This article takes a processualist position to identify the current forces conducive to rapid change in the social sciences, of which the most important is the divergence between their empirical and normative dimensions. It argues that this gap between the many and various empirical ontologies we typically use and the much more restricted normative ontology on which we base our moral judgments is problematic. In fact, the majority of social science depends on a “normative contractarianism.” While this ontology is the most widely used basis for normative judgments in the social sciences, it is not really effective when it comes to capturing the normative problems raised by the particularity and historicity of the social process, nor the astonishing diversity of values in the world. The article closes with a call to establish a truly processual foundation for our analysis of the social world, which must move away from contractualism and imagine new ways of founding the human normative project.

This essay is a discussion of three recent and important books on the French Revolution: Timothy Tackett's The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution, Jonathan Israel's Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre, and Haim Burstin's Révolutionnaires. Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française. All three volumes are characterized by a welcome return to general interpretations based on new theoretical approaches and consider the revolutionary process from multiple points of view: the first uses the historiographical current known as the “new history of emotions” to explain the contemporary obsession with conspiracies and thence the Terror; the second proposes a new approach based on the traditional history of ideas, considered capable of explaining the so-called “hard facts”; the third envisages the revolutionary experience from an anthropological perspective, constructing a typology in order to characterize it. Nevertheless, all three are united by a reluctance to analyze the political structure itself; in other words, to investigate the concrete workings of political institutions during the Revolution.

This article uses the case of Catherine Théot and her prophetic activity in late eighteenth-century Paris to reflect on the relationship between event and prophecy in the era of the French Revolution. Despite appearing fixed and immobile, Théot's prophecies were constantly changing and evolving, giving rise to hybrid discourses influenced by various currents including both Jansenism and revolutionary discourses. The Théot affair thus provides an occasion to reflect on contemporary supernatural interpretations of the French Revolution. In this context, her prophecies can be read as a response to the emotional needs triggered by political instability, the fear of war and political violence, and religious changes. In conclusion, the article points to a religious discourse that existed on the margins of the dialectic between revolution and counterrevolution, but was nevertheless closely linked to it though the effects of the Revolutionary Wars and the Terror.

This article argues that the term “fiscal-military state” is a misnomer, particularly when applied to one of the paradigmatic cases of early modern state formation, Britain. Britain devoted a significantly smaller proportion of government revenues to military expenses than any other European state. Moreover, its overall expenditure included important non-military elements and massive investment in colonial development, a fact that standard accounts fail to take into consideration. The existing fiscal historiography also ignores large swaths of other types of state activity. Finally, the article argues that the British state—and quite probably other early modern states—was not forged in warfare. If war did not make the British state, this would explain why the British state was less narrowly focused on making war.

Since the 1970s, Andrew Abbott has promoted an original and ambitious project for the social sciences. In particular, he has argued for the development of a “processual sociology” based on precepts first articulated by the Chicago tradition of sociology and in his view somewhat forgotten. Against functionalism, against the “variables paradigm,” he has emphasized the Chicago tradition's focus on patterns of interaction and their contexts, and has deepened our analysis of the local and ever-particular dimensions of social entities by considering their inscription in successive sequences. As well as seeking to formalize these sequences, this vision aims to link processes playing out at different rhythms and levels. As a project it is based on a conception of social life as a “world of events,” where “change is the normal nature of things” and “not something that happens occasionally to stable social actors.” This makes it possible to explain the emergence and durability of social entities (for example, professions and disciplines) in the flow of events. The originality of this approach consists in founding a new institutionalist analysis of social realities on this ontology of perpetual movement.

Marked by American pragmatism but also traversed by the question of order and social structures, Abbott's oeuvre offers an original approach to the diversity of contexts and temporalities in processes that, through the intermingling of various “lineages,” constitute social traditions and entities. This article presents Abbott's contextualist theses and the intellectual background against which they emerged. It also considers the place that the processual approach accords to contingency and personhood, factors that enable Abbot to work toward a synthesis of history and sociology.

