Si l’histoire et les sciences sociales ont connu une sorte de fusion au cours des dernières décennies et si de multiples domaines d’études spécialisées se sont affirmés pendant la même période, le registre durkheimien de la « sociologie générale » paraît aujourd’hui comme en friche. Il s’agit dans un premier temps d’analyser les conditions de cette désaffection et dans un second temps d’indiquer comment, par la voie d’une réflexivité de longue durée, on peut reformuler un agenda pour la sociologie générale.

Why should ‘better than’ be transitive? The leading answer in ethics is that values do not change with context. But this cannot be the entire source of transitivity, I argue, since transitivity can fail even if values never change, so long as they are complex, with multiple dimensions combined non-additively. I conclude by exploring a new hypothesis: that all alleged cases of nontransitive betterness, such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, can and should be modelled as the result of complexity, not context-relativity.

This article argues that popular revolution was closely tied to the establishment of capitalism. Contrary to the revisionist George V. Taylor’s view that the Revolution had nothing to do with the advance of capitalism because financial and productive capital were divided from one another, this article contends that the Revolution played a critical role in tying them together. Prior to the Revolution financiers began to make limited investments in wholesale trade, manufacturing and mining. But during the revolutionary crisis the sans-culottes (...) pushed the Jacobins to create a national money and to curb speculation in order to foster production and exchange and reduce unemployment. With speculative activity blocked by popular resistance and state interference, bankers and other capitalists increasingly turned to productive investments and forged a link between financial and productive capital which proved crucial to further capitalist accumulation. (shrink)

The empirical turn in bioethics has been widely discussed by philosophical medical ethicists and social scientists. The focus of this discussion has been almost exclusively on methodological issues in research, on the admissibility of empirical evidence in rational argument, and on the possible superiority of empirical methods for permitting democratic lay involvement in decision-making. In this paper I consider how the collection of qualitative and quantitative social research evidence plays its part in the construction of social order, and how this (...) creates certain paradoxes for the normative ideal of a public bioethics. The analysis in this paper is based on Foucauldian ideas, and on recent work in the history of the human sciences. The paper closes with some open questions for theoretical work in the sociology and philosophy of bioethics. (shrink)

Lamarck's perspective on change within the organic world, in particular his conception of "la marche de la nature," , crystallized during the last decade of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th. I argue that it should be viewed as resulting in part from interactions with, and transfers from, the social thought—modes of thinking, ways of conceptualizing, models, metaphors and analogies—of the decades before the French revolution and of the revolutionary decade itself. Moreover, Lamarck's involvement with the (...) new institutional frameworks initiated during the revolutionary period had brought him into direct contacts with the then prevalent modes of discourse on things social. (shrink)

The late 19th-century Ignorabimus controversy over the limits of scientific knowledge has often been characterized as proclaiming the end of intellectual progress, and by implication, as plunging Germany into a crisis of pessimism from which Liberalism never recovered. My research supports the opposite interpretation. The initiator of the Ignorabimus controversy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, was a physiologist who worked his whole life against the forces of obscurantism, whether they came from the Catholic and Conservative Right or the scientistic and millenarian Left. (...) Du Bois-Reymond’s doubt that scientists would ever elucidate consciousness must therefore be seen as an endorsement, and not a rejection, of his faith in reason. (shrink)

: The study of perfection, progress and evolution is a central theme in the history of ideas. This thesis explores this theme seen and understood as part of a discourse in the new fields of anthropology, sociology and psychology in the nineteenth century. A particular focus is on the stance taken by philosophers, scientists and writers in the discussion of theories of human physical and mental evolution, as well as on their views concerning the nature of social progress and historical (...) change. The wisdom and feasibility of improving the human species is discussed alongside an analysis of new methods of investigating and measuring physical and mental attributes of the human organism.The instruments used to assess the development of mind, body and society are described, and are viewed as part of an increased emphasis on the use of technology as an integral part of modern life, and as a means toward the ordered gathering of information in social-scientific practice. An international perspective is taken by observing the way in which ideas about the physical and mental development of humankind was discussed in light and consequence of English and European scientific exploration in the Southern Hemisphere. Further, an evaluation is made of the manner of the spread of new thought in the social sciences from the intellectual and cultural 'centre' of England and Europe to the Anglo-European community located at the 'periphery' in Australia in the late nineteenth century. In particular the educative role played by the non-professional enthusiast as a pivotal conduit for the dissemination of these ideas is highlighted and linked back to a significant tradition of amateur scholarship as a central phenomenon in the study of the history of ideas. (shrink)

