Aurélien LignereuxProfessor of History at Sciences Po Grenoble and the CERDAP2 laboratory
How would you define objectivity in the social sciences?
If, in order to be objective, it were sufficient to give a faithful representation of the thing observed in an approach devoid of partiality, then the repeated controversies about the militant drift of the social sciences would have no reason to exist. Indeed, who could boast of lacking objectivity without immediately disqualifying himself as a researcher and thereby losing credit for the scientificity of his remarks? Yet there are many who, intoxicated by the "combat sport" they have learned to master, forget the strictly defensive use of the social sciences and use them to attack institutions and systems of all kinds, inflicting nasty blows on them by alleging the emergency situation and the iniquity of the balance of power. As their numbers grow - and generational renewal plays a key role in this - their commitment is accepted to the point of becoming the norm in an academic environment based on peer assessment and co-optation; conversely, their potential opponents are all the more marginalized.
This is how we usually explain the "sinistrisme universitaire" - the serial movement of radicalization on the left - but it would undoubtedly be advisable to take a different approach to this question of objectivity, and break with the idea that research objects are pre-constituted and waiting to be explored. In fact, the best researchers create their objects, forge their concepts - and they are encouraged to do so by the institutional promotion of innovative, emerging and disruptive themes. Since these objects are not given but created, they inevitably reflect the life experience, field positioning and worldview of their creators.
What's more, the objects of research need to be understood in terms of their connections, their intersections and the overall dynamic that gives them their full meaning, but also generates phenomena that are perceived with concern. This is undoubtedly the key to the conflict surrounding Islamo-Leftism: those who devote themselves to the themes included in this nebula may (believe) do so with complete objectivity, but the fact remains that, seen from the outside, this surge of critical work is part of a convergent and eminently committed process of destabilization and deconstruction. We have to admit that the proliferation of works on racism, police violence, migrants and male domination - to name but a few examples - is leading to a concentration effect that is altering our knowledge and understanding of the social world. Yes, perspectives are distorted; yes, the magnifying glass effect operates when a flood of researchers focus on the same objects. The result is a kind of anamorphic map that magnifies certain terrains, the very ones that are promoted as battlegrounds.
Under these conditions, objectivity is nothing more than the ability to recognize that the angle from which we view social, political or historical issues is only one angle among others, and that we must always situate ourselves within a broader framework. The decline of general culture in the face of hyper-specialization and the disappearance of the humanities, which the interdisciplinary injunction cannot replace, have their part to play in this crisis of objectivity.
Is researcher neutrality possible and desirable?
Choosing this or that object of research is therefore not neutral, regardless of the researcher's protestations of neutrality. Moreover, this is nothing new; there has just been a reversal, as even forty years ago, working on the police or colonization was considered the prerogative of friends of order or enthusiasts of the colonial gesture. Empathy plays an important part in these vocations, whether for "heroes" or for the "dominated". This does not prejudge the quality of these works. Here again, the bias stems from a lack of perspective, so that only one aspect of the observed situation is often analyzed, with the risk of mistaking the part for the whole.
Two factors play a major part in this. Firstly, the filters imposed by the issues the researcher has chosen. Faced with the depth of a field of investigation, and the ever-increasing possibilities of archival research, a grid is essential. But this series of entries can truncate the perspective. The researcher runs the risk of lying by omission, since he is unable to reproduce the totality of reality, and only exposes what nourishes his reflection, itself a reflection of his preoccupations. If the researcher feels like an "infiltrator", he or she may well come away from an immersion in a BAC crew with worse-sounding words than the others.
On the other hand, popularization puts neutrality to the test. Only a scientific publication can guarantee the presentation of research protocols, outlining the conditions of observation, the nature of the corpus or cohort studied, and the scope of the conclusions reached. On other media, the exercise is necessarily perilous, as the tempo demands that the result be given priority over the "how" of the investigation. The complexity or ambivalence of situations can be sacrificed, since the aim is not so much to make people understand as to make themselves understood by submitting to the rules of the media. When the debate is heated, in order to make oneself heard, one has to harden and shorten one's demonstration, increase one's generality or even take a stand, so as not to be embarrassed by one's methodological scruples in the face of a non-specialist devoid of such impediments; few are those who then retain what Jean Birnbaum has called "the courage of nuance".
Being neutral means not taking sides in a dispute, but it also means knowing how to take the side of one's discipline, when facts are mishandled, when anachronism interferes, when the good feelings of the moment lead to peremptory judgments. Many approximations and shortcuts have been spread about Napoleon in this bicentenary year: as a historian, to enter the debate is to re-establish a few facts and broaden perspectives. Napoleon was essentially concerned with the economic and geopolitical aspects of the slavery issue; he was certainly not a negrophile - as abolitionists were called - but he himself, a Corsican, may have been considered the offspring of a "half-African family" by Chateaubriand and English newspapers.
