SV-600 The French Tradition: From Durkheim to Deleuze (Autumn 2023)

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, the student will be able to

• Discuss the works and ideas of central French social theorists, including Durkheim, Mauss, Lèvi-Strauss, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Deleuze.
• Understand the wider intellectual context that shaped the ideas of theorists and intellectuals like Durkheim, Bourdieu, and Deleuze.
• Apply the key concepts and theoretical frameworks of some of the central thinkers working within "the French tradition" in PhD-level research.
• Critically evaluate the French intellectual tradition of the 20th century.

The French tradition denotes one of the major streams in European intellectual history, alongside Anglo-American analytic philosophy/empiricism and German idealist metaphysics. The "long 20th century" (to use Giovanni Arrighi’s term) saw the emergence of a series of central French intellectuals, philosophers, and social scientists whose ideas, concepts, and frameworks exerted and continue to exert a powerful influence on sociology, anthropology, political science, International Relations, philosophy, critical theory, and beyond. While not being totally oblivious of its side streams, the course will concentrate on the mainstream of the tradition.

This course introduces doctoral students to some of the key contributors to the French tradition, starting with Émile Durkheim, a progenitor of modern sociology, and his nephew Marcel Mauss, the "father of French ethnology," extending through the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lèvi-Strauss, hermeneutic historicism and power analyses of Michel Foucault, critical-realist sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, and transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze. The aim is to unfurl the specific academic trajectories of these thinkers within a wider space of intellectual forces—the French academic scene extending from the late 1890s up to the new millennium—to enable PhD students to critically evaluate, appropriate, and apply their concepts and ideas in the context of their own doctoral research.

While the course obviously touches upon the history of ideas, the focus is nonetheless solidly social-scientific. We are interested in these thinkers not only for their own sake, but also because they can help us produce better analyses of social phenomena. If the French 20th century tradition continues to exercise a fascination for students and scholars alike today, it is because its concepts and key ideas continue to allow us to see the social world anew and critically inspect it from a multitude of angles and vantage points. In a world increasingly averse to critical theorizing, the French tradition offers a resolute defense of the power of the intellect to interrogate, interrupt, and remake social realities.