Travailler et aimer (Sciences Humaines)

For the first time Dominique Schnapper confides. She tells us about herself, her father Raymond Aron, her husband, the art historian Antoine Schnapper. Immersed by family tradition in the great questions of the century, witness to the fight led by some of the greatest minds of our time against the communist illusion, she talks about her job as a sociologist, far from collective fads and intellectual fashions.

She talks about her first steps in academic research during the 1960s, at a time when the teaching of sociology was being reorganized, her decisive meeting with Pierre Bourdieu and the break with him in the climate after 68, her relationships with the figures who have marked French sociology in recent decades, from Raymond Boudon to Alain Touraine.

She looks back on her work, from Jewish identities, the trials of immigrants and the unemployed to the theory of citizenship, from which we unknowingly borrow notions such as the “community of citizens” or “providential democracy”, which have entered everyday language. She takes an uncompromising look at the nature of political power and French intellectual life. A life’s work.

Dominique Schnapper, one of the great figures of French sociology, was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, member of the Constitutional Council from 2001 to 2010, and received the Balzan Prize in 2002. Her publications include Jews and Israelites (1980), L a France de l’intégration (1991), La Communauté des citoyens (1994), La Relation à l’autre (1998), La Démocratie providentielle (2002), Une sociologue au Conseil constitutionnel (2010).
Print length ‏ : ‎ 280 pages