The Global Sociology Blog

Daniel Little has an interesting post in which he argues for the persistence of significant differences between American and French sociology despite pretty strong interconnections and influences. In the 21st century, differences in ways of approaching social phenomena:

UnderstandingSociety: French sociology as a distinctive tradition via kwout

As usual, I would nitpick on some of points of this typology and note a few omissions, but ok. I think part of the story that needs to be mentioned is that there really was no place for sociology in the post-WWII era in France because intellectual life was so overshadowed by powerful individual figures, starting with Sartre, then Lévi-Strauss and Foucault or even Raymond Aron. It’s only once people like Bourdieu were able to open the structuralist and post-structuralist field to find a place for sociology that things really changed.

At the same time, the interactions with American sociology were always present:

UnderstandingSociety: French sociology as a distinctive tradition via kwout

[Yikes... the spelling of names... it hurts] One should add the fact that symbolic interactionism has long been popular in French sociology (with Bourdieu getting Goffman translated and published in the collection he edited). But I would still agree that French sociology is different than American sociology, partly because France is more sociology-friendly and less individualist a country.

And since Little does mention French sociology’s massive studies (such as Lapeyronnie’s Ghetto Urbain or Béaud et al.’s La France Invisible, in the tradition of La Misère du Monde, all of which clock at about 600 pages of text… who would publish something like that in the US?), I think these do indeed represent the best of a French approach to sociology that seamlessly blends grand social theory, macro and micro investigations without exercising symbolic violence over the subjects of the investigation while at the same time deploying the strength of sociology’s tools.

Ultimately, I think part of the differences between national traditions have to do with culture in general (individualism versus more socially-oriented), the institutional organization of the academic world and research (there is no American equivalent to the French CNRS), the greater respect in France for intellectualism and theories as well as public intellectuals (for better and for worse). In addition, French students tend to be better prepared to think sociologically and when they finally reach college, early specialization creates a more coherent and richer curriculum rather than the cafeteria-type curriculum that defines the freshmen / sophomore years in the US.

From my perspective, French, and indeed European sociology "feels" (I know I should find a better word than that) more intense than American sociology. When I look at the sociological work that is groundbreaking in the way that Max Weber’s Economy and Society was, I think of Manuel Castells’s Information Age trilogy or Boltansky’s New Spirit of Capitalism, or the entire body of work by Ulrich Beck or Zygmunt Bauman. I don’t think there is an American equivalent to these massive and encompassing studies that aim to define their epoch, except, maybe, Immanuel Wallerstein (but then, he’s inspired by Braudel).