# Are the Human Sciences Doomed to Controversy? **Date de l'événement :** 03/09/2026 * Publié le 03/09/2026 ### Date 03/09/2026 ## Chapô **Cet article est aussi [accessible en Français](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/content/2026-09-03/les-sciences-humaines-sont-elles-vouees-a-faire-polemique_eiyQbVzyRddnrJ6rFL2K).**  **The humanities regularly find themselves at the centre of controversy, as they question the beliefs, values and shared narratives of the societies they study. Georges Mercier, a PhD candidate at Sciences Po’s CERI and a political columnist in Quebec, examines the tensions inherent in the researcher’s place within their own community. Should researchers maintain a critical distance from society, or should they instead seek to strengthen its ties and consensus?** ## Corps du texte The controversies that periodically shake academia tend to sidestep one essential question even as they presuppose it: that of researchers’ belonging to their society. What exactly do researchers in the human sciences owe the society that houses them? Do they owe it loyalty and fidelity? Should they help reinforce the social consensus prevailing at a given moment, or may they instead call into question the norms, values and beliefs of their society? Should they proudly assert their belonging to it, or maintain a form of analytical detachment from it? My research defends the claim that researchers’ belonging to their society is necessarily complicated, owing to the characteristics proper to research itself. That belonging is not self-evident. While this holds for the natural sciences as much as for the human sciences, the phenomena the human sciences investigate tend to give their researchers’ belonging a sharper political edge. Unlike the many commentators who assume that researchers can be perfectly integrated into their society, and who deplore it when they are not, I hold that it is hardly surprising to find the human sciences and their practitioners so often at the heart of political controversy. If anything, were a fuller understanding of the work of the human sciences to spread more widely, we might expect the political tensions surrounding them to increase. I will first explain the main reasons why belonging poses a particular problem in the human sciences, then set out the four broad answers that can be given to it, before concluding with the strongest claim of my research: that the various epistemologies of the human sciences carry political implications that need to be made explicit. To keep the argument simple, I deliberately set aside the institutional and sociological factors specific to the research world that also contribute to giving researchers a place apart in their societies. ### The gap between researchers in the human sciences and the society they study The human sciences are of course anything but a unified field. On the contrary, fierce debates rage over the methods, the purposes and even the objects of research. Yet these internal disputes should not obscure a shared identity, one that is independent of rivalries between schools and academic chapels: researchers in the human sciences are, all of them, researchers. It is the nature of research, more than its content, that complicates their relations with their societies. At a minimum, research requires calling into question phenomena, whether social or natural, as they present themselves, and refusing thereby the spontaneous explanations given of them. The point may seem banal, but it is precisely because we do not know that we inquire. Doubt and questioning are obviously not the preserve of researchers, still less of researchers in the human sciences. People question and interrogate their worlds in everyday life, outside the university. Researchers nonetheless differ from their fellow citizens in occupying a specific position that makes such questioning their principal occupation: academics are paid, and paid first of all out of public funds, to put the common world into question. Within the bounds of their function, at least, there can be no spontaneous, unreflective, routine adherence to their society, to its beliefs or to its widely shared opinions. Their belonging to that world is complicated precisely by the fact that they cannot take it for granted or subscribe to it spontaneously without betraying, in the same gesture, the minimal imperative of their practice. In a sense, researchers form a social body unified, for all their differences, by a shared refusal to take the world for granted. In this respect, researchers in the human sciences resemble those in the natural sciences. But the nature of the objects the human sciences interrogate makes their situation markedly more complicated, politically and socially, than that of their colleagues. Some claims of the natural sciences remain controversial today (vaccines, or the theory of evolution in certain quarters), yet the fact remains that, unlike their colleagues, researchers in the human sciences take a systematic interest in phenomena about which people hold strong, and sometimes very strong, opinions and beliefs. Few people are deeply attached to one account or another of the molecular structure of salt, or of the workings of the cardiovascular system; almost everyone, by contrast, has a view on the history of their nation, on the effectiveness of meritocracy, on the distribution of success in their