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The Sociologist and the Republic: Pierre Bourdieu and the Virtues of Social History
- History Workshop Journal
- Oxford University Press
- Issue 58, Autumn 2004
- pp. 128-148
- Article
- Additional Information
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History Workshop Journal 58 (2004) 128-148
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The Sociologist and the Republic:
Pierre Bourdieu and the Virtues of Social History
Julien Vincent
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Pierre Bourdieu. Photo: Bernard Lambert. By permission: Journal forum, Université de Montréal. Courtesy of Marie-Christine Rivière |
'One of my constant struggles, particularly through Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, has been to promote the development of a unified social science in which history would become a historical sociology of the past and sociology would become a social history of the present.'
'I am here to announce our support for all those who have struggled, for three weeks, against the destruction of a civilisation associated with the existence of the public service—that of the republican equality of rights, rights to education, to health, to culture, to research, to art and, above all, to work.'
The Peculiarities of French Social History
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that French historians discovered E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963) just as it was becoming a monument to a vanishing approach to social history in Britain. The fact that such an important book was only translated into French in 1988, twenty-five years after its first publication, will probably seem extraordinary to future historians, but it illustrates broader features of both French and British historiography. It certainly highlights the absence of a truly Franco-British or European republic of historical letters. It also, as I shall outline below, reflects the extent to which French historians, with a few exceptions, have refused to define themselves in reference to what became known in the 1980s as the 'linguistic turn'. Yet social history is not just a branch of knowledge, it is also a language available to various political ideologies, including Marxism, conservatism, Whig liberalism, and various species of republicanism. This is why, I shall argue, it may be more difficult than it seems to state what exactly is dead and what is alive in E. P. Thompson's idea of social history, and in his understanding of the way it relates to political thought and action. An examination of the figure [End Page 129] of Pierre Bourdieu, and of his (limited but significant) influence on French historians, may enable us to uncover some of the ways in which this historiographical divergence between the British and the French is related to larger philosophical and political questions rather than explicable by some hypothetical 'national character'.
In Britain, as in many other countries, there is now a general consensus that social history underwent a revolution during the 1980s and 1990s, one aspect of which was an increased attention to the role of language. French social historians, in contrast, have generally refused to admit the existence of any 'crisis', let alone a 'revolution in historical fashion'.3 This contrast between the British and the French is all the more striking since, although the French deny any historiographical 'revolution', they have been as obsessively self-questioning as the British about their own practice in the last two decades, and their perception of the difficulties of social history has largely echoed that of their British colleagues. There have nevertheless been some significant differences. In Britain debate has largely turned on the question of whether the 'linguistic turn' could adequately be described as a reaction against social history or as an improvement of its original research programme. In France, in contrast, attention has focused on the legacy of the Annales school. Perhaps the idea of a 'revolution in historical fashion' was particularly easy to accept in Britain during the Thatcher years for, as Gareth Stedman Jones notes, the unity of British social history, such as it was, had been 'in a broad ecumenical sense, political rather than methodological'. In France, if there was any such unity to social history it was achieved primarily at a methodological level through the Annales programme, whose...
