Profile

DOMINIQUE SCHNAPPER AND THE COMM UNITY

OF CITIZENS

Danie l Bell

D ominique Schnapper, neeAron, is one of the leaders of the third generation of French post-

World War II sociology.

French sociology beforeWorldWar II was domi- n a t e d by the i n t e l l e c t u a l l e g a c y of l~mile

Durkheim, who died in 1917.The major figures were Maurice Halbwachs, Paul Fauconnet, and Celes t in Bougle in soc io logy , Marcel Mauss

(Durkheim's nephew) in anthropology, Georges Davy (who was director of the t~cole Normale Superieure) in law, and Marcel Granet in Chinese civilization.The famous Annales group, founded

by Marc Bloch and Luc ien Fcbvre , s h o w e d

Durkhe im ' s i n f l u e n c e in the i r e m p h a s e s on

mentalit~s and social structure. Yet, despite Durkheim's work on suicide, little

empirical investigation was under taken in this period. The reasons were varied. There was, in large part, the traditional philosophical distrust of empir ic ism as wayward and cont ingent , as against la logique, the underlying structure of knowledge. (As Claude L~vi-Strauss describes the classical method in his Triste Tropique:"there are two choices; take one.")And there was a paucity

of chairs of sociology: one at the Sorbonne occu- pied by Fauconnet , one at Strasbourg (where

Durkheim had taught) occupied by Halbwachs,

one at Bordeaux. Research funds were almost nil; only afterWorld War II was sociological research i n t r o d u c e d into L'l~cole Prat ique des Hautes

l~tudcs (Universit~ de Paris VI, where graduate seminars are held), and the CNRS with the sup- port of the Rockefeller Foundation.

More important for sociology, however, was the decline of the Durkheim legacy itself. Durkheim

had espoused a rational secularism and in his im- age of the moral order had proposed, in effect, a

civil religion identical with the Third Republic and

humanism. But in the years of the Depression, of

heightened class conflict, the rise and success of fascism and a looming war, the Durkheimian view of society compr is ing a moral cen te r seemed anachronistic, if not irrelevant.

The first generation of post-World War II soci-

o log i s t s - J ean Stoetzal, Georges Friedmann, and Raymond Aron- -had been members of Celestin Bougl~'s Centre de Documenta t ion at the l~cole

Normale Sup~r ieurc - -one still needed to be a

normalien as the path to teaching posit ions.

Though Bougl~ had been a Durkheimian, his stu- dents rejected the inheri tance. Aron, who had gone off to Germany to study, in the early 1930s, became influenced by MaxWeber (who had been entirely ignored by Durkheim and never men- tioned in his magazine L'Ann~e Sociologique) and brought Weber to France. Friedmann (originally a phi losopher and a student of Leibniz) was influ- enced by Le Play ( though that was not acknowl- edged) and under took studies of work and the

rationalization of work by the machine process.

Stoetzel, a social psychologist, became interested

in public opinion, polling, and survey research. The three were joined by Georges Gurvitch, a

Russian ~migr~ who had spent the war years in the United States, and who const ructed his own system of phenomenology.

But, again, institutional positions were few. In

1952, the teaching positions in sociology in the faculty of letters were hardly more numerous than in 1910. Davy and Gurvitch held the two chairs

98 SOCIETY �9 NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2002

at the Sorbonne . Stoetzel taught in Bordeaux.

Fr iedmann had a chair at the Conservatoi re Na-

t ional des Arts et M~tiers (originally an evening

schoo l for w o r k i n g m e n w h o sought t echn ica l

training).These men became thepa trons for those

w h o des i red advancemen t in sociology and they

domina ted the juries of the grand examinat ions .

in part icular, the doc to ra t d 'e ta t , the major sign

of ach ievement and recogni t ion.Aron taught part-

t ime at"Sciences Po," while concent ra t ing on jour-

nalism. Recogn i t ion came relat ively late in his

academic life, first wi th a chair at the Sorbonne

and at t~cole Pratique des Hautes t~tudes, and then

to a chair at the Coll/:ge de France, the most pres-

t igious ins t i tu t ion in French academic life.

Gurvi tch had few students . (At the examina-

t ion of Michel Crozier for the doc tora t d 'e ta t , on

his book the Bureaucrat ic PbeJ~ome~lon--these

were ce leb ra ted events and were r epo r t ed in Le

Monde- -Gurv i t ch accused Crozier of subver t ing

French in te l lec tual life wi th Amer ican me thods

of research, and thus abet t ing "American imperi-

alism." Crozier was de fended by Aron). Stoetzel

and Fr iedmann were the pa t rons of the younger

norma l i ens , Boudon and Touraine. Aron, w h o

s tood aside from academic pol i t ics was the major

i n t e l l e c t u a l i n f l u e n c e , t h o u g h the C e n t r e de

Sociologie Europeene, which he headed with sup-

por t from the Ford Foundat ion , sponso red the

work of Crozier, Jacques Lautmann, and Pierre

Bourdieu, who broke with Aron after 1968.

