Concepts and the Social Order: Robert K. Merton and the Future of Sociology

3. R. K. Merton in France: Foucault, Bourdieu, Latour and the Invention of Mainstream Sociology in Paris

R. K. Merton in France: Foucault, Bourdieu, Latour and the Invention of Mainstream Sociology in Paris1 Jean-Louis Fabiani Why do French sociologists seldom quote Robert K. Merton? This paper is an attempt to analyze a recurrent paradox. Although Merton’s operative concepts are known and used, his achievements are not really acknowledged in France. To explain this, one has to start with the rejection of Durkheimism that was especially strong in France in the post-WW II context. But one also has to take into account the strength of a philosophical lineage that shaped the whole intellectual field, the “French history of science,” as described by Michel Foucault. No real space was allowed to the sociology of science developed by Merton. Last, the sociological mood of the 70s in France was mainly critical and created a kind of scapegoat, the ‘American mainstream sociology .’ Thus this paper is a tribute to Merton’s fruitful notion of obliteration by incorporation, but also a contribution to the importance of creative misunderstanding in the international circulation of ideas. 1 Olivier Martin, a French sociologist who stands among the best in the young generation, noticed a few years ago (Martin 2004) that there was a paradox about Robert King Merton in France: although French sociology is significantly present in his works (particularly Durkheim’s concepts), he was never recognized as a major sociologist in the country of the author of the Rules of Sociological Method. In another paper, published the same year in the Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, Jean-Christophe Marcel raised a question, after a long research on post-war French sociology: “Why do Stœtzel, Gurvitch, Davy, but 1 I am indebted to Craig Calhoun, Randall Collins and Laurent Jeanpierre for earlier discussions. I would like to thank István Adorján for his insightful suggestion. particularly Friedmann, ignore Merton? In all my readings, I did not find any substantive comment of his work” (Marcel 2004). In this paper, I will try to show that the paradox is only apparent. Merton was read, partly in translation, but he was neither really used nor commented . His work was implicitly included in a very nebulous vision of “American sociology“ that stressed the applied and ideological dimension of the social sciences. For the less ignorant, Merton occupied a kind of obscure position, intermediate between Parsons’ grand theory and Lazarsfeld’s applied research. The French sociologists who had had the opportunity to meet him in the USA—particularly his translator Henri Mendras or even Raymond Boudon, close to Lazarsfeld and extremely knowledgeable about American sociology, made very scarce comments. Drawing on my own works on French intellectual history (Fabiani 1988, Fabiani 2010), but also on a study of critical literature about Merton I wrote for this workshop, and on the renewed interest of young French sociologists toward the historical development of their own discipline and the international circulation of ideas (Laurent Jeanpierre , Jean-Christophe Marcel, Olivier Martin, Romain Pudal, and Patricia Vannier among others), I shall try to understand Merton’s presence/absence in France. Before I read Yehuda Elkana’s proposal, I imagined that it was a situation that was specific to my country: now I know that it is not, and I’ll try to go beyond the case study to offer a reflection on the invention and uses of the notion of “mainstream sociology .” Educated as a philosopher (political philosophy and philosophy of science), I had been attracted to Pierre Bourdieu’s after dinner seminar at the École normale supérieure, a very uncommon practice at the time among young “normaliens”. Bourdieu had just come back from one year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was still considered by the Althusserian “establishment” at the École normale as a smart but marginal intellectual. During the first weeks, I heard many notions, completely new for me, that were constantly used by Bourdieu and his garde rapprochée, tough men with leather jackets, with the exception of the “artist” Luc Boltanski, a fragile, daydreaming and rather shy woman full of respect for the young master. Sérendipité, prophétie autoréalisatrice, or more often prédiction créatrice, conséquences inattendues de l’action, l’effet Mathieu. Sometimes Bourdieu would make some ironical remarks 30 Concepts and the Social Order about the shortcomings of the théorie à moyenne portée (middle range theory), but I could not catch the...