The sociologist and the republic: Pierre bourdieu and the virtues of social history

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 128-148

  Vincent, Julien ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547441380     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/58.1.128     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. Pierre Bourdieu with Lutz Raphael, 'Sur les rapports entre l'histoire et la sociologie en France et en Allemagne', Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 106-7, 1995, p. 111.
2. Speech at the Gare de Lyon, Paris, December 1995. Reproduced in Pierre Bourdieu, Contre feux, Paris, 1998, p. 30.
3. Daniel Roche, 'Les historiens aujourd'hui. Remarques pour un débat', Vingtième siècle, Revue d'histoire 12:6, octobre-décembre 1986, pp. 3-20;
4. 'Histoire et sciences sociales. Un tournant critique?', Annales ESC 43:2, mars-avril 1988, pp. 291-3;
5. 'Histoire et sciences sociales: tentons l'expérience', Annales ESC 44:6, novembre-décembre 1989, pp. 1, 317-23;
6. Gérard Noiriel, Sur la 'crise' de l'histoire, Paris, 1996;
7. Christophe Charle, 'Contemporary French Social History: Crisis or Hidden Renewal?', Journal of Social History 37:1, fall 2003, pp. 50-61.
8. By contrast see José Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870-1914, London, 1994, p. 1.
9. Gareth Stedman Jones, 'Review of The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950', in Economic History Review, New Series 44:4, November 1991, p. 730.
10. Gareth Stedman Jones, 'The New Social History in France', in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002.
11. This view is further developed in Gareth Stedman Jones, 'The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s', History Workshop Journal 42, autumn 1996, pp. 19-35.
12. Historians like Denis Crouzet, Robert Descimon, François Furet, Jacques Guilhaumou and Pierre Rosanvallon, all in different styles, stand as exceptions.
13. Hudson Meadwell, 'Post-Marxism, No Friend of Civil Society', in Civil Society, Theory, History, Comparison, ed. John A. Hall, Cambridge, 1995.
14. John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Political Tradition, Princeton, 1975;
15. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 1: The Renaissance, Cambridge, 1978
16. and Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge, 1998.
17. See David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, 'Social History and its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language', Social History 17:2, May 1992, pp. 165-88;
18. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, 'The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language - a reply', Social History 18:1, January 1993, pp. 1-16.
19. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, transl. Lydia J. Cochrane, Durham NC, 1991.
20. Philippe Besnard, 'L'impérialisme sociologique face à l'histoire', Historiens et Sociologues aujourd'hui, Paris, 1986, pp. 27-35;
21. Christophe Charle, 'L'historien entre science et politique', in Paris fin de siècle, Paris, 1998;
22. Olivier Dumoulin, 'Comment on inventa les positivistes', in L'histoire entre épistémologie et demande sociale, ed. Alain Boureau, François Dosse, Olivier Dumoulin, Robert Franck, Jacques Lévy, Jean-Clément Martin, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Jacques Rancière, Créteil, 1994;
23. Madeleine Rebérioux, 'Le débat de 1903: historiens et sociologues', in Au berceau des 'Annales', ed. Charles-Olivier Carbonell and Georges Livet, Toulouse, 1983;
24. Antoine Prost, 'Seignobos revisité', Vingtième siècle. Revue d'histoire 43:3, juillet-septembre 1994, pp. 100-17.
25. Charles Seignobos, Le Régime féodal en Bourgogne jusqu'en 1360, étude sur la société et les institutions d'une province française au moyen âge, Paris, 1882.
26. Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siècle. Culture et politique, Paris, 1998, pp. 134-5.
27. M. M. Postan, 'Marc Bloch: an Obituary Note', Economic History Review 14:2, 1944, p. 161.
28. For a discussion, see Olivier Dumoulin, Marc Bloch, Paris, 2000, pp. 172-81.
29. Christophe Charle, La République des universitaires 1870-1940, Paris, 1994.
30. Gérard Noiriel, in 'Le "passé/present": une approche différente de l'histoire du temps présent', in Etat, nation et immigration. Vers une histoire du pouvoir, Paris, 2001, pp. 45-66, offers an interpretation of Bloch which emphasizes his attempt to link historical research to contemporary republican issues. This interesting interpretation, which would deserve a detailed discussion, must be put in the context of French debates about Bloch's republicanism in the 1990s.