Claude Levi-Strauss once remarked that sociol-

ogy was not a d isc ip l ine wi th a specif ic field, but

an a t t i tude :" therefore one does not need to be a

sociologis t to do sociology:" In the pos twa r years,

in effect, there were two sociologies: the sociol-

ogy of Saint-Germain des Pres, and the academic

soc io logy that e x p a n d e d with the growth of re-

search groups.

The soc io logy of Saint-Germain des Prds had

its roots in the exis tent ia l i sm of Jean-Paul Sartre,

t he M a r x i s m of Louis A l thus se r , the r a d i c a l

Nie tzscheanism of Michel Foucault , the sublimi-

nal psychoanalys is of Jacques Lacan, the l i terary

e thnography of Roland Barthes and Edgar Morin

(whose patron, initially, was Georges Fr iedmann ),

the d e c o n s t r u c t i o n i s m of Jacques Derr ida, the

p o s t m o d e r n i s m ofJean-Fran~;ois Lyotard, and the

pop sociology (frothing like instant coffee) of Jean

Baudri l lard.There is an old observa t ion that intel-

lectual fashions, like couture , or ig inate in France

and sell in the United States. (I leave aside the

s t ructural an th ropo logy of Claude Levi-Stranss,

wi th his heroic , if overween ing , effort to find a

rational under ly ing s t ruc ture of the human mind

which would encompass all levels of social ex-

change from economics to communica t ion to kin-

ship.)

Sociology as an academic d isc ip l ine was estab-

l ished by the second generat ion, and largely by

four men who gained in ternat ional r e p u t a t i o n s - -

Raymond Boudon, Pierre Bourdieu,AlainTouraine,

and Michel Crozier.To these one can add the late

Francois Bour r icaud , Georges Balandier, Henri

M e n d r a s , J e a n - D a n i e l R e y n a u d , and Eric de

Dampierre .

What is crucial about these men, par t icular ly

the first four, is that they es tab l i shed research

groups which ac ted as a training cen te r for stu-

dents, and thei r ex t raord ina ry p roduc t iv i ty (each

of the four has pub l i shed more than a dozen

hooks, g rowing out of the i r research) . Boudon

runs t i le G r o u p e d ' l~ tude des M e t h o d e s de

l 'Analyse Sociologie;Touraine, the Centre d'l~tude

des Mouvement Sociaux; Crozier, the Centre de

Socioh)gie des Organizat ions; and Bourdieu, the

( ;entre de Sociologie de l 'Educat ion et de la Cul-

ture and is the d i rec to r of Actes de la recherche

en sciences sociales, a journal he founded in 1975

as the out le t for his studies.

The fields that have covered are vast. Boudon

has wr i t t en on social mobili ty, the un i n t e nded

consequences of p l anned actions, methodolog i -

cal individual ism, and more recent ly on Simmel.

Touraine has focused on social movements , track-

ing each new" one with alacrity, and on post-in-

dustr ial society.

Bourdieu has cha r t ed the social r ep roduc t ion

of society through cultural mechanisms as against

the o lder Marxist emphas is on economic prop-

er ty relations. Crozier has s tudied organiza t ions

and b u r e a u c r a c i e s and the way the}' i n h i b i t

change. Each has given rise to new vocabular ies :

Bourdieu, habitus (durable systems of disposi t ions

which cond i t ion the col lect ive responses of so-

cial groups): Crozier, la socidtO bloquEs; Boudon,

effets pervers:Touraine, action sociology. All have a c h i e v e d p r o m i n e n t p o s i t i o n s in

French academic and in te l lec tual life. Boudon, a

p ro fessor at the Sorbonne , was e l ec t ed to the

Academie de Sciences et Morale. Bourdieu is at

the College de France. Crozier has been given the

Prix Tocquevil le .They direct publ ishing programs

at m a j o r h o u s e s : B o u d o n at t h e P r e s s e

Unive r s i t a i r e de France , Bourd ieu at Edi t ions

Minuit ,Touraine at Le Seuil.

