Guest Editor’s Introduction: French Sociology, French Sociologies

Abstract

From Montesquieu to Piketty, French intellectuals have been a major source of inspiration for American academics. This is particularly true of sociology and social theory, where scholars such as Durkheim, Bourdieu or Latour have had a decisive influence on past and present research (Ollion and Abbott 2016). Yet, partly because of the language barrier, French sociology somewhat takes time to travel to the other side of the Atlantic. But it is not just a matter of translation or, for what it's worth, French people's terrific English accent (and vice versa). As Etienne Ollion and Andrew Abbott underlined, lack of familiarity with each other's field, diverging scientific norms of research and writing style, as well as differences in trending methods and topics can also explain difficulties to incorporate French sociology into its US counterpart (2016, pp. 345-348). In order to answer this time lag, The American Sociologist has decided to publish a special issue about the present situation and future prospects of sociology in France and French-speaking countries/territories. 1 We are very pleased to present to the American readership twelve papers shedding light on French sociology or, as I should rather say, French sociologies. While the papers that we were able to gather are rich and varied, they can roughly be grouped in threeoverlappingcategories. I will begin by giving a brief outline of the papers, before mentioning some future research avenues and current controversies surrounding French sociology's scientific authority. The first category, that comprises seven papers, deals with particular subfields or research questions: sociology of deviance and criminology (Mucchielli 2017), sociology of international relations (Meszaros 2017), sociology of aging (Burnay et al. 2017),

The research on modernity in Latin America: Lineages and dilemmas

“…1. Genealogical reconstructions of fields or disciplines concerning the national level have been regularly published: see, for instance the volume edited by Patel (2011) for lineages in Indian sociology, the issue organized by Larregue (2017) for sociological lineages in French sociology, and Brandão (2005) for a genealogy of political thought in Brazil. The present contribution focuses not on a single country but on a region, Latin America, although Brazil due to my previous investigations is especially considered.…”

Explanations and excuses in French sociology

“…How does an academic discipline protect its status and privileges from this type of political attacks? What does this controversy tell us about French sociology, a distinctive and highly influential tradition that has received much attention from historians and theorists in recent years (Heilbron, 2015; Larregue, 2017; Ollion & Abbott, 2016)?…”