fellow blogger Stanley Fish reflects on French theory in America. I wonder if anyone could write a book called, “American Theory in France”. Or for others, do we not really have theory? Come to think about it, [insert nation here] Theory really only seems to work for France and Germany. Maybe I’m wrong on that.
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Come to think about it, [insert nation here] Theory really only seems to work for France and Germany.
“Australian Materialism” is (or was) a recognized body of ideas in the philosophy of mind. Bernard Williams remarked that Australia was the only place this view could have been thought up, and also the only place where it was true. There’s also Austrian Economics, of course. But the important thing to remember is that American Theory is in fact extremely successful internationally under its more common name, “neoliberalism.”
The trick of neoliberalism, though, is that it tries to seem nation-less. It is simply the truth. Truth has no nation. Although it is much more comfortable in the hall of the economics department at the great University of Chicago than other places. This is a very clever trick indeed. Who knew the truth could be so tricky?
That’s not a feature of neoliberalism, but a feature of being the world imperial power. Just as whiteness and masculinity, being “American” is unmarked. U.S. ideas are hegemonic, and therefore define what is “normal”. It’s incredible how often American social scientists make up “general” theories based on U.S. data (or don’t bother to specify that their theories are specific to the U.S.), something that happens less in other countries (though this may happen in France, I supposed, since they are a somewhat imperial power too in the intellectual realm).
Actually, as a French sociologist, my experience, when I was a student was we did learn a lot of American theory, especially the symbolic interactionist school, along with ethnomethodology (with Parsons studied as precursor). We didn’t do much Mills, hey, after all, we had Marx and Weber to chew on.
As you all know, of course, Bourdieu was a big fan of Erving Goffman and got him translated in French and published in his series (no one ever tried translating Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology… I wonder why?? We had to study it in English and gosh was that painful).
Contrary to what you might think, American schools of social sciences (soc / anthropology) are very well respected in France.
In poli-sci the picture is a bit more complicated:
- References to early texts are common, let’s say in the Mills “Power Elite”—Wildavsky “Speaking Truth to Power” period. Behaviouralism and normative policy analysis are cited in historical accounts of the discipline.
- References to texts written after 1980 are very selective because the dominant methodology of US poli-sci has almost no resonance on this side of the Atlantic (in a nutshell, p-values on Congressional votes have little appeal to European readers).
The only strand of US poli-sci theory that is widespread here is, to my knowledge and rather unsurprisingly, historical institutionalism. Some public policy texts also enjoy a high level of citation.