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 aunched in 1975 with the blessing
and support of Fernand Braudel, the director of the Maison des sciences de l'homme where
it remained based for some twenty years, the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales (hereafter ARSS) has established itself as one of the world's premier social
science publications, yet one that remains highly singular for its format, tone, and
mission. It has fueled the development of a distinctive sociological perspective, inspired
by the scientific and civic vision of Pierre Bourdieu, that both extends and breaks with
the long lineage of the French school of sociology. It has fostered the
internationalization of social science in a Parisian milieu whose predilection for
intellectual autarky is beyond dispute. And it has sought to bring the most advanced
products of social research to impinge on collective consciousness and public discussion
in France and beyond.
 ARSS bears the
unmistakable mark of its founder and editor-in-chief, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose
indefatigable stewardship has propelled the journal across three decades and whose
prodigious scientific output has profoundly shaped its contents. But it is the result of
the joint activity of a wide network of scholars anchored by the Centre de sociologie
européenne of the Collège de France and its foreign associates and affiliates, as
testified by the diverse origins, styles, and theoretical inclinations of its
contributors.
Unlike Esprit
or Les Temps modernes, ARSS is a scientific rather than an intellectual
journal, so that methodological validity and empirical adequacy retain priority over
literary elegance and political rectitude. In contrast with L'homme or Annales : économies,
sociétés, civilisations, however, it is both doggedly transdisciplinary and attuned
to current sociopolitical issues : the mouthpiece of an activist science
of society whose audience is primarily but not exclusively composed of academics. Yet,
contrary to Le débat, its ambition is not to echo but to question intellectual
and political fashion, based on the notion that a self-critical social science can and
must function as an «public service» by relentlessly challenging accepted ideas and
established ways of thinking. Indeed, much as the Année sociologique served as
focal point of the scholarly exchanges and vehicle for the sublimated republicanism of the
Durkheimian school earlier in the century, ARSS was designed as springboard for a
transdisciplinary sociology marrying scientific rigor, methodological reflexivity, and
sociopolitical pertinence.
The longish and
rather awkward title says it : Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
aims at exposing both sociological objects and the «research acts» necessary to
bring them to light or, better, to construct them as such. For the implicit
epistemological charter of the journal (rooted in the philosophy of the concept of Gaston
Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem) stipulates that social facts are not given ready-made in
reality : they must conquered against ordinary perceptions and scholarly common
sense. Bucking the normalization of social science reporting, which tends to hide the
«dirty work» carried out in the sociological kitchen, ARSS «must not only demonstrate
but also display.» For the distinctive goal of this sociological laboratory-in-action is
precisely «to unmask the social forms and formalisms» in which reality cloaks itself
(untitled editorial introduction to the inaugural issue). Thus its infatuation with
«transversal» themes, cut out in counterintuitive ways that overturn accepted
conceptions and typically elevate «lowly» objects while lowering «lofty» ones (it is
not by happenstance that the very first article of the first issue dealt with «The
Scientific Method and the Social Hierarchy of Objects»).
To achieve rigor
and relevance without subservience to doctrinal precepts and to make sociology come alive
to its readers, ARSS has multiplied formal experimentations and stylistic innovations.
First it publishes not only standard scholarly articles but also shorter reviews,
polemical pieces, reading notes, telling documents, and closely edited, self-reflexive,
field or experiential accounts (see, e.g., Yvette Delsaut's «Notebooks for a
Socioanalysis» and Philippe Bourgois's «A Night in a Shooting Gallery,» in the February
1986 and September 1992 issues). Second, the archtypical Actes article weaves
text with photographs, fac-similes of exhibits, and excerpts of interviews or raw
observational data in boxes and sidebars running alongside the text. It also plays with
different fonts and types, and mixes direct and indirect styles, all in an effort to wed
analytical precision with experiential acuity.
The journal has
actively sought to denationalize social research by opening a wide window onto
foreign scholarship, connecting developments in gallic sociocultural inquiry to trends and
breakthroughs abroad and vice-versa. Next to Annales, it is the most
internationally-oriented social science periodical based in Paris. Indeed, the list of
non-French authors published in ARSS reads like a veritable «Who's Who» of world social
science : Michael Baxandal and Howard Becker, Michael Burawoy and Aaron
Cicourel, Nils Christie and Robert Darnton, Norbert Elias and Carlo Ginsburg, Johann
Goudsblom and Eric Hobsbawm, Jürgen Kocka and William Labov, Wolf Lepenies and Eleanor
Maccoby, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Gerschom Sholem, Joan Scott and Carl Schorske, Armatya
Sen and Theda Skocpol, Ivan Szelenyi and Jeno Szücs, Raymond Williams, Paul Willis, and
Viviana Zelizer. Many renowned French authors also saw print in the journal before they
had earned international acclaim, from Maurice Agulhon and Jacques Bouveresse to Robert
Linhart and Bruno Latour. Yet through the years ARSS has pursued a concerted policy of
scouting and broadcasting the work of younger scholars, in tandem with little-known texts
by classic authors (E.C. Hughes, Mauss, Goffman, Weber and Wittgenstein). Alongside with
foreigners and younger researchers, ARSS has also published more women than most if not
all social science journals of comparable stature and reach.
While ceding
nothing to political fads and newsy items, the journal strives to keep a pulse on society
and to contribute to ongoing sociopolitical debates from a rigorous scientific
standpoint. It thereby pursues the civic mission of social science : to strive
for autonomy, yet to reinject the knowledge made possible by such autonomy into the public
sphere (Bourdieu 1989). For example, in the fall of 1980, as Soviet tanks were rolling
towards Kaboul, ARSS featured an issue entitled: «And What About Afghanistan?» In 1988,
on the eve of the presidential face-off between Mitterrand and Chirac, a series of
articles by leading politologists, sociologists, and legal scholars took to «Rethinking
the political.» In the early nineties, new forms of social inequality and marginality
surged which eluded traditional instruments of collective voice. In response, ARSS
published a series of biographically-based studies depicting the social roots and
implications of such «social suffering» (these studies were later expanded into the
best-selling, thousand-page, socioanalysis of contemporary France entitled La misère
du monde, Bourdieu et al. 1993). Coming on the heels of the massive December 1995
street demonstrations against social insecurity, the November 1996 issue on «New Forms of
Domination at Work» featured an organizational analysis of overwork in the trucking
industry just when truck drivers were paralyzing the country with roadblocks. In 1997, as
the debate around «globalization» and its ills mounted, the journal gathered a set of
in-depth, international, inquiries into «Economists and the Economy.»
Under another
angle, ARSS may be characterized by its privileged objects and recurrent themes. Chief
among them is the economy of cultural goods. Literature and popular imagery,
painting and publishing, music and museums, fashion and taste, religion and schooling,
myth and science (as well as their intersection, scientific myths, beliefs, and
rites) : the production, circulation, and consumption of these goods obey
peculiar laws that are best uncovered via comparative and analogical analysis in a variety
of settings. A second favorite subject-matter is the logic of social classification
and the fabrication of social collectives. Studies in the making (or unmaking) of
class, gender, ethnicity, age, region, nation, and empire converge to show that alternate
principles of social vision and division constitute tools and stakes in the symbolic
struggles whereby social reality is at once endowed with facticity and revealed as a
brittle edifice. This concern for deconstructing ready-made social entities extends to
such familiar «containers» of social life as the family, the firm, the party, and the
state. The correlative concern to document the social necessity at work behind extreme
social realities encompasses such seemingly exotic institutions as folk singing, soccer,
concentration camps, and the ghetto.
A third thematic
node centers on social strategies of domination, distinction, and reproduction : among
them figure studies of households, schooling and consumption, work and labor, the bases
and effects of public policy, the intersection of economy and morality, and the role of
politics and the law. Last but not least, ARSS has continually scrutinized intellectual
practices, predicaments, and powers. Such thematic issues as «The Categories of
Professorial Understanding,» «Science and Current Affairs,» «Research on Research,»
«The Social History of the Social Sciences,» and «The Cunning of Imperialist Reason»
(September 1975, February 1986, September 1988, June and September 1995, and February
1998) attest to the need to put scholars under their own microscope in order to
uncover —and hopefully better control— the social determinants of
social thought. Among classic articles on the sociology of intellectuals, one may single
out Pierre Bourdieu's «Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger,» Michael Pollak's «Paul
Lazarsfeld, Founder of a Scientific Multinatinal,» Roland Lardinois's «Louis Dumont and
Native Science,» Gisèle Sapiro dissection of François Mauriac's literary trajectory,
and Louis Pinto's incisive pieces on the «parodic intellectuals» of Tel Quel and related
Parisian coteries (November 1975, February 1979, June 1995, February 1996).
All told, the
driving impulse behind the varied investigations published in ARSS is to denaturalize
social categories, facts, and institutions, while providing the means to recapitulate and
assess the different steps of the demonstration at hand. This formula has proven
appealing : with a regular readership approaching ten thousands, ARSS enjoys a
broad public extending well beyond academia (there are only about a thousand sociologists
in France). The latter includes not only researchers but schoolteachers and university
students, social workers and activists, cultural intermediaries as well as other educated
strata interested in social inquiry and questions (several issues have sold upwards of
20,000 copies). With «sister journals» in Sweden, Japan, and Brazil that reprint key
articles in translation, its international audience reaches far outside of the
French-speaking ambit. Since 1989, ARSS has been flanked by a supplement, Liber : revue
internationale des livres, published simultaneously in nine European countries and
languages, whose aim is to further circumvent national strictures and accelerate the
continental circulation of innovative and engaged works in the arts, humanities, and
social sciences.
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales remains a largely artisanal operation,
with a small staff and limited institutional support, quite disproportionate with its
national impact and international following. Success inevitably tends to dilute the
original formula that yielded it; as the pool of both authors and readers expands,
the distinctive scientific and civic spirit of the journal becomes harder to sustain. ARSS
can be expected to evolve in response to shifting intellectual currents and constraints
while remaining true to its initial vocation : to promote rigorous,
transdisciplinary, social science from around the globe that fuses research and theory
while remaining alert to the political and ethical implications of social inquiry. In so
doing, it renews the scientific militancy and internationalism of the French school of
sociology. And, as with Durkheim and the Année sociologique, its biggest
challenge will be to survive the eventual passing of the scholarly generation that created
and nurtured it. Reading Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in years to
come thus promises to offer an intriguing experiment in the routinization of intellectual
charisma.
Further readings :
- Actes de la recherche
en sciences sociales. Special anniversary issue, n°100, December 1990.
- Bourdieu,
Pierre : «The Corporatism of the Universal : The Role of
Intellectuals in the Modern World.» Telos 81 (Fall 1989) : 99-110.
- Bourdieu, Pierre et
al. : La misère du monde. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1993 (trans. The
Poverty of Society : A Study in Social Suffering.
Cambridge : Polity Press, 1998).
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