Contenu du sommaire

The apologetic uses of the sociology of sociology The attempted sociological analysis of the history of the social sciences in France in the book Prophets and Patrons by T. Clark employs a sociology of innovation and a sociology of science, a comparative sociology of university systems, a sociology of knowledge, and a sociology of France. The analysis of theoretical assumptions and of explana tory models leads to an underscoring of the functions of reassurance and of auto-justification that they fulfill.

Social structures and structures of perception of the social world The evolutionist model that leads numerous American sociologists to see other societies as so many stages on the path toward the American society consists of projecting on the contemporary world the structure of that society : a structure that is, at the same time, synchronic -in which the hierarchy of ethnic groups maintains a complex relationship with the hierarchy of classes -and diachronic -in which immigrant groups arrived in a certain historical order. The social structure, having become a mental structure, tends to organize the perception of the social world. For Parsons or Iipset, Bellah or La Palombara, every American aspires toward the model of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) in the same way that allnations are in evolution toward American society, or, more exactly, toward the WASP conception of that society.

The social uses of the automobile : competition for space and accidents In order to make a sociological analysis of traffic accidents, one must renounce any pretensions to a psychoanalytical analysis of the "agression instinct" and take into account the property that the drivers owe to the position they occupy in the social structure. One can take for a hypothesis that the multiplication of automobiles, substituting the scarcity of driving space for the scarcity of motor vehicles, tends to engender a competition between drivers and between groups for the appropriation of that fraction of common space that constitutes road space. The lower the position occupied by the agent in the social hierarchy, the less well armed he is to engage in this competition.

Elghorba : the reproductive mechanism of emigration The conversation of a young and recent emigre traces the biographical itinerary that led him to emigrate and to discover a France that could only strip the enchantment from the image that he formerly had of it : an image elaborated and imposed by the entire group that continues to maintain it and which is not independent of the ancient roots and of the intensity of the migratory tradition, It allows us to uncover certain mechanisms that tend to perpetuate emigration and that cannot be reduced to economic necessity, which is an alibi both in the scholarly tradition of research on the causes of emigration as well as in the praxis of the subjects and in the justification that they give to others and to themselves for this praxis.

The invention of the life The relationships that effectively unite, in L'éducation sentimentale, Frédéric to all the other characters in the novel reproduce within the neutralized mode of an esthetic intention, the fundamental structure of Flaubert's relationship with the social universe. Working to invent a new manner of living : the bourgeois condition, which defines the modern artist and intellectual, while still sufficiently recognizing the axioms of the bourgeois style of life in order to make them manifest. Flaubert was led to feel strongly the question, today repressed, of the social determinants of the writer's career and of the position of the intellectual in the structure of the ruling class.

The title and the job : the relationship between the system of production and the system of reproduction. All the surveys of mobility, all the historical comparisons consider as out of the question what must be the central object of inquiry -that is, the permanence of the relationship between the words and the things, between the titles and the jobs, between the nominal and the real. What sense is there in considering as identical the primary school teacher of 1880 and the primary school teacher of 1930, or of 1974 ? Is the son of a primary school teacher really a "teacher's son" in the sense that he is himself a teacher ? Doesn't the nominal identity hide the real disparity ? The dialectic of title and job is a manifestation of the dialectic of de-classifying and re-classifying that is one aspect of the class struggle.