The review of magazines. In The Postmodern Condition (Editions de Minuit, 1979), the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard announced the “end of great stories”. While the moderns were mainly interested in universal truths, understood through large unitary stories – those of the emancipation of humanity or the class struggle – the postmoderns seemed doomed to turn towards small stories and towards local truths. But for several years the big stories have been making a comeback. Civilizational frescoes are among the best-selling books, and the narrative genre of the origin story once again stimulates the imagination of the social sciences.
The latest issue of the journal is based on this observation. Traces. Review of human sciences. Despite their tendency towards hasty generalizations, “grand narratives” can also set thoughts in motion, suggest the coordinators of the issue Rémi Hadad, Igor Krtolica, Aurélia Michel and Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod. Without rejecting or completely endorsing them, they wanted to better understand their function and the uses made of them in empirical work.
Of the “royal states” from the Bronze Age in Europe to the writings on the matriarchy of the first Frankfurt School in the 1930s, including the formation of social hierarchies in western Madagascar, the story of origins sometimes appears as a discourse that structures the imaginations of the actors studied, sometimes as a set of scholarly hypotheses which can stimulate new ideas or, on the contrary, hinder them.
Under the patronage of Rousseau
Do grand narratives promote interdisciplinarity? In his book The fundamental structures of human societies (La Découverte, 2023), sociologist Bernard Lahire started from the question “Where do we come from?” » in order to bring social sciences closer to life sciences. But in her critical note of the work, as murderous as it is erudite, CNRS researcher Chloé Mondémé rather recognizes a program of « biologization du social » which she describes as “reductionist”.
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