the germanic and french political culture traditions and the titles of classic social theory books

Omar

In a highly recommended article in Sociological Theory Ron Jepperson (2002) argues that political modernization in the European interstate system followed four primary pathways, which in the end entailed four radically different cultural conceptions of the status and relationship between the individual, the state and civil society. These conceptions have in their turn been institutionalized in contrasting modes of the organization of the state and the cultural authority of non-state agents.

The four pathways that Jepperson talks about are (1) the “Anglosaxon” in which state institutions are weak and decentralized and public decision making is conceived in the mode of the aggregation of preferences by pre-constituted individuals who are seen as the primary ontological cement of society; (2) the “French” in which the state is seen as the embodiment and executor of highly legitimized and universalized collective projects and visions and in which individuals preferences and choices are seen as a subordinate and potentially threatening disruption from this perspective, there is no coherent “civil society” but only an unruly “mass” of disconnected individuals; (3) the “Scandinavian” mode which is just like the Anglosaxon, except that civil society is seen as not composed of atomized individuals but instead as a collection of corporate bodies endowed with traditional rights and prerogatives and each occupying its place in a functional division of labor; and finally (4) the “Germanic” which is just like the Scandinavian only that the “corporate” conception of civil society is wedded to a “high modernist” (in Scott’s 1999 terms) conception of the state as in the French tradition. Schofer and Fourcade (2001) put this typology to work in their analysis of cross-national differences in civic involvement.

I was reminded of Jepperson’s typology when while joking around with a friend in grad school we noticed that a lot of German classical social theory work were always about something and something else (i.e. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), while the titles of a lot of the classic (Durkheimian) works were only about a single unitary process (i.e. Suicide). In retrospect, I now see that Jepperson’s typology provides the crude basis for a “reflection theory” sociology of knowledge account (as in that classic work in the French tradition Primitive Classification) as to this anecdotal observation: in the Germanic tradition, the cosmological order is conceptualized as a “clash” between two highly culturally elaborated and distinct structural orders (state and society); in the French tradition only a “single” collective order exists. This follows if we believe that totemic classifications are simply reflections of society, and if in science concepts are just totemic classifications.

Thus, the Chomskyian “deep structure” for the title of a work in the Germanic tradition will be:

Concept 1 and Concept 2

The corresponding French deep structure is simply:

Big single concept

Here are some examples of Germanic works with a translation into the “French” in parentheses:

Germanic:

(1) Wirtschaft und Gessellschaft (The Social Structures of the Economy)

(2) Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Capitalismus (The Capitalist Spirit)

(3) Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (The Socialization of Community)

(4) Faktizität und Geltung [Habermas‘ Facts and Norms] (The Facticity of Norms)

(5) Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action appears to be an important exception. But it is not. Pull the two volumes from your shelf. check out the subtitles of the books. They are both “germanic.” Thus:

(5a) Volume I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (the Rationalization of Society)

(5b):Volume II:Lifeworld and System (The Systematization of the Lifeworld)

(6) Habermas again: Knowledge and Human Interests (The Social Foundations of Knowledge)

(7) Sein und Zeit [Heidegger’s Being and Time] (The Temporality of Being)

(8) French writers sometimes write Germanic books, especially when they have been influenced by German intellectuals. Thus we have Sartre’s:

Being and Nothingness (which should been called in proper French fashion: The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

(9) The power of the Germanic mode of thought is so great that even when book titles should have three concepts, the authors are mysteriously compelled to reduce them to only two. Freud is the best example:

Das Ich und Das Es [The Ego and the Id] (which should have really been called: Das Ich, Das Es und Das Uber-Ich; if Freud would have been French, it would have just been called The Superego since this last agency is the true protagonist of this metapsychological classic)

(10) Ideology and Utopia (Castles in the Air)

Here are some classic French works and the “German” translation:

(1) Primitive Classification (Primitivism and Classification)

(2) The Division of Labor in Society (Labor and Society)

(3) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Religion and Cognitive Forms)

(4) Distinction (Society and the Judgment of Taste)

(5) The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Kinship and Structure)

(6) Tristes Tropiques (Sadness and theTropics)

(7) The Archeology of Knowledge (Knowledge and Society)

(8) The History of Sexuality (Sexuality and History)

(9) Mythologies [Roland Barthes] (Myth and Society)

(10) For Marx [Louis Althusser] (Marxism and Structure)

Of course the most glaring exception to the rule is Karl Marx a nominally “German” writer who prefered French titles (Das Kapital, Grundrisse, etc.). However, as argued by Pels (2001), Marx is for all of the Hegelian turns of phrase, not really a writer in the Germanic tradition of the Staatswissenschaften, but is closer to the Anglo-French political economy tradition. Thus, the “French” titles of his works. There are a bunch of other French writers who are really German in spirit (they belong to the “continental” German tradition of philosophy of Kant-Hegel-Fichte-Nietzsche) and it shows up in their titles. Thus we have Derrida’s Writing and Difference Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and Giles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

One thing that can be noticed by translating French titles to German ones and vice versa is that the Germanic forms is better at giving a sense of static structure while the French is better at process. Translating Germanic titles to the French mode thus brings out the processual/historical aspect of the work, while translating French titles to the German mode highlights their “structuralist” aspect.

Kieran appears to belong to the German tradition, as his book is (sub)titled Altruism and the Market for Human Organs. His magnum opus will of course be simply called Organs and the Market. Fabio on the other hand, appears to belong to the French tradition: (From Black Power to Black Studies). A German rendition of the title of his book would be Black Studies: Discipline and Movement.