DOMINIQUE S('HNAPPER AND THE COMMUNITY OF CIT1ZE,VS 99

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What is striking about these men (and some of the others I have cited),is their deep inw)lvement

with American academic life. Boudon spent con- siderable time at Colombia, working with Paul Lazarsfeld at the Bureau of Applied Social Re- search, learning mathematical sociology, as well

as teaching at Harvard. Bourdieu for a number of

years has spent a quarter teaching at the Univer- sity of Chicago, and working for a period with

James Coleman. Crozier has taught at Harvard and regu la r ly at severa l Cal i forn ia un ive rs i t i e s .

Touraine has written a major assessment of Ameri-

can higher educat ion for the Carnegie Endow-

ment. As against the fashionable sociology of Saint-

Germain des Pres, which has attracted followers among the literary intelligentsia, but rarely under-

s toodAmerican society, the academic sociologists have gained a deep understanding of American

life even when, as in the instances of Bourdieu

andTouraine, they have been critical of American society. But what has been important is that the

problems they study, and the methods they use,

are part of the c o m m o n coin of sociology as an

international discipline.

All four have been "established" for more than thirty years each, and have now retired (e.g., Cro- zier andTouraine) or are on the verge of doing so. The routinization of charisma, to inw)ke a tired

phrase, may be at work, for in the course of its trajectory many hard-working but specialized so-

ciologists have been p roduced , but few have matched their path-breaking achievements. Much of the strength of French sociology depends upon

the third generation that is now coming into its o w n ,

Dominique Schnapper is p robably the out- standing person of the third generation of soci- ologists. She is married to Antoine Schnapper, a l e ad ing art h i s t o r i a n and p r o f e s s o r at the Sorbonne, and mother of three children. She has been extraordinari ly p roduc t ive intellectually, writing to date about a dozen books and over a hundred scholarly articles in a period of less than thirty years. She is surely the major female figure in French sociology. Schnapper took her under-

graduate degrees (Dipl6me and Licence) in poli-

tics, history, and political science at the Institut

d'l~tudes Politiques (popularly known as"Sciences

Po") and the Sorbonne in 1957 and 1958, and wrote a Doctorat-bs-Lettres (the famous doctorat

d'dtat, the magisterial degree), wh ich is rarely taken any longer by sociologists, who are content

with the lesser Ph.D. (The doctorat was abolished

twice in the intervening years as being too diffi- cult, t ime-consuming, and unnecessary, though it is now formerly restored.) Since 1981, she has been director of studies at L'l~cole des Hautes l~tudes en Sciences Sociales, the school of gradu-

ate studies located on Boulevard Raspail, the cen- tral building for history and social studies in Paris.

She has served on six government commissions. She was president of the Societe Frangaise de

Sociologie from 1995 to 1999.

D o m i n i q u e S c h n a p p e r is p r o b a b l y t h e

o u t s t a n d i n g p e r s o n o f t h e t h i r d

g e n e r a t i o n o f s o c i o l o g i s t s .

Her field, which she has made uniquely her own, has been the stud), of nationality and mi-

norities in France ( though she has also writ ten

extensively on fields as widely distant as aesthet-

ics and unemployment) . Her book, La France de

l ' int~rgration, published by Gallimard in 1990,

won the prizes of several French academies. A

previous book, Ju i f s et Israelites, published by Gallimard in 1980, was published by the Univer-

sity of Chicago Press in 1983, asJeu,ish Ident i t ies in France. In addition, she has wri t ten about rift)'

scholarly articles on Jewish life in France, on na- tionalities and immigration, as well as a prize-win- ning book on immigration.

The C o m m u l t i t y o f Citizens." On the Modern Idea o f the Nat ion , published by Gallimard in

1994, is her masterwork. It was widely reviewed and praised in France on its publication by, among others, Frangois Furet, the great historian, who died a tragic death in July 1997, and Phillipc Seguin, the Gaullist political leader. It won the prize of the NationalAssembly in 1994.

In the last decade, the study of nationalism (along with gender and race) has become the major focus of soc io logica l s tudies (Gellner. Anderson, Hobsbawm, Liah Greenfeld) as the in- te res t in class has r eceded . Yet as P rofessor

Schnapper points out, the very term nationalism conflates the political and the ethnic, though the

two, she argues, are not the same. It is, in fact, this very difference that is the signal contr ibut ion of

her book.What she has sought to do is clarify the term Hation, as an idea and a social fact, and bind

the idea of the nation to the integration of soci- ety through the communi ty of citizens.

