International relations in France : writing between discipline and state / Henrik Breitenbauch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Breitenbauch, Henrik.

Series:

Worlding beyond the West ; 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

International relations--Research--France.

International relations.

International relations--Research--United States.

International relations--Sociological aspects.

International relations--Cross-cultural studies.

Physical Description:

xii, 232 p. : ill.

Edition:

1st edition

Place of Publication:

Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2013.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Why is the French International Relations (IR) discipline different from the transnational-American discipline? By analysing argument structures in research articles across time, this book shows how the discipline in France is caught between the American character of the discipline and the French state as regulator of legitimate forms of expression. Concretely, French research arguments are less explicit about what their propositions are and what academic discussions they draw on and add to than their transnational-American counterparts. Based on a comparative case study of French and American IR research from 1950 to 2011, the book is a major contribution to the meta-IR literature on global, regional and national traditions of IR. The challenge to the French discipline of whether and how to position itself in relation to the evolving American discipline is in many ways exemplary for other non-American national IR disciplines, and the choices as well as the structural conditions underlying the French case are relevant to all non-Western disciplines. The comparative analysis moreover reveals that the modern American discipline -- what is considered as recognisable social science -- takes shape only during the 1970s. The book thus offers new knowledge about the discipline's international development as such. Both case and methodology are interesting to larger audiences outside IR, in the history and sociology of social science, contrastive rhetoric, as well as French and cultural studies.

Contents:

Cover

Title

Copyright

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction and method

Introduction

The paradoxical case of French IR

Inter/national: French versus transnational-American IR

How the argument is construed

Chapter overviews including methods and sources

2 Theory: legitimate forms of expression

Towards a political sociology of legitimate forms of expression

The meta-IR debate: proposal for a structure

A heuristic model of variables in national IR disciplines

Form and the domestic internal-external dynamic

Archaeology: socially dependent knowledge production

Domestic-external variables: contents and dynamics

Moving from content to form

Social science between science and literature, university and the public sphere

Genre as sociological structure: contrastive rhetoric and composition studies

Conclusion

