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Conference : The International Circulation of Ideas: Producers, Brokers and Agents

Call for Papers

If, as Pierre Bourdieu once said, ideas circulate “without carrying along the field of production in which they originate”, it is also possible to suggest that some ideas or intellectual products do not originate within national intellectual fields, but within international networks whose agents circulate and communicate across geographic and cultural borders. Migrations, exile, international institutions, professional mobility, international conferences, transnational politics represent a fertile field of cultural production that has not yet been analyzed as such. The impact of the “intellectual migration” from Europe to the United States in the 1930s and the 1940s, the reconstruction of European scientific networks by US philanthropic foundations after 1945, the international factors accounting for the reconfiguration of academic life in Latin America during the 1970s, or the emergence of a “neoliberal” international in the 1930s would be as many points in the case.

This international workshop aims at pursuing this intuition, by considering the “circulation” of ideas as a primary and constitutive feature of intellectual life, rather than a mere displacement of cultural products primarily shaped by their national context.

The workshop will be organized around three thematic sessions, each one focusing on a specific mode of internationalization of scientific productions: migrations, philanthropic foundations, political internationalism. The point is not to gather researchers working on the same objects, but to bring together people working on similar processes, in order to reach a more fine-tuned understanding of the mechanisms accounting for the international circulation of scientific ideas and of the social processes that underlie them.

1 – Intellectual Migrations

Organizer: Laurent Jeanpierre (ljeanpierre@free.fr)

During the 1930s and the 1940s, the exile of European scholars in the US has triggered major intellectual, scientific and political realignments. It is indeed difficult to understand the analysis of the state that emerges in the 1940s, the development of critical theory, the impact of the Austrian school of economics in the US, or the rise of the Chicago school without relying on a sociology of exile. All the more so that the analysis of this intellectual migration has provided the basis for subsequent policies of selective immigration during the Cold War.

This session will aim at comparing different processes of intellectual migration and, more generally, “brain drain” which took place in the 20th century, under varying degrees of political constraint. Obvious cases would be the role of Latin American academic exiles in configuring hemispheric scientific networks in the 1970s, East European dissident intellectuals in Western Europe and their intellectual impact, but also forms of migration that obey a different, less politicized logic, such as those which take place today between Asia and the Anglo-American world.

Beyond the diversity of the possible case studies, the goal of the session is to stimulate reflection upon the various effects of migratory phenomena in terms of scientific innovation, hybridization, fragmentation and specialization of scientific knowledge, homogenization of scientific practices, publications, comparative methods, and also more or less fertile misunderstandings between different scientific or national traditions.

2 – Philanthropic Foundations and Scientific Research

Organizer: Nicolas Guilhot (nguilhot@msh-paris.fr)

Starting in the late 19th century, the philanthropic foundations have played an important role in the institutionalization of academic disciplines, before actively fostering the internationalization of scientific research. They also represented a very specific milieu mediating between administration, science and business, intent on rationalizing the governance of modern industrial societies by harnessing scientific work to the needs of policy making and economic production.

The foundations acted early on to internationalize this social organization of scientific research. Already in the 1930s, and more so after 1945, the foundations have sought to export to Europe the American model of pragmatic social reform based on the close collaboration of public administration, scientific research and enlightened economic elites. This model encountered resistance coming from traditional academic institutions eager to maintain their autonomy, and often bypassed them, resulting in the creation of new institutions or research centers which compensated their lack of local legitimacy with a better insertion in international research networks.

This session will be an opportunity to discuss the research agendas around which this internationalization of social science research took place (although case studies on the natural sciences are also welcome). The history of such disciplines as area studies, international relations, behaviorism, management and administrative science, for instance, is tightly connected to this international background. Other aspects that can be considered are the methodological developments related to this process of internationalization, its effects upon the format (“big science”) and the social organization of scientific research (funding structure, institutional aspects), as well as the sociological profiles of the academic and intellectual actors brokering between different scientific cultures.

3 – Liberal internationalism

Organizer: François Denord (f.denord@free.fr)

Mauss once observed that “religious cosmopolitism originated within cosmopolitan circles.” The same thing can be said about some economic or political ideas, which circulate all the better since they first emerged within internationalized societies. More than an ideology, internationalism is often the concrete practice of cosmopolitan circles. If socialist internationalism has been abundantly studied, and if the process of European integration is attracting increasing attention, the case of liberal (or neoliberal) internationalism remains relatively unknown. This session will focus on the latter, although other case studies are welcome.

The international circulation of liberal ideas cannot be reduced to a simple scheme of import/export. As early as the 1930s, cosmopolitism represented the smallest common denominator for the major exponents of this doctrine, whether they fled authoritarian regimes or came from the bourgeois upper class. Yet, in order to ensure the diffusion of their ideas, they had to build institutions and think tanks, such as the prestigious Mount Pelerin Society. These institutions allowed for a certain degree of solidarity between theorists and practitioners of the market economy, both at the national and international levels.

This session welcomes contributions focusing on these institutions and on their impact in different national contexts, their relations with international organizations or powers such as the US or the European Union, the role of national processes in their development, the relation between economic ideas and political models.

Deadlines for proposals

Contributors should submit an abstract of their paper by December 15, 2005. Should it be accepted, they will be asked to submit the final paper by May 1st, 2006.

For practical information, contact the organizer of the preferred session (ljeanpierre@free.fr ; nguilhot@msh-paris.fr ; f.denord@free.fr) or Pierre Rimbert (rimbert@msh-paris.fr).

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