Delivered. France, intellectual republic, brilliant home of the social sciences. This reassuring image of Epinal appears outdated. To a large extent, the social sciences no longer exist in public debate except to be denigrated, note Claude Gautier, professor of philosophy, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, historian, in their new book. For more than fifteen years, political leaders have constantly attacked them. The latest example is the symposium entitled “After deconstruction: rebuilding science and culture”, which was held on January 7 and 8 at the Sorbonne, with the financial support of the Ministry of National Education, according to Mediapart, and with Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer as first speaker.
This essay therefore seems at the right time to offer contradiction to a government which has forgotten the liberal convictions it displayed at the start of the five-year term, but also to the intellectuals who support its approach. This interference of the political, which would therefore have epistemological claims to decide between the scholar and the activist, has a history. The moment we are living in begins in 1989, with the fall of the Wall, ” the end of the story ” announced by the American academic Francis Fukuyama, and the headscarf affair in Creil (Oise). New cleavages appear, in particular on the place of Islam within the company. With ideologies disqualified, neoliberal thought prevails and depoliticizes the role of the state in favor of an approach centered on management.
The 1995 strike against the Juppé plan on pensions and social security is another key moment. The debate around these events exposes fractures within the intellectual world. The thinkers who support the social movement are portrayed by their opponents as “backward retrograde” braced on their “acquired interests”, accusations that will return when, in 2007, the law on university autonomy is adopted. The effect of this reform, like the policies subsequently adopted to regulate research, is clear: “outsourcing and privatization of functions, elimination of positions, growing precariousness, contractualisation”.
Meanwhile, the political world arrogates to itself the right to define what is science or not. It’s Nicolas Sarkozy using the term “Islamo-leftist” to denigrate certain researchers rather than respecting the autonomy of research. It was Manuel Valls, under the following mandate, who confused explaining and excusing, believing that the intellectual investigation of a social fact amounts to endorsing it. It is Jean-Michel Blanquer who has gone on a crusade against “wokism”.
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