society or on the nature of political parties. The human sciences differ from the other sciences in that they bear on objects that interest, or have the potential to interest, individuals, in the twofold sense of arousing their curiosity and engaging their ideological or material interests. But they take that interest in an interrogative mode that tends to unsettle the self-evidence and the common beliefs of the very people they study. That is what makes them always potentially sciences that make trouble, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase. ### Is it only “critical” approaches that pose a problem? For all the sociologist’s enduring influence, however, a stubborn misunderstanding needs to be dispelled here: the idea that disruptive potential is the preserve of certain specific scientific practices. On this reading, only so-called “critical” approaches (Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, Bourdieusian sociology, and so on) genuinely interrogate society, the other approaches in the human sciences being content, supposedly, to reproduce unchanged the discourse the dominant classes hold about it. Pierre Bourdieu’s writings, like those of Marx, the Frankfurt School or C. Wright Mills before him, are emblematic of this wish to confine the only true human science to one with the critical ambition of unveiling certain logics, implicit or explicit, of domination and inequality, thereby considerably complicating its practitioners’ relationship to their society. There is, however, an important confusion here between the dynamic of research itself and the purposes assigned to it. It is true that not all approaches in the human sciences explicitly aim at transforming society, most being content to grasp and understand it better. But a science can be disruptive without its author wishing it to be, as the American sociologist Edward Shils forcefully reminds us. A capitalist economist studying equality of opportunity might well find that it varies sharply with social origin, without thereby wishing for a shift to another economic system, or even for stronger redistributive measures. A human science, in other words, can be disruptive without its author actively wanting to be critical of their society. This is why the question of belonging cannot be put to adherents of the more critical approaches alone: it is a question for all researchers in the human sciences. It does, admittedly, arise differently depending on the purposes ascribed to the human sciences and on the relationship researchers themselves maintain with their scientific practice. In my work I set out at least four ideal-typical answers to the question of belonging: critical, consensual, ironic and tragic. Belonging appears more or less difficult, more or less natural, depending on which answer a given researcher adopts. So while the question is indeed universal, the answers offered to it depend heavily on researchers’ particular understanding of their own scientific practice. Those answers in turn trace different prescriptions about researchers’ involvement in their societies; they trace, in other words, different politics of the human sciences. ### Four competing ways of thinking about the belonging of the human sciences to society The critical answer, which I develop from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is the one that makes belonging most complex. Not only is it built on the explicit ambition of unveiling the truth within a society founded on unawareness, postulating that agents are never entirely conscious of the reasons for their actions (what I call the “primacy of ordinary error”), but it also demands of researchers a genuine “conversion” to the practice of the human sciences. The use of the term conversion, in Bourdieu especially, is no accident. For the critical posture, research is not one occupation among others; it entails a conversion of every perspective, something like an ethics of life. In that context, belonging to society, to shared narratives and shared opinions, becomes particularly difficult: researchers lay claim to a marginality they hold to be justified and necessary. They go so far as to make it the very ground of their practice’s scientific status. Politically and democratically, this answer is all the more problematic in that it implies a strong form of epistemological inequality between researchers and their fellow citizens. The researcher’s word would count for more than that of fellow citizens. Even were the two to reach the same conclusions, the researcher’s procedure would confer greater value on theirs. It becomes clear, then, why critical work, especially on politically charged objects, is liable to provoke unusually strong resistance and sharp controversy: adherents of this answer use the distance they claim in order to criticise, at times harshly, the foundations of the societies that house them. ### The researcher in search of consensus At the opposite end, the consensual answer, which I explore through the work of the American sociologist Edward Shils, seeks to make researchers’ belonging to their society as easy as possible. This answer too recognises that research complicates such belonging, that it is necessarily denaturalising and alienating; but it treats these features as things to be contained. Where the critic sees in the rupture between researchers and their collectivity the precondition of sound