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I'm always torn between two possible strategies. The fisrt is presenting sociology as an academic discipline, as something like history or philosophy, and in this case I get a reception that is interested but strictly academic. Or else I try to exert the specific effect of sociology, in other words try to place my listeners in a situation of self-analysis, and from that point on I know that I am exposing myself to becoming a scapegoat for the company assembled.
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The historian permits himself to take many things as self-evident, and even as signs of achievement.
In the case of sociology, however, we are always walking on hot coals, and the things we discuss are alive, they're not dead and buried.
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In the French intellectual field I have many enemies but no opponents, that is, people who would do the work needed to present me with a refutation. I know that in such a case people will say: 'But if you're irrefutable, that's totalitarian.' Not at all. But they would have to be on their toes to refute me. That's a little arrogant, but still…
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The problem of the sociologist is that he tries to say things that no one wants to know, and especially not those who read him. And by the same token, this sometimes makes me doubt the legitimacy of my existence as a sociologist and the function of scientific work; is it good to say what is true about the social world? Would it be possible to live in a social world that knew itself? I believe the answer is yes.
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Anyone who thinks that putting a microphone in front of the mouth of a miner will gather the truth about miners; in fact, what you get are the trade union discourses of the last thirty years; and when you do the same with a farmer, you get the discourses of schoolteachers - transformed. So the idea that you could find a kind of place of original insight in the social world, whether this is the intellectuals, or the proletariat, ot some other group, is one of those mystiques that have enabled intellectuals to give themselves a boost, but on the basis of a dramatic self-mystification. The sociologist listens, questions, has people speak, but he also gives himself the means of subjecting every discourse to criticism. That goes without saying within the profession, but I think it is not known outside of it.
Given that the historian is himself part of history, is there a science of history? GIven that the sociologist is himself in society, is there a science of sociology?
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For example, you could take a certain evening's television, an election night, and make a tremendous analysis of it, but an unpublishable on because it would be viewed as a criminal demoliton: you would see the professor of political science commenting on the journalist who then comments on the politician, each struggling not to have the last word but to be in a position of metadiscourse in relation to the previous speaker.
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I believe that a good use of sociology as an instrument for the transformation of the social world would be to define the limits of what can be done and to go as far as possible beyond these limits with just a small chance of success.
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In the end, the discussions we can have about sociology, which is held to be aggressive and enabling individuals to reappropriate themselves only at the price of much suffering, take place in a quite different order. Historical discourse, except in certain cases and for the history of the twentieth century, is a discourse that comforts and reassures.
Sociologists are seen as aggressive people, conflictual, people who make a fuss, whereas historians are people who don't make a fuss, as they work on things long past. From time to time, they start a new debate on the French Revolution…