Morten Jerven's Poor Numbers sheds light on the acute fragility of African statistics, itself linked to the precarious conditions in which aggregates are produced. As patchy and problematic as they are, these numbers are nevertheless ubiquitous as instruments of proof and tools of government. Quantified fictions take shape in complex statistical chains that stretch from their producers to the economists who use them, and are mediated by international organizations. Focusing on the criterion of accuracy, Poor Numbers powerfully conveys its message of “garbage in, garbage out,” but leaves important questions related to the relevance of statistics unanswered. The history, sociology, and political economy of numbers sketched by Jerven merit closer consideration with a view to the following: identifying the connections between evolving state forms and the development of statistics; establishing a historical ethnography of the organizations that produce and use numbers; understanding the growing role of multinationals in the political economy of statistics; taking a less conciliatory view of the involvement of international organizations; and, last but not least, denaturalizing the dominant economic categories by integrating the plurality of economic approaches to statistics. The article concludes with a call for a comparative political economy of numbers that would no longer consider the African case in isolation, and would work against the idea that Africa has not entered statistical history, or has only done so “by mistake.”

This paper proposes to revisit the intellectual trajectory of Norbert Elias on the basis of an article published by the sociologist in a local Jewish newspaper in 1929 and entitled “On the Sociology of German Anti-Semitism.” It argues that in this seemingly circumstantial text, Elias asserts his decision to favor sociology, which had come to replace and envelop his engagement in the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weiss. This is evident in the article's somewhat ambiguous final sentence, where Elias presents German Jews with an alternative: collective emigration to Palestine or a lucid vision drawn from a sociological diagnosis of the situation. The paper begins by situating Elias's text within the range of analyses of anti-Semitism in 1920s Germany, comparing its approach to Zionism with that of Franz Oppenheimer. It then contextualizes its relationship to the sociology of Karl Mannheim: Elias was Mannheim's assistant in Frankfurt and his approach contrasted with the perspective developed in the same time and place by the Frankfurt school. Finally, the paper shows that Elias's sociological distantiation would imperceptibly take the place of the political distantiation that had centered on Zionism—a scientific movement that implied erasing from his memory the political Zionism he had long supported. A new French translation of Elias's 1929 text, also by Danny Trom, is included as an appendix.

Though it is currently benefiting from a renewal of interest, the economic history of Africa raises intense methodological controversies that are echoed in two books recently published by Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers and Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong. A large proportion of these controversies relate more generally to the differences between economists and historians, at least in terms of their dominant practices. In its quest for the institutional “fundamentals” of economic development, much research in this field is content to work with a summary and imperfect base of data, an approach that Jerven is right to criticize. Analyses often suffer from an insufficient knowledge of social contexts, and compress historical time between a “before” and a “now.” They also rely on debatable statistical assumptions. Nevertheless, though extant archives present limitations that are both qualitative (the sources are predominantly colonial) and quantitative, a modest renaissance remains a possibility and would offer more space for better controlled comparative analyses.

The global history of the First World War is still in its early stages. This article proposes to contribute to its development by “de-Europeanizing” the historiography of the conflict and suggesting some of the ways scholars can move beyond “centers” and “peripheries” to combine different spatial scales of analysis. First, it demonstrates the need to look beyond the European theaters of the war and investigate spaces hitherto deemed to be marginal: despite their distance from the epicenter of the combat, these regions were traversed by tensions directly linked to the conflict and witnessed major transformations between 1914 and 1918. Second, it invites researchers to focus on elements such as the environment, natural resources, or diasporas, which make it possible to break out of a national framework of analysis and to do justice to the global impact of the Great War. This twofold approach underlines the value of a new geography of mobilization and belligerence, one that matches the diversity of experiences and reflects the truly global dimension of the First World War.

This article explores the famously diverse and expressive political cultures of the “Archaic” Greek communities (650 – 450 BCE) in the light of recent work on public goods and publicness, to which the present essay partly responds. This contribution may also be considered as a fragment of the long history of the Greek polis. The distinction between “elitist” or “aristocratic” styles and “middling” or “popular” styles, upon closer examination, turns out to be a set of political play-acting gestures, predicated on different political institutions and notably on access to public goods. The “middling” styles paradoxically reflect restricted political access, while “aristocratic” competition in fact responds to the stress and uncertainties of broad enfranchisement. The whole nexus of issues and gestures surrounding distinction is hence not socially autonomous, but immediately linked to political requirements and institutional pressures. This article thus argues not just for the centrality of public goods to polis formation in early Greece, but also for the centrality of formal access and entitlements to the “public thing”—in other words, for the centrality of the state and its potential development. Putting the “state” back in the early history of the Greek city-state: the exercise has its own risks (notably that of teleology), but it attempts to avoid problems arising in recent histories of the polis, where the state is downplayed or indeed dismissed altogether, and the polis itself reduced to a pure phenomenon of elite capture or elite constitution.