knowledge, the consensual researcher sees a poor instrument of knowledge, one that tends to bias the researcher’s gaze. In the consensual view, critical researchers, by elevating to the rank of norms certain elements only more or less present within a given society, end up producing a false, because distorted, image of the society they study. The consensual answer argues instead that a feeling of affection between researchers and those they study is the condition of possibility of an adequate science. For the mistrust the critic erects into a principle of knowledge, it substitutes a form of trust and reciprocity between investigator and investigated. Belonging to society is thereby made distinctly easier. Politically, this answer tends to favour a happy integration of researchers, insofar as it proposes a form of equality between them and their subjects. Indeed, in some authors adopting a consensual approach, researchers are explicitly called upon to strengthen social bonds, acting in a sense as agents of social integration. For the consensual researcher, the rupture with society is not an existential licence justifying marginality, but a challenge to be overcome and transcended. ### Intermediate possibilities: tragedy or irony Between these two extremes lie two intermediate positions. The tragic answer, drawn from the work of Max Weber, shares with the critical one the view that scholarly knowledge is irreconcilable with lay knowledge. The tragic researcher likewise holds that a gulf separates the knowledge of the many from scientific knowledge. Yet precisely because they consider that certain questions, those bearing on values, cannot be arbitrated by science, they experience that rupture as a painful burden to be borne with seriousness and resolve. The tragic answer is tragic precisely because it refuses the happy resolutions that the critical and the consensual answers each propose in their different ways: there will be no full justification of the rupture in critique, and no minimising of it in consensus; research is an existential undertaking that imposes a constitutive tension on its practitioner. Weber’s great lecture on the subject, Science as a Vocation, illustrates this position. But the fundamental problem of the tragic researcher stems from the fact that they regard their scientific activity, as the critic does, as an existential activity that defines them. The ironic answer proceeds instead from the perhaps more common and more democratic ambition of multiplying one’s occupations and granting scientific practice its proper place. I illustrate it through the paradoxical work of Peter Berger, the American sociologist of religion who, at the very time he was publishing The Social Construction of Reality, a book that pushed the denaturalising character of the human sciences to its limit, never ceased to pursue a parallel activity as a Protestant theologian. That a single individual can hold together a religious and a scientific perspective is characteristic of an ironic answer which calls, in short, for keeping things in proportion by assigning the practice of the human sciences a limited place. If that practice can indeed be limited, then belonging to society becomes easier for researchers, who can bracket their scientific practice when, outside the walls of the university, they “alternate” towards another perspective. The alternation is not an entirely innocent one: adherents of the ironic posture are aware that they are ignoring a choice that ought to be made. They nonetheless regard their scientific practice with distance and moderation: they never quite leave their community, and never quite belong to it either. Politically, the ironic answer is the one that best accords with a democratic and liberal society: democratic, because researchers claim no superiority over their fellow citizens; liberal, because they claim at the same time a form of distant marginality. ### The belonging of the human sciences to society is political There are doubtless other answers to the question of researchers’ belonging to their society. One can readily imagine a “technical”, even cynical, answer that would confine the practice of the social sciences to generating “data” to be used as the needs of the moment dictate. Beyond the answers on offer, however, what matters is that the question arises for all researchers in the human sciences, by virtue of the minimal and universal nature of their practice. At the same time, as the preceding paragraphs have shown, there is no clear-cut answer to the question of belonging. There are only relations of greater or lesser coherence between the epistemological and methodological claims an author adopts and that author’s own relationship to their society. Within those relations one can discern different politics of the human sciences, more or less acceptable within a modern, democratic and liberal society. Epistemologies, in other words, imply politics of the social sciences: my work seeks to bring out the political extensions of scientific practice. To say how one knows society, and what can be known of it, is at the same time to disclose how one can inhabit it and belong to it – which, for researchers in the human sciences, will never be self-evident. ### Thématique `#Démocratie` **Licence :** `#CC-BY-ND (Attribution, Pas de modification)` **Langue :** `#Anglais` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)