Conference "Travelling concepts"

« Literary field » Network - II - Translation and international circulation of ideas

Location : ENS Lyon [  ]

Direction : Olivier Christin

Abstract : “Textbook cases”, special cases. National Production and international circulation of concepts in the social sciences.

This colloquium claims the double and partly unfaithful heritage of both the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the European Vocabulary of philosophies, together with that of the boudieusian critique of scholastic unconscious. It thus aims at gathering a series of studies dedicated to a few of the terms or concepts through which history and the social sciences think the things which don’t depend on the “external senses” as Humboldt used to put it, through which they think the social world and think themselves.

However, unlike the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe which concerned a clearly delineated lexical format and field of research (the vocabulary of social groups, the central concepts of ideologies or of constitutional forms…), no discipline or field of research will be privileged. The series of contributions we intend to gather will thus include some proper nouns, some expressions referring to chronological periods (“Ancien regime”, “Modern History”...) or some seemingly technical terms (“average”, “type”, “trend”…) which equally result from ideological constructions and from the activity of social actors. It will include concepts, terms and expressions of a very heterogeneous nature with different characters of variability: some of them concern the description of social groups by themselves and by the social sciences (“avant-garde”, “working class”, “profession”…), some others come from the sciences of the State and from administrative knowledge (“police”, “territory”, “average”, “trend”…), some result from particular ideological constructions which emerged and became meaningful in some precise conditions (“the west”, “secularization”, “ethnic/ethnicity”, “absolutism”…).

What matters most therefore is not the range of the terms and concepts, nor the pursuit of a kind of encyclopaedism. Most important are the methodological reflection and the exemplarity of the analysis aiming at the denaturalization and the historicization of lexical usages, which will turn each example into a textbook case, that is, an exemplary case through which we can better understand what is imposed surreptitiously by academic structures, linguistic usages and intellectual routines. We don’t intend to propose one more dictionary or lexicon, even less to impose a new normativity to escape from Babel, to fight the hegemony of the English language, or to “perfect” the language of the social sciences, to speak the language of 19th century scientists. Relinquishing all normative objective or quest for definition, the ambition of this project is to provide on a few significant cases some examples of careful scientific investigations which combine historical semantics, a comparative perspective and a critical objectivation of the sociological and historical conditions of the possibility and operationality of concepts and lexical usages in the social sciences, which show that questions and conflicts of meaning are also questions and conflicts of power.