Traditional accounts of Athenian society tend to take their sources at face value, as direct reflections of Athenian reality. They present a model of free citizens working as independent producers, while the elite derived its surplus income from the exploitation of slaves. This model underestimates the systematic omissions of the sources, their consistent and distorting focus, and the implications of these biases. By mapping the field of vision of Athenian sources and the discourses that focus attention on certain aspects while leaving others in the shadows, this article offers an alternative methodology for reconstructing Athenian society. In particular, it considers the Athenian distinction between slave and free, arguing that the emphasis on a clear distinction between the two is not an automatic result of the significance of slavery in Athens. It also shows how the sources render invisible the large numbers of freemen that did not live as independent producers, and argues that there was a significant gap between the theoretically clear-cut distinction and its application in practice. A renewed approach to Athenian society needs to account for the dimensions that remain systematically beyond the sources’ field of vision. It must also take major conceptual distinctions like that between slave and free not as reflections of reality but as choices which relate to Athenian society's view of itself and require historical explanation.

Morten Jerven's work offers a historical perspective on the techniques used by national administrations and international organizations to quantify and analyze the growth of African economies. In his view, the work of statisticians and economists has largely failed to account for national economic and social realities since the beginning of the structural adjustment period. The informalization of economies, the weakness of statistical institutions, and the lack of methodological rigor among international experts have led to the production of statistical fictions. Jerven's analysis calls into question the usual narratives produced by quantitative economic history, such as that of an African economic failure since 1960. It also opens a dialogue with the sociology of quantification, highlighting cases where growth calculations appear arbitrary. However, his methodology suffers from a number of weaknesses. While his earliest works were based on detailed national case studies, Jerven's recent analyses have focused on the critique of continent-wide discourses, in particular international comparisons and econometric studies of growth. His work has thus moved away from a careful ethnography of numbers toward a focus on the denunciation of global practices. This shift prevents the author from making precise reflections on the various roles of numbers in African societies, the multiple positions and modes of action that quantification engages, or the specific historical trajectories which calculations of African growth are supposed to represent.

The social sciences have much to gain by paying particular attention to the place that dispositifs occupy in social life. The utility of such a perspective is clear from an examination of the research that has made use of this notion since the end of the 1970s. Yet in addition to the wide variety of definitions and objectives relating to the concept of dispositif, a reading of these works also reveals some of the difficulties that have been encountered along the way. An effort to clarify and renew the discussion on both the conceptual and methodological levels is thus worthwhile, and this article is a contribution to that end. The first section sets out the results of our conceptual inquiry into the notion of dispositif. The second puts forward a series of propositions designed to develop a “processual” approach to dispositifs. Finally, we return to several studies that we have conducted from this perspective relating to the dispositifs of redress, looking at the doctrinal work of jurists around a criminal trial, the practices of lawyers in the courtroom, the reactions of victims of a medical scandal to a compensation fund, and the historical transformation of dispositifs of redress for medical accidents since the beginning of the nineteenth century. This enables us to clarify the approach we propose and to suggest new avenues for the future.

This article represents an initial foray into the global environmental history of the First World War and suggests new approaches that can change our understanding of the conflict. With ravaged farmlands, charred trees, and muddy quagmires as iconic images of the First World War, scholars have generally tended to overlook the place and the role of nature. Yet only by taking the environment into account can we fully understand the trauma of war and how this conflict in particular shaped the most basic levels of human existence for years to come. Armies in the First World War were both social and biological entities, which depended on a “military ecology” of energy extraction, production, and supply. To keep soldiers and machines in action, belligerent states commandeered food and fuel throughout the biosphere, extending the war's environmental reach far beyond the western front. Examining a number of the ways that war shaped the periphery—evolving disease ecologies in colonial Africa, tin extraction in Southeast Asia, and food production in Latin America—will show that the boundaries of belligerency were vast. These three regions also illustrate the different ways in which the preparation and pursuit of war transformed societies and the natural world. Seeing what George Kennan called the twentieth century's “seminal catastrophe” from an environmental perspective illuminates the global dimensions of the First World War. The conflict accelerated environmental change that had begun in the previous century and established the patterns of military-industrial production, human victimization, and environmental exploitation that defined the twentieth century.

