[text originally published in the Nouvel Observateur]
On July 17, the French Sociology Association (AFS), on the occasion of its 10thecongress, posted on its website a motion adopted at the general meeting, "On the ongoing revolts in working-class neighborhoods". It refers to the "murder by the police" of a "17-year-old delivery man, racialized, resident of Nanterre". Providing "its support for the legitimate demands emanating from working-class neighborhoods: truth, justice and equality", the AFS "denounces systemic police violence, is outraged by the summary "justice" and heavy judicial repression that we have been witnessing for several days, and is concerned about the rise of the extreme right." Not a word, let us note, on the violence committed by the rioters, the acts of intimidation and assault perpetrated against elected officials, the ransacking of public property and businesses that constitute the livelihoods of part of the population of these neighborhoods.
This is a perfect example of academic activism, openly practicing the confusion of arenas between science and politics, while respect for the specificity of contexts should be the ABC of sociology. The text invokes the "truth" while omitting to specify that in place of "legitimate demands" we have mostly witnessed not words but actions, ranging from the destruction of public services to the looting of branded items, perfect emblems of this capitalism against which the rioters are supposed to rebel in the eyes of their duly qualified defenders.
It is perfectly legitimate for any citizen to be outraged by police blunders, to demand that adequate training and supervision protect both the population and the police officers themselves, and to demand that republican order not be threatened by the defense of corporate interests within the police. But we do not see what their denunciation is doing at a conference of teacher-researchers, especially under the expression "systemic violence", typical of a discourse that does not aim to shed light on the facts but to instrumentalize them and which is only pseudo-sociological verbiage offered to the militant cause.
If sociology's vocation, as this motion states, is to analyse the world and offer explanations for it, one may doubt that the denial of reality, the blindness and the distortion of the facts that characterise this text bring us any closer to any analysis and the slightest possibility of a sociological explanation of these riots. Instead, we are offered a legitimisation of the violence committed by the rioters: we excuse before we have even explained. This is doubly problematic, on a political and scientific level.
Because this motion also presents as self-evident the idea that sociology would also have the vocation of "deconstructing the discourses and practices that naturalize and justify the different social dominations" - as if analyzing, explaining, understanding were not enough to justify research. This is a conviction that not all sociologists share, and which suggests that its authors, too busy transforming lecture halls into general meetings and their publications into catalogs of slogans, have not taken the trouble to open the classics of the social sciences. Because could one, without covering oneself with ridicule, reduce to such a program these classic themes of sociology that are the causes of suicide, the affinities between Protestant ethics and capitalism, the springs of the "civilization of morals", the organization of the "frameworks of experience" or even the "practical sense" of family ties? Should we conclude that the authors of this motion, engaging an association itself supposed to represent an entire profession, are unaware of the fundamentals of their own discipline?
No sociologist who cares about preserving a minimum of dignity and credibility for it can recognize himself in a collective that dishonors itself in this way. As for those who support this distressing motion, we suggest that they reserve their activism for the radical left whose postures they thus borrow. Sociology does not have to be taken hostage in political maneuvers, a fortiori when these, clearly, only serve to promote the very positions they claim to combat.
Alain EHRENBERG
Monique DAGNAUD
Olivier GALLAND
Nathalie HEINICH
Philippe d'IRIBARNE
Jean-Claude KAUFMANN
Michel MESSU
Dominique SCHNAPPER
