Celestin Bouglé

Célestin Bouglé (1924)

Célestin Bouglé (born June 1, 1870 in Saint-Brieuc , † January 25, 1940 in Paris ) was a French sociologist .

Life and thought

Bouglé was born in Saint-Brieuc in Brittany in 1870 and lived with his uncle in Paris from 1884 after his father's death. There he attended the Collège Rollin and the preparatory courses (khâgne) for the ENS ( École normal supérieure ) at the Lycée Henri IV. In 1890, he joined the ENS. In 1893, as the best in his class, he was qualified to teach philosophy (Agrégation). Then he spent a year on a scholarship in Germany, where he a. studied with Georg Simmel . First a teacher in Saint-Brieuc, in 1898 he was sent to the Faculty of Humanities in Montpellier as a lecturer. 1899 doctorate with a dissertation on Les Idées égalitaires . 1900 professor in Toulouse, from 1908 at the Sorbonne in Paris. Lecturer at the ENS, from 1927 its deputy director, then its last director before the German occupation (1935–40). Bouglé died in Paris in 1940.

In Germany, Bouglé was mainly influenced by Simmel and his work on social differentiation. Taking up Simmel's thoughts, Bouglé criticized Émile Durkheim in his first work Les Sciences sociales en Allemagne 1896 for wanting to use the same methods in the social sciences as in the natural sciences. Nevertheless, from 1896 onwards, Bouglé became an important contributor to Durkheim and his journal Année sociologique (1898–1913). Bouglé's most important work is his dissertation on Les Idées égalitaires . Going beyond Durkheim's idea of ​​the division of labor and based on Georg Simmel's concept of social differentiation, he analyzes modern society. According to Bouglé, this differs from other societies in that the modern individual can combine his roles at will. According to Bouglé, this is the basis for modern individualism such as egalitarianism. On this theoretical basis, Bouglé advocates the rights and equal opportunities of all people and rejects any racist or otherwise biologically based inferiority at an early stage. The opposite of modern society is the Indian caste society, where belonging to the caste also defines the other characteristics of the individual (see Bouglé's Essais sur le régime des castes ). More interested in the political and moral side of sociology, Bouglé moved away from Durkheim and his other collaborators ( Marcel Mauss , Maurice Halbwachs ) from 1910 and devoted himself more to popularizing modern and especially sociological thought. In 1920 he founded the Center de Documentation Sociale CDS, which produces various well-known personalities such as Marcel Déat , Georges Friedman and Jean Stoetzel. The most important member of the CDS is Raymond Aron , who is writing his dissertation on German sociology, in which he introduces Max Weber in France, to Bouglé and who becomes Bouglé's political heir when he rejects the totalitarian character of communist ideology.

Bouglé is very active politically. When the French League for Human Rights was founded at the time of the Dreyfus Affair in 1898 , Bouglé became one of its first members. From 1911 to 1924 he held the post of Vice President of the Human Rights League. Together with Émile Chartier (pseudonym: Alain) he was the most important intellectual of French radical socialism, that specifically French form of liberalism that advocates human rights (see Dreyfus affair) and secularism (see separation of church and state 1905). Bouglé also worked with Léon Bourgeois for solidarism, the radical socialist attempt to combine liberalism with responsibility for the socially disadvantaged. In 1901, 1906, 1914 and 1924 he ran as a radical socialist in vain for a seat in the National Assembly. As a gifted speaker, he often made political appearances.

In the 1920s, Bouglé had scientific connections with the German sociologist Gottfried Salomon , both of whom were Proudhon specialists.

Fonts (selection)

• Les Sciences sociales en Allemagne. Les méthodes actuelles , Paris, Alcan 1896
• Les Idées égalitaires. Étude sociologique , Paris, Alcan 1899
• Philosophy de l'antisémitisme (l'idée de race) , in: La Grande Revue, 143–158, 1899
• Solidarisme et Libéralisme , Paris, Rieder 1904
• La democratie devant la science. Études critiques sur l'hérédité, la concurrence et la différenciation , Paris, Alcan 1904
• Le solidarisme , Paris, Giard 1907
• Essais sur le régime des castes , Paris, Alcan 1908
• La sociologie de Proudhon , Paris, Armand Colin 1911
• You say antique au citoyen modern: études sur la culture morale , Paris, Armand Colin 1921
• Leçons de sociologie sur l'évolution des valeurs , Paris, Armand Colin, 1922
• De la sociologie à l'action sociale , Paris, Presses Universitaires de France 1923
• Qu'est-ce que la sociologie? La sociologie populaire et l'histoire. Les rapports de l'histoire et de la science sociale d'après Cournot. Théories sur la division du travail , Paris, Alcan 1925
• Proudhon , Paris, Alcan 1930
• De la sociologie à l'action sociale: pacifisme, féminisme, coopération , Paris, Alcan 1931
• Socialismes français: du socialisme utopique à la démocratie industrial , Paris, Armand Colin 1932
• Bilan de la sociologie française contemporaine , Paris, Alcan 1935
• Les Maîtres de la philosophie universitaire en France , Paris, Maloine 1938
• Humanism, sociology, philosophy. Remarques sur la conception française de la culture générale , Paris, Hermann 1938.

Web links

• Literature by and about Célestin Bouglé in the catalog of the German National Library

Wikisource: Célestin Bouglé  - Sources and full texts