Associationalism: the past, present and future of public sociology

In this chapter we would like to take stock of the highly controversial public sociology and its organic turn proposed by Burawoy. For some, it is a salutary renewal of the sociological approach. For others, it is a veritable destruction of the scientific basis of the approach. Either way, much ink has been spilled about public sociology over the last 20 years. For our part, we would like to adopt a nuanced position. There is no doubt that public sociology today brings a breath of fresh air to sociology, notably in the field of pragmatic sociology or cultural studies. But public sociology is, in our opinion, only part of a much older proposal in the history of sociology: the associationalist proposal. Indeed, as we will see in this this article, the leitmotif of public sociology – which aims to bring sociologists and laypeople into association with one another in order to make common claims – has long been supported by various currents of thought and various methodologies. After outlining public sociology’s main ambitions, we will discuss participatory investigations, socio-analysis and intervention collectives. We will then go into some depth about this synthetic perspective, which we call “associationalist”, by delving into the 19th century, and by looking more specifically at Proudhon, a precursor of French sociology. By studying his conception of common sense and of workers’ and laypeople’s knowledge, we will see that sociological approaches such as his – which were marginalized early on by Comte’s positivism and then Durkheim’s distanced objectivism – largely prefigured all of the “public” perspectives of the “organic” type mentioned above. Finally, we will stress the point common to all of these proposals: the vocation of sociological science is not to abandon political stances. Rather, its ambition is to support and help shape critical representations and instituting practices that exist among civil society actors, by associating itself more readily with dominated collectives – such as the working class in the nineteenth century – than with dominant ones.