DOMINIQUE SCHNAPPER AND THE COMMUNITY OF CITIZENS 101

For the sociologist , the central p rob lem of in-

quiry is the nature of the social bond, the ties of

cohes ion of individuals in col lect ive entities. Here

the centra l con t r ibu t ion of Professor Schnapper

is a set of r igorous def ini t ions and dis t inct ions,

and thei r exempl i f ica t ion in the h is tory of West-

ern societ ies. Her a rgument is that what defines a

nation is the poli t ical form, as against the religious

and the social, and by the fact of c i t izenship, indi-

viduals are in tegra ted into the society. She con-

trasts the pol i t ical bond wi th the e thnic g r o u p - -

here she employs a neologism, the ethnie as the

c o u n t e r p a r t to thepoliO,.

In short Professor Schnapper's work forces us to think about the

fundamental question of what holds a society together, and the fate

of the nation.

The e thnic are members of a historical and cul-

tural community, often tied by common descent,

who emphasize theirparticttlclriO,, even when they

seek to b e c o m e a pol i t ical entity. The po l i ty is

mult icul tural , wi th the nat ion as a supra-bond.

It is this emphas i s on the pol i t ical which is

essent ial to Professor Schnapper ' s a rgument .The

p o l i t i c a l c a n n o t be r e d u c e d to the re l ig ious ,

though this is a t t emp ted in theocra t ic societ ies,

for then o ther g roups in the nat ion are excluded.

And the pol i t ica l differs from the social bond, because of its specif ic i ty as a jur idical and legal

c o n c e p t . Here S c h n a p p e r d i r e c t l y c o n f r o n t s

Durkheim, who made the social and moral bond

the centra l ties of a society, for the social tie can-

not account for the charac te r of r ights and of citi-

zenship, the nature of sovereignty, that defines the

polit ical . And against the Marxian tradit ion which

emphas izes conf l ic t as inheren t in the poli t ical ,

she argues that the nat ion integrates the p e o p l e

as a c o m m o n communi ty of citizens. (This is a

way of expla in ing the tact that desp i te the claims

of in te rna t iona l i sm as the basis of solidarity, the

French and German working classes, the two most

advanced in Europe, fought each o ther as French-

man and Germans in two wor ld wars.)

Professor Schnapper ' s subtle explorat ion of the

nature of the pol i t ical bond lends her to some

start l ing and convinc ing s tatements . Thus, many

conserva t ives claim that secular ism undermines

a socie ty and call for a "return" to religion.Yet as

Schnapper po in ts out ,"Sccular ism in par t icu lar is

an essential a t t r ibute of the modern State, because

it al lows one to t ranscend the diversi ty of reli-

gious belongings, to consecra te changes in the

pr ivacy of beliefs and pract ices , and to make the

pub l i c sphe re in to a re l ig ious ly neutra l p lace

shared in c o m m o n by all citizens."

The nat ion has been one of the major socio-

logical d e v e l o p m e n t s of the past one hundred

years , though most socioh)gis ts , as S c h n a p p c r

points out, Durkheimian and Marxist, have shied

away from the subject.Today, however, the major

p rob lems are the threats of the de c om pos i t i on of

the na t ion .Wi th in the nation, she poin ts out, the

intensified hedonis t ic drive for weal th emphasizes

individual in teres ts as against common, national

al legiances. Multi-ethnic states, m)t only in the

former conglomerates such as the USSR and Yugo-

slavia, but in nations such as Canada, Belgium, and

Lebanon are on the verge of flying apart. Religious

ftmdantentalism, as in the Middle East and North

Africa, seek to subordinate the political to religions

orthodoxy. And with globalization, the defensive

s teps by nat ions to create wide r economic and

pol i t ical enti t ies, such as the move to the Euro-

pean Community, create dilemmas of national alle-

giance and identity. In short Professor Schnapper 's

work forces us to think about the fundamental ques-

tion of what holds a society together, and the fate of

the nation, as we enter the twenty-first century.

Dominique Schnappcr, as one p robab ly knows,

is the daughter of Raymond Aron, the leading so-

ciologist of the genera t ion after Max Weber and l~utile 1)urkheim. In recen t ),cars, she has spent

cons iderab le t ime and energy in the p ro jec t of

the Friends of the Society of Raymond Aron, to

br ing toge the r a full co l lec t ion of his oeuvre and

deve lop his work. Her own work is one of the

best tes t imonials to his charac te r and intel lect .

The field she has carved out is her own. But she

also shows the s tamp of the fa ther in the splen-

did nature of her achievements .

l )aniel Bell is the Henrl, Ford H Professor o f Social Science Emeritus of Harvard University and Scholar in Residence of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the president o f La Soci~td Tocqueville, a French-American organization devoted to caroqng out work in the spirit o f Tocqueville. This essal, is published on the occasion o f Dominique Schnapper receiving the In terna t iona l Ba lzan Foundation Prize for sociology in 2002.

102 SOCIETY �9 NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2002