The Histoire du Maroc edited by Mohamed Kably is a monumental collaborative work involving more than fifty authors, all, with only one exception, Moroccan. It is thus a de facto “Moroccanized” history (though not excessively so) and the synthesis that it presents marks an important milestone. This article will nevertheless suggest some alternative thematic or transversal structures while also highlighting some of the volume's guiding threads: the initial geographical tableau, the periodization, its vision of historical origins and antiquity, the “plural” nature of Morocco and its relationship with the exterior world. In terms of the overall tone of the volume, it is necessary to evaluate its place in the broader historiographical context today. Other recent studies have revealed an oscillation between two scales, the one tending toward oversimplified generalities (the Middle Ages, the modern period), the other toward what has sometimes seemed an excessive focus on the specific and the exceptional. The Histoire du Maroc handles these debates with cautious discretion as they run through its chapters in a light filigree; it is a useful tool, pedagogic and accessible to a large and diverse public because it is neither intransigent nor polemical. Hard to reduce to particular historical currents, it is a scholarly work, an example of reasoned academic study. It is based on actual knowledge, without preconceived boundaries, and will remain a reference, scholarly, experimental, and pragmatic. It seems most unlikely, after the publication of this volume, that the history of Morocco will need to be rewritten over again.

What kind of body was the body of a Hellenistic king? To consider kings in antiquity is to necessarily reach back beyond Ernst Kantorowicz's schema and explore the body before the concept of the “king's two bodies.” An analysis of Xenophon's Cyropaedia sheds light on this configuration, in which the problem was not so much the (unachievable) conformation of a royal super-body as the obscure point at which the natural encountered the ceremonial, the latter absolutely essential to the former in the context of a sprawling empire, but nevertheless threatening to engulf it in the luxury with which the sovereign surrounded himself. Neither transparent nor opaque, at once a sign and a mask, this model was further honed by Alexander the Great. While his persona was bound up with the same alternative, the criticisms that he faced obliged Alexander to make a tactical distinction between his person and ceremonial luxury. This separation in no way implied a duality but rather depended on shifting boundaries, sometimes insisting on his naturally royal body, sometimes on the luxury reconfigured by the sovereign's extreme mastery. The Hellenistic kings inherited these questions, and alternated between a symbolization of their natural being and a naturalization of the symbolic in a constant interplay that resisted stabilization. Only the rise of Rome would bring an end to this vision of the royal body in a process of perpetual construction, as though the incarnation of royalty itself was inconceivable.

This review article poses three questions, essentially based on the first two volumes of Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, a collective undertaking edited by Dominique Pestre. First, it considers the relationships between “science” and “knowledge.” Can a clear line be drawn between them? Or should “scientific” knowledge (with or without quotation marks) be considered a particular class of knowledge? And, if this is the case, must we define it according to a certain number of specific operations? Second, the article turns to the acceptance, criticism, or rejection of the traditional definition of the “scientific revolution,” dated to the seventeenth century and characterized by the mathematization of nature and the introduction of experimental practices. Should this be replaced by other perspectives, highlighting previous reconfigurations of fields of knowledge or the plurality of “revolutions”? Finally, the article considers the attention paid to connected histories of knowledge, which move away from Eurocentricism and introduce new actors. Recognizing these circulations does not however efface the asymmetry of exchanges, the stigmatization of indigenous knowledge, or the imperialistic imposition of Western science.

This article places the Middle East campaigns at the heart of the effort to understand the First World War's cultural impact in Britain. By doing so, it shows that the effects typically attributed to the western front—loss of faith in technology and heroism—were mediated in important ways by lessons emerging from the Middle Eastern fronts in Palestine and Mesopotamia, where the British found their faith in technology strengthened. By incorporating that cultural legacy, we can better understand why Britons remained committed to the war and why they maintained their faith in industrial development and imperial warfare after the war had ended. The heroic image of T. E. Lawrence and of the infrastructural development undertaken by the British military in Mesopotamia bolstered faith in technology and imperialism just when the western front was revealing their darker side. The article begins with a study of the unique military tactics the British adopted in the region, shaped by particular cultural notions about a largely imaginary “Arabia”: deception, irregular warfare, and airpower were used to an unprecedented degree in these campaigns. It goes on to show how the British government strove to capitalize on the propaganda effects of these “sideshows” as they became successful. In particular, they stressed the notion that the empire could find redemption in the restoration of the ancient “cradle of civilization.” Such ideas sustained idealistic notions even as the western front unleashed a new kind of cynicism.