The entry of time and history into biological systems of classification is perhaps the single most significant development in the history of biological systematics in the modern era. Darwin's claiming that descent is ‘… the hidden bond of connexion which naturalists have been seeking under the term of the natural system’, rather than seeing the answer in the multitude of previous attempts to resolve the problem in terms of morphological affinities, analogies, and complex relations of resemblance, marked the turning point (...) in a long search into the meaning of biological taxonomy, and allowed the development of Darwin's insights by Haeckel, Plate and others into modern phylogenetic systematics. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn the summer of 1783, a trial took place in the French city of Arras. One M. de Vissery, a resident of the nearby village of St. Omer, was appealing a decision by his local aldermen, who required him to remove a lightning rod he had put on his chimney. His young defense lawyer was Maximilien Robespierre, who made a name for himself by winning the case. In preparation, Robespierre and his senior colleague corresponded with natural philosophers and jurisconsultants. (...) Robes- pierre then persuasively resolved the crucial problem, namely, the proper relations of scientific to legal authority. He exploited the empiricist dogma common to contemporary physics and jurisprudence to argue that judges need not defer to scientific experts, but must only consider the facts, which required no expertise. It was a first approximation of an argument Robespierre would make with mounting authority over the next decade. (shrink)

The sciences of ethology and sociobiology have as premisses that certain dispositions and behavioural patterns have evolved with species and, therefore, that the acts of individual animals and men must be viewed in light of innate determinates. These ideas are much older than the now burgeoning disciplines of the biology of behaviour. Their elements were fused in the early constructions of evolutionary theory, and they became integral parts of the developing conception. Historians, however, have usually neglected close examination of the (...) role behaviour has played in the rise of evolutionary thought. (shrink)

The eme r gence of the concept of pr o g ress is cu r rent l y associated with th e Enlightenment o r , going som e w hat further back, with the que r elle des anciens et des modernes in the 1 7 t h centu r y . Y et the notion of pr o g ress can be traced back to a signi f icant l y earlier period: the foundations of a possi b (...) le Christian pr o g ress i vism w ere, in m y opinion, laid b y St. Augustine; this ess a y e xplores its guidelines. J . G. Herde r ' s reaction a g ainst the notion of pr o g ress proposed b y the Enlightenment possesses also a Christian inspiration. While Enlightened pr o g ress i vism conce i v es past cultures as o v ercoming steps in a rising staircase, Herde r , in turn, claims that each of them amounted to a "self-centered sphere" and w as therefore v alua b le in its o wn right. The sense of the e xistence of past generations cannot lie in p a ving the w a y for future ful f illment as this w ould be incompati b le with d i vine l o v e, w hich estimates each of its creatures in its o wn right, as an unrepeata b le ind i vidual. In contrast to Enlightened a r r o g ance (contempt for the "obscurantist" past), Herder presents a "democratic" vi e w of History within w hich all epochs h a v e the same v alue. (shrink)

Cet article propose d'utiliser le concept d'utopie rationnelle pour rendre compte des pratiques managériales et tout particulièrement de la production de réformes répétées dans les organisations. Dans cette perspective, après avoir décrit une décennie de transformations au sein d'une organisation publique, certaines caractéristiques de la « culture managériale » sont dégagées de sa pratique réformatrice. Dans un second temps, le concept d'utopie rationnelle est construit à partir de textes canoniques et des travaux d'« utopologues ». Dans un troisième temps, utopie (...) rationnelle et culture managériale sont comparées, afin de préciser l'apport cognitif de cet outil à la compréhension du fonctionnement des organisations. (shrink)

Si l’histoire et les sciences sociales ont connu une sorte de fusion au cours des dernières décennies et si de multiples domaines d’études spécialisées se sont affirmés pendant la même période, le registre durkheimien de la « sociologie générale » paraît aujourd’hui comme en friche. Il s’agit dans un premier temps d’analyser les conditions de cette désaffection et dans un second temps d’indiquer comment, par la voie d’une réflexivité de longue durée, on peut reformuler un agenda pour la sociologie générale.

The essay investigates the proposition that economic questions are a fit subject for science. This investigation will involve a selective examination of seventeenth-century writings before looking at again selective Enlightenment texts. The essay is deliberately wide ranging, but it aims to pick out the emergence or crystallization of political economy by noting how theorists sought to establish it as a subject matter and in the process develop ways of studying it that aimed to uncover regularities and exhibit generality, systematicity, and (...) precision. Together these supported its pretensions or claims to be a science that would in a Baconian manner be useful and free of the perceived shackles of a moralistic classical disparagement of economic activity. (shrink)

There is a tension in the notion of popular sovereignty, and the notion of democracy associated with it, that is both older than our terms for these notions themselves and more fundamental than the apparently consensual way we tend to use them today. After a review of the competing conceptions of 'the people' that underlie two very different understandings of democracy, this article will defend what might be called a 'neo-Jacobin' commitment to popular sovereignty, understood as the formulation and imposition (...) of a shared political will. A people's egalitarian capacity to concentrate both its collective intelligence and force, from this perspective, takes priority over concerns about how best to represent the full variety of positions and interests that differentiate and divide a community. (shrink)