes what is actually well-known about the evolution of French geography during the 60's and the 70's and then focuses on political and epistemological changes that appeared immediately or following in wake of 1968's events. It first shows how the geographic community more or less maintained social and political consensus and homogeneity through its demographic expansion during post-war decades, which price was an epistemological conservatism and a static equilibrium between old constituents of the discipline. Then it depicts how Departments of Geography in universities were mobilized during the months of contestation (May-July 1968), mixing a global involvement within the national movement and a local reform of geographical communities and institutions, that shows a conformist view of what geography is, similar to common idiosyncratic self-representations mastered by geographic leaders. Lastly, it explores the political break-ups that immediately followed the 1968 crisis and the more delayed rise of a scientific criticism called “nouvelle géographie” and partly inspired by the English-American “new geography”, but specific in the way it mixes political and epistemological dimensions.

This article offers a panoramic view of works that wondered about the influence and the consequences the events of May 1968 had on knowledge, on its institutions and on people who work on it. It mainly analyses how such works are contributing to the history of human and social studies. It first shows the precocity of the reflections on that matter and lingers over the scheme of “68 thought” that the eponym book made popular. He underlines its approximations, especially regarding causal analysis. In a second part, it lingers over the importance of the date “68” in the historiography of human sciences in the 1980's-2000's and over the different kinds of avoidance this branch of science shows whenever it has to handle directly the mechanisms by which the anti-establishment mood was able to change research‘s schedules. It analyses at length the exception that a seminary of the “Institute of Present Time” created in 1988, even if the broadcast of its proceedings was extremely narrow. In the third part, it proposes a program frame to systematize the survey on the consequences of the “68 years” on the staff, institutions and contents of human and social studies.

This paper aims at examining the impact of war sciences on language sciences during the World War II. I will assume that the interaction between war sciences (engineering and sciences) and language sciences should be distinguished from the war effort undertook by linguists to teach foreign languages. Two cases will be analyzed. Roman Jakobson's distinctive features theory, associating acoustical physics and information theory to linguistics, led to a new phonology in continuity with phonetics. Machine translation, as a cold war technology conceived outside of linguistics, initiated the second mathematics turn of language, that is the mathematics and computer turn of language sciences. In both cases, one will examine which type of connection between war sciences and linguistics is concerned : transfer, convergence or integration.