How important are methods to you as a researcher?
Our methods are not so much scientific as artisanal, but in the noble sense of the word, in that we use the resources of a trade to process the fruit of our observations. Research does not obey scientific laws, but must be carried out according to the rules of the art, which does not exclude tinkering and chance - that famous serendipity sometimes at the origin of a discovery or interpretation. Moreover, researchers are not interchangeable: two historians consulting the same archives will not see the same thing, depending on their previous readings, their issues, their degree of concentration from one bundle to the next, their convictions, their generation or the demands of current events. This is to be welcomed, for history is only contemporary.
Doubt is the order of the day when faced with unambiguous and definitive demonstrations. The history of the social sciences reminds us that the authoritative argument of scientificity is dangerous when they claim to govern the perception of the world and thereby reform the law. Let's recall Clemenceau's words during the debate on colonization on July 30, 1885: "For my part, I've been having a particularly hard time of it ever since I saw German scientists scientifically demonstrating that France should be defeated in the Franco-German war because the Frenchman is of an inferior race to the German." The fact that disciplines perceived as scientific in the 19th century have disappeared, that parts of anthropology, ethnology and sociology have made a 180° turn, changes nothing: when it comes to man, humanistic knowledge must take precedence over scientific dogmatism. There's nothing like humor and humility to guard against the risk of embracing one's discipline for the causes that are closest to one's heart.
At every stage in the development of knowledge, there is an element of interpretation, and sometimes instrumentalization. This applies even to the finished product. L'Histoire mondiale de la Franceedited by Patrick Boucheron, is a case in point. Between what is said in each of the notes - and I know something about this from having written one - and what has been said one way or another in the media, there is such a wide margin that one has the impression that the work has only reinforced the convictions of some and the suspicions of others. And with good reason: the collection, composed of short stories each recounting an encounter between France and the world, sidesteps the question of representativeness, leaving it up to each individual to decide whether these outside influences are as rare and discontinuous as those identified in the table of contents, or whether the latter merely gives a glimpse of an uninterrupted intermingling.
Methodological impressionism can be seen as an aesthetic of research. For my part, I've always opted for large corpora, empirically constituted and attentive to source effects. In this way, I can take a quantitative approach, relying on a database to assess the representativeness of my examples.
Could you present an example of research, ideally from your own work, to illustrate the issues and tensions surrounding objectivity and neutrality in the social sciences?
There's been a lot of talk lately about the divide within the Left itself between those who favour a class-based approach to domination and those who favour race or gender - in short, identities. The debate can be applied to the past. It's tempting to reread Napoleonic Europe in the light of later colonial empires, or to detect in it a cultural imperialism, armed not only with the certainties offered by a French model with universal pretensions, but also willingly resorting to the grid of ethnotypes to explain the forces of inertia opposing it. French expatriates in the annexed departments, particularly in Italy, were divided between the duty to assimilate the annexed populations and the desire to distinguish themselves from them. From this point of view, mixed marriages offered a prime observation post, all the more so when such unions were refused by the French hierarchy, as was the case between gendarmes and Piedmontese or Genoese women. The question is, however, what is the nature of these blockages?
Anglo-Saxon historiography has recently put forward an interpretation that emphasizes their cultural and even ethnic character: the bans imposed were the result of a refusal to mix, not only out of fear that the gendarme married to a local woman would show connivance with the local population, but also out of a concern for demarcation. A social history of institutions, however, cuts short this interpretation, firstly by unearthing counter-examples of authorized mixed marriages - which belies the systematic/systemic nature of the hindrances - and above all by re-establishing their significance.
Everywhere, in old and new French departments alike, a gendarme's marriage must be approved by his superiors. Neither the morality of the bride nor that of her family should compromise the reputation of the gendarme, just as he must have proved to his superiors, through the management of his pay, his ability to support a family. Consequently, if a French gendarme's plans to marry an Italian woman are rejected by the hierarchy, it's not because of an a priori exclusion of native women, but because of the very person of the bride, when she is reputed to be light, and often because of her very profession, like an inn servant. Consequently, marriages that are rejected do not reflect the hierarchy's refusal of mixed unions out of hostility to the local integration of their officers; rather, these refusals confirm the gendarmes' poor integration, insofar as, unable to find respectable, well-established local parties, they turn by default to the first arrivals, the only girls they can approach. In short, in this case, the rules of the game are social, not ethnic or cultural.