"Despite wars, scholars remain the great workers of the international: American Sociologists and French Sociology during the First World WaR 

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book chapter in a collection edited by Marie-Eve Chagnon and Tomás Irish, The Academic World in the Era of the Great War (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018)

 

This just published essay looks at the relationship between French and American sociology during the war, namely how the experience of both neutrality and belligerency changed the theoretical assumptions of American sociology in a transnational context. American social scientists had participated actively in Réné Worms’ l’institut international de sociologie (formed in 1893) but they saw cultural differences between societies that helped marked the way different professional bodies interpreted “social facts”. The point of comparison between the French and American experiences is instructive. In France, Worms was the consummate internationalist entrepreneur, but he was absent from the emerging “French tradition” in sociology forged by Émile Durkheim. The latter connected his development of a universal sociological method to a specifically French intellectual and political tradition (secular and social democratic). The American experience shows that connecting professionalization to assumptions of both U.S. exceptionalism and progress also enabled American sociologists to legitimize themselves. But the Great War posed special problems for them (most of whom had been partially educated in Europe) because, to start with, their neutrality reflected a position that the European war was a symptom of an atavistic social culture that their theories of evolution (and the United States itself) proved were on the way out. Once the U.S. joined the war in 1917, its sociologists re-discovered “national” traces in their reading of French social science that were used to reinforce their nation’s wartime loyalties, even while they, like Woodrow Wilson, clung to the belief that the U.S. was uniquely fighting for an international ideal. But the “social emotion,” as Chicago’s George Herbert Mead called it, of the war also pushed a number of U.S. sociologists toward positivism as a kind of shield against what they saw as the excesses of nationalism, while their French interlocutors (Mauss, Halbwachs, Bouglé especially) tried to reopen discussions of the “nation” and “nationalism” as critical social problems.

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This project has led further to an examination of what might be called the first sociological turn in international relations theory. If Robert Vitalis and Errol Henderson have reminded historians of international theory of the critical role played by race and imperialism in furnishing the founding concepts of the Anglo-American discipline of IR, there was also a confluence, at the end of the First World War, in the incipient social interactionism of Mead and Mauss that sought to position the relationship between the formation of the nation-state and the protean character of the international system.