This summer, The duty takes you on the side roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up like a postcard. Today, we reflect on the construction of social reality through science with Georges Mercier.
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, Bourdieu. Four scholars, four sciences, four new worlds. With Copernicus and astronomy, humans learn that their planet is not the center of their universe; with Darwin and biology, that it possesses no special ingredient which would strictly distinguish it from the animal kingdom; with Freud and psychoanalysis, that behind his consciousness there is a deep unconscious; with Bourdieu and sociology finally, that even the most intimate of his successes and his beliefs are partly the products of social forces which he does not control.
We could extend this list at will, add Beauvoir for gender, Marx for class, the first liberal economists for the myth ofhomo economicus — the sciences, apart from their search for truth, contribute to building the everyday world in which we live.
With each of their “Copernican revolutions”, the whole image of our universe is indeed transformed. This part of causality of science in the image that we have of who we are, of the world in which we evolve and of the nature of the relations that we have with each other entails an important political responsibility.
However, science and its practitioners often argue that they are politically neutral, even apolitical: they only describe things as faithfully as possible, enter into agreement with the deep nature of phenomena, reach the “truth” about the natural world and social. This, beyond many philosophical debates, the sciences also do – or at least attempt to do.
But one does not preclude the other. Even if the truth of the scientific theses were to be affirmed – which we will certainly not doubt for Darwin and Copernicus, but what we have never ceased to contest for the others -, to state a “truth”, whatever it is , remains an eminently political gesture. Of this, our politicians, those who handle state secrets and obscure reports on gigantic tunnels, are obviously aware.
But politics has never been reduced to those who explicitly claim or claim to do so. This is not made, as Jacques Rancière suggests, by power relations, but by “struggles between worlds”. Any activity that poses a particular vision of the world in the city (from the satire of RBO to brutalism in architecture, via surrealism) thus contains the seeds of political action.
Let’s define it briefly: politics is the activity that determines “who gets what, when, and how” (H. Lasswell). Who gets the power, who owns the means of production, when certain people should get certain social benefits, etc. It is the imaginary configuration of a given era which largely determines the answers to these questions. In our thoroughly neoliberal world – and whether that is fair or not – we often believe that the “market”, applied to all spheres of life, should be the ultimate arbiter of these questions.
In the background of our imagination is a myth, but a productive myth, that of thehomo economicusthis Robinson Crusoe alone on his island, working tirelessly, and without any help, to build for himself (and perhaps also for his family) his success and his capital.
But where does this image come from? Part of the discourse behind it — the great success stories, the prime-time interviews with our great business founders (even if they sometimes inherit them), sure, but also all those books of “ personal growth” that sit at the top of the sales charts. Among these discourses, we will find a particular type, but very effective, that of modern economic “science” in its neoliberal variant.
Describe rather than found a world
We know his refrain, to hear it everywhere. Let’s caricature slightly: what is a collectivity? But this is only an aggregate of individual preferences! What is a human? But he is only a self-entrepreneur, a great maximizer of his utility! The strength of economistic discourse, and of approaches more or less linked to the theory of rational choice in the other social sciences, is due to the additional legitimacy conferred on it by its provenance.
A scientific discourse claims to describe rather than found a world (based, incidentally, largely on public funds). It is therefore worth more than a simple literary or journalistic discourse. And this, notwithstanding the fact that the economy, like all fields of knowledge, is crossed by controversies and discussions, that is to say that there does not exist “a real economy”.
The economy and its human obviously represent an easy example, but other examples of this type abound. We might think of those nebulous concepts of “systemic racism” or “public opinion”, both extracted from the diversity of social phenomena – certain disparate forms of discrimination, the aggregation of responses to polls – by researchers, then presented as if they existed outside of scientific discourse. These concepts then acquire an “existence of their own” and retroact on the communities studied, directing the results of an election or the fortunes of a public policy.
So we see that science and its productions lead a double life, produce multiple results — and that their practitioners, and especially the best among them, sometimes turn out to be political actors in the strong sense of the term. This, of course, does not mean that the social sciences are deceptive or that they simply invent their concepts. But it is to point out that they have a particular responsibility and that a “science of science”, as Pierre Bourdieu said, must be rigorously pursued. Social scientists must think about what they do and the consequences of what they say. It is to rigorously conceptualize this “scientific responsibility for the world” that my thesis works.
Because, from time to time, it is literally the continuation of a universe.