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Structure and ‘Details’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
‘Concerning all these observations, it may now be concluded that, although on the one hand the two concepts of the individual and of society are very distinct for the purpose of analysis, and although in practice these concepts correspond to clearly opposite trends, it is, however, impossible to move from one to the other to account for psychological or social reality, or to conceive ideal aims which correspond to these two things.’
‘Every theory founded on this reduction of one of these two principles to the other, of society to the individual, or the individual to society, is one-sided; and all tenets of this kind are in one sense a veritable mythology.’
Marcel Bernés (1901)
If we overlook a perceptible dating of the words employed and the style of argumentation, French sociological writings published in the socially and intellectually unsettled climate of the early twentieth century acquire an astonishingly up-to-the-minute appeal at the very end of the twentieth century. It must be said that, on the one hand, the successes of socio-biology, then the cognitive sciences, and, on the other, the spectacular vogue of the extreme relativism accompanying the revival of a perennially nebulous humanism, lead us today to a picture of prevailing theoretical antagonisms which irresistibly conjures up the debates for which, in 1901, the Revue Philosophique provided a forum: when the very Durkehimian Celestin Bougie put ‘biological sociology in the dock’ and Gabriel Tarde was challenged by his ‘hot-headed friend’, Alfred Espinas, the first proposing sociology as a continuation of psychology and the second wanting to place it at the end of a spectrum of natural sciences.
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References
Notes
1. Marcel Bernès (1901). Individu et société, Revue Philosophique, 52, 478-500; 495.
2. Célestin Bougle (1901). Le procès de la sociologie biologique, Revue Philosophique, 52, 121-146; Alfred Espinas. Être ou ne pas être, ou le postulat de la sociologie, Revue Philosophique, 51, 449-480; Gabriel Tarde. Réponse à M. Espinas, Revue Philosophique, 51, 661-664.
3. André Lalande (ed.) (1902-23). Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie. 1st edn in fascicules; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
4. Bernès op. cit. (1901), 499.
5. Roger Salengro, a Popular Front minister, committed suicide in 1936 after repeated defamations in the ex treme right-wing weekly, Gringoire. The intellectual socialist Léon Blum was at the head of this government.
6. The term ‘Holocaust', currently used in relation to the Nazi extermination camps will be retained here to facilitate reading of the text, in the absence of an expression as comprehensible or less ambiguous. It must in fact be indicated that, according to a recent work, the word is historically imbued with considerable connections to Christian anti-Judaism. See Giorgio Agamben (1999). Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz. L'archive et le témoin. Paris: Payot and Rivages, 34 ff.
7. Jean-Paul Sartre (1954). Réflexions sur la question juive. Paris: Gallimard, 86. The original edition dates from 1946, but a note indicates that this passage was written in October 1944.
8. Stéphane Courtois, Nicols Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczcowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean-Louis Margolin (1997). Le livre noir du communisme. Crimes, terreur, répression. Paris: R. Laffont.
9. The Vendée witnessed a counter-Revolutionary revolt in favour of the French Crown in 1793-6.
10. Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘Cambodge: au pays du crime déconcertant', in S. Courtois et al., op. cit. (1997), 643.
11. This could be observed at the time of the discussions which accompanied the publication of the Livre noir du communisme.
12. A medical term indicating dissociation/schizophrenia, is intentionally used here, a term to which Claude Lévi-Strauss resorted in different circumstances, as opposed to ‘disharmony' (disharmonie), a vaguer expression, which itself signifies a chronic characteristic of the sociological disciplines.
13. Paul Feyerabend (1979). Contre la méthode. Paris: Le Seuil. The original English edition appeared in 1975.
14. For the abrupt nature of this retreat, see François Dosse (1992). Histoire du structuralisme, vol. 2. Paris: La Découverte.
15. It is worth recalling that Claude Lévi-Strauss always kept his work apart from the upheavals of a broadly ‘structuralist' sphere of influence for which he did not feel himself in the least responsible. The reader should bear in mind that the criticisms addressed here to a structuralist ideology transforming formulas into slogans (following the example of the existentialist fashion which had preceded it) should not be confused with the criticism of a theory in its applied field.
16. Reprinted in Jean Pouillon (1993). Le cru et le su. Paris: Le Seuil.
17. Ibid., 90.
18. Marshall Sahlins (1985). Islands of History. London and New York: University of Chicago Press, 144; trans lated into French in 1989 as Des îles dans l'histoire. Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, 149.
19. Ibid., xiv; (1989), 14.
20. On this point, the strategy and reflexes of the French extreme right cannot be distinguished at all from equivalent cases which current events present us with from time to time. The reader will understand that my insistence on the French case is justified solely by its singular importance in the field of sociological theory: it is the non-existence of an effective or pertinent intellectual response which is interesting here, given the confrontation between a banal political force and an intellectual achievement which is considered original in the whole of the western world.
21. Jean-Paul Sartre (1985). Critique de la raison dialetique, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 408 (first published in 1960).
22. There have been some exceptions. Françoise Héritier, lead figure of structuralism ‘qualified' in anthropo logy, has also gone on the attack concerning pregnancies resulting from rape in Yugoslavia - confirmation that the evil with which this article is concerned does not stem from any one theoretical school, properly speaking. It is a fog of the period covering the social sciences as a whole.
23. François Furet (1995). Le passé d'une illusion. Essai sur une idée communiste au XXe siècle. Paris: R. Laffont. François Furet, a former militant communist who became very hostile to his old ideas, was a specialist historian in the France Revolution and an eminent reference on the problems critiqued here. The Black Book of Communism was dedicated to him a short time after his death.
24. In this respect, medieval historians can be differentiated symptomatically from their colleagues in con temporary history: archaeological discoveries make the subjects who lived in the Middle Ages appear an enigma inextricably intertwined with the structure - a necessary object of research if one is not to be confined within the analysis of the event. One question stands out as a result: that of the theoretical and methodological consistency of the New History across broad historical periods.
25. Jean Jaurès (1972). Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, 6 vols. Paris: Éditions Sociales (first published in 1904). Jean Jaurès was an emblematic figure of French socialism. Together with Emile Zola he was one of the great intellectuals who defended Dreyfus and he was assassinated in 1914 because he had tried to organise a working-class battle against the imminent war.
26. Jean Jaurès (1994). De la réalité du monde sensible. Paris: Éditions Alcuin (first published in 1891), 74. We should note that the theological dimension of the text has attracted the attention of commentators strangely moved by extremely obscure intentions.