HAPPENINGS
547
the positivist-empiricist stream are forced to fall back upon verbal criti–
cism, which has the merit of avoiding total "one-dimensionalization," but
which only confirms their isolation and ineffectiveness.
Among the "white hopes" of French sociology, Parsonian jargon
and the cult of statistics (at last, the solid ground of science! ) are the
key to all problems. The study of society has performed the incredible
feat of depoliticizing all instruction - in other words, of legalizing the
existing politics. And all this is combined with a fruitful collaboration
with government officials and technocrats looking for personnel, etc. Our
professors easily pass for "leftists" compared with the antiquarians and
curio collectors who flourish in the other departments. The point is that
the latter are reluctant to leave the mandarinate of the university estab–
lished by liberal capitalism, whereas the sociologists have sensed the
direction of the "change":
organization, rationalization, production of
human merchandise tailormade to suit the economic needs of organized
capitalism.
Here it is necessary to refute some conceptions supported by M.
Crozier
(Esprit,
January, 1968) and A. Touraine (articles in
Le M onde)
on the issues which concern us.
For Crozier the source of the American malaise is not, as some naive
persons believe from the violence, the militancy of the black people who
have been pushed to the limit by their living conditions, or the horror of
the imperialist war in Vietnam (that "accident," that "madness," to
quote Crozier, who seemed to be more committed to scientific ex–
planation than to magical words). Nor does it lie, according to Crozier,
in the collapse of values, the fact that all values are giving way before
the value of exchange, money. No, all this exists, but it is only the
surface. Violence has always existed in the United States. What is new,
Crozier tells us, is the invasion of rationalism. It is the change in
thinking necessary for people to become familiar with the "world of
abstract reasoning." Current history is not a real struggle between social
groups fighting over material interests and various socio-economic
priorities, Crozier tells us. It is the place where two phantasmagorical
entities confront each other: . rationalism in the service of growth and
the irresponsible anarchy of those frightened by the change. This "socio–
logical" vision would hardly be worth refuting were it not for the
ideological significance that it might acquire, since Crozier also recom–
mends to the blacks not demands for power but "an intellectual muta–
tion" (sic!), and since all this culminates in the Great Celebration of the
American Way of Life, which produces today new individualities which
are inventive and dynamic.
