For a new sociology. The book imposes by its references in many fields of knowledge. Some will be intimidated and will not dare to push the door. They would be wrong. Because, past the first pages of the introduction, the great journey begins. Bernard Lahire serves as an effective guide for us in this intellectual journey unlike any other, both a masterful and manifest synthesis for a “social science of life”.
By tradition, sociologists have always been wary of laws, theories and invariants precisely because their science took into account variations from one society to another. On the contrary, Bernard Lahire wishes to highlight constants, general mechanisms and imperatives that span the ages. Faced with what he considers a “blindness”he wants to give a new view to his discipline, to remind it somehow of the immutable reality.
This research director at the CNRS offers a compass to navigate in this backwater of egos. “The social sciences suffer from too great a dispersion of specialized work which communicates only very little with one another. » Faced with this scattering, he is sounding the alarm. As the Bourbaki group brought order to mathematics in the 1930s, they want the same awareness for the social sciences. He does not hope that these sciences become “harder”, but only that they discuss, that they take advantage of the tools offered by others to get out of an explanation of the social by the social. He therefore calls for a break, aware that we do not change like that a team that has been pretending to win for decades. “You cannot change all of the scientific communities in the humanities and social sciences by the sheer force of a book. » But a book like this can serve as a trigger. Beyond cultural differences and particularisms, he wants to highlight constants such as exist in the exact sciences. Because everything does not start with the man. Power or domination pre-exists in nature. Human exceptionality arises from an ordinary that needs to be rediscovered. “A product of biological evolution, the cultural action of Man makes it possible to compensate for his weaknesses and changes the nature of evolution, by modifying the selective pressures which weigh on the species. » Thus, by cooking his food, the man saw his intestine shrink. So there are sociological laws, processes around reproduction and learning.
This invitation in a century and a half of writings and trial and error hopes to bring out the major biological and social facts that structure human societies. We can see a break there, but also a continuity, a form of culmination of the author’s previous research. It is still a question of seeing further, of going beyond the obvious and pretense, without biologizing the social but by putting more sociology into the biological.
Bernard Lahire
The basic structures of human societies
Discovery
Edition: 3,500 copies.
Price: €30; 972 p.
ISBN: 9782348077616
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