31. On this subject see also Noiriel's Les origines républicaines de Vichy, Paris, 1999.
32. See Olivier Dumoulin's discussion in his Marc Bloch, pp. 162-72
33. and Susan W. Friedman, Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography. Encountering Changing Disciplines, Cambridge, 1996.
34. Maurice Agulhon, La République au village. Les populations du Var de la Révolution à la IIe République, Paris, 1970.
35. Pierre Vilar, Une Histoire en construction: approche marxiste et problématiques conjoncturelles, Paris, 1982, p. 9.
36. Emile Durkheim, 'La sociologie en France au XIXe siècle', Revue bleue, 4th Series, 12:20, 1900, p. 609.
37. See Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, London, 1975.
38. Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim. His Life and Work: a Historical and Critical Study, London, 1973.
39. Jean-Claude Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique. L'espace non-poppérien du raisonnement naturel, Paris, 1991, new edn 2001.
40. See, however, Pierre Bourdieu, 'La vertu civile', Le Monde, 16 Sept. 1988, written in defence of the mendésiste Prime Minister Michel Rocard.
41. Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet, and other stories, Harmondsworth, 1986, chap. 4
42. quoted in Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres, Paris, 1999, p. 11 (translation forthcoming from Harvard University Press).
43. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, transl. Mary Gregor, Cambridge, 1998, p. 47.
44. This account may sound as if autonomy were simply another word for 'structure', and as if the rules of the game in an autonomous field, by limiting available options, were just another form of domination of the individual agent who participates in a non-dominated field. This would be the case for a writer dissuaded from writing innovative new novels because they are incompatible with accepted views on the art of writing novels. Bourdieu, however, suggests that the participants in a field may endeavour to change the very rules of the field, and therefore the range of available options, but that in order to do so they must have been able to accumulate enough specific capital in the first place - literary capital if in the literary field, or juridical if in the juridical field. In other words, in order to change accepted views on the art of writing novels, a writer must have mastered the art of writing conventional novels in the first place. Rather than a disguised form of domination, autonomy is therefore a key concept in Bourdieu's treatment of the structure/agency debate in sociology. On this subject compare Philip Pettit, 'Agency-Freedom and Option-Freedom', Journal of Theoretical Politics 15:4, 2003, pp. 387-403.
45. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism;
46. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford, 1997.
47. On this theme see John Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge, 1985.
48. See for instance Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume 2: Renaissance Virtues, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 164-5.
49. The list of works commenting on or illustrating Bourdieu's influence on historians is huge. See the contributions to Le Bulletin de la Société d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 3:4, 1999
50. dedicated to 'Les historiens et la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu', supplement to Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 46, 1999;
51. Roger Chartier, 'Pierre Bourdieu e a história', Topoi 4, Rio de Janeiro, 2002, pp. 139-57;
52. Travailler avec Bourdieu, ed. Pierre Encrevé and Rose-Marie Lagrave, Paris, 2003;
53. Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu. Dettes et critiques, ed. Bernard Lahire, Paris, 1999, new edn 2001;
54. Gérard Noiriel, 'Comprendre l'incompréhension. Hommage à Pierre Bourdieu', in Penser avec, penser contre, Paris, 2003.
55. This is particularly clear in Noiriel, Sur la 'crise', an analysis of historical practice in the 1990s which is largely based on Bourdieu's concept of field.
56. Bourdieu's concept of 'social space' is based on his interpretation of correspondence analysis, a method of correlation analysis aimed at revealing the structure of a complex data matrix. See Philippe Cibois, L'analyse factorielle, Paris, 1983
57. and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, transl. Richard Nice, Cambridge MA, 1984.
58. The role of Bourdieu as an alternative source of inspiration after the decline of Marxism is expressed in explicit terms by Noiriel in Penser avec, p. 156.
59. On Bourdieu in the context of post-1958 France see Jeremy F. Lane, Pierre Bourdieu: a Critical Introduction, London, 2000.
60. Pierre Rosanvallon, 'Rationalisme politique et démocratie en France (XVIIIe - XIXe siècles) ', Zinbun, Annals of the Institute of Research in Humanities 29, Kyoto, 1994, pp. 17-32.
61. Roger Chartier, 'Le monde comme représentation', Annales ESC 44:6, 1989, pp. 1, 505-20.
62. Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: a History of Statistical Reasoning, transl. Camille Naish, Cambridge MA, 1998;
63. Christophe Charle, Naissance des 'intellectuels', Paris, 1990 (translation forthcoming from Verso);
64. Christian Topalov, Naissance du chômeur 1880-1910, Paris, 1994;
65. Laboratoires du nouveau siècle. La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880-1914, ed. Christian Topalov Paris, 1999.
66. See Lane, Pierre Bourdieu, pp. 9-33.
67. Bourdieu was one of the first to introduce E. P. Thompson in France. See E. P. Thompson, 'Modes de domination et révolutions en Angleterre', Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 8-9, 1976, pp. 133-51
68. (translated by Christophe Charle). The difference between habitus and mentalité, and the links between habitus and Thompson's views on historical change is very clear in Pierre Bourdieu, 'Le mort saisit le vif. Les relations entre l'histoire réifiée et l'histoire incorporée', Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 32-33, 1980, pp. 3-14.
69. There were a number of isolated attempts to apply some of Thompson's ideas in France, including Michelle Perrot, Les Ouvriers en grève, Paris, 1974.
70. On this see Jacques Revel, 'Microanalyse et construction du social', in Jeux d'échelles, Paris, 1996.
71. Gérard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries, transl. Helen McPhail, Oxford, 1990.
72. Interestingly Noiriel's work on immigrant workers was not mentioned in the first edition of Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory: see Steven Englund, 'The Ghost of Nation Past', The Journal of Social History 64:2, June 1992, pp. 299-320, particularly n. 4 and n. 43.
73. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society, London, 1977;
74. Bourdieu, Distinction.
75. Christophe Charle, Les élites de la République 1880-1900, Paris, 1987
76. A Social History of France in the Nineteenth-Century, transl. Miriam Kochan, Oxford, 1994
77. and 'Légitimités en péril. Eléments pour une histoire comparée des élites et de l'Etat en France et en Europe occidentale (XIXe-XXe siècles) ', Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 116-117, 1997, pp. 39-52.
78. On this question see Christophe Charle, La crise des socié tés impériales. Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne 1900-1940, Paris, Seuil, 2001.
79. Marc Bloch, 'Réponse d'un historien', Les Cahiers politiques, underground journal of the Comité général d'études de la Résistance, 1943
80. republished as 'Pourquoi je suis républicain', in Marc Bloch, L'Etrange défaite, Paris, 1990, p. 220.
81. Gisèle Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953, Paris, 1999.
82. Liber, a European review of books, was published in nine European languages and countries from 1989 to 1999: see Loïc Wacquant, 'The Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu', International Sociology 17:4, December 2002, pp. 549-56.
83. Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Force of Representation: Notes on the Idea of Region', in Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 220-8.
84. Christophe Charle, 'Région et conscience régionale en France. Questions à propos d'un colloque', Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35, 1980, pp. 37-43;
85. Roger Chartier, 'Les deux France. Histoire d'une géographie', Cahiers d'histoire 4, 1978, pp. 393-415;
86. and 'Science sociale et découpage régional. Notes sur deux débats 1820-1920', Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35, 1980, pp. 27-36.
87. Marc Bloch, 'Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes', Revue de synthèse historique 46, 1928, pp. 15-50.
88. Michel Espagne, 'Sur les limites du comparatisme en histoire culturelle', Genèses 17, 1994, pp. 112-21.
89. Pierre Carles's documentaries on Pierre Bourdieu and/or on French television include Pas vu, pas pris, 1998;
90. La sociologie est un sport de combat, 2001;
91. and Enfin pris!, 2002.