Comparer en France. Petit essai d'autobiographie disciplinaire

Abstract

Comparative Politics in France. A tentative Academic Autobiography - The undergoing government-led reforms of the Higher Education and Research system in France may negatively affect those fields of historical sociology and comparative politics that have developed since the early 1970s, and are nowadays gaining grounds within the wider international scientific community. A fresh reading of the masterworks that provided its theoretical cornerstones (those of Weber, Gramsci, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu and historians like Michel de Certeau and Paul Veyne) reminds us of the main ambitions of the whole comparative exercise: crafting and sharing an analytical glossary, rooted in the confrontation of various research experiences without expecting it to become either a common denominator or the first step towards any linear causal explanation. To put it another way, its strategic goals could be listed as follows: instead of entities, comparing practices, processes, and therefore historical periods that by definition are contingent, ambivalent, and fragmentary. Gathering and sharing common questions without expecting common answers. Conveying those questions raised from the analysis of one peculiar society to the study of another one. Demonstrating that continuities, that lie at the roots of the historical and political sociology's approach of things political, are actually discontinuities. Reassessing in a creative manner the issue of the "autonomous historicity" of both European and non-Western societies, by recalling to mind the fact that their relationship to the Other and to the Elsewhere is one of its key constituents, and hence that it cannot be dissociated from their fundamental "extraversion". Acknowledging that this "autonomous historicity" argument does not lead to assuming that the various trajectories of those political societies are parallel and never merge. In the same way, this acknowledgement should not mean the revival of the old idea of the incommensurability of "cultures" or "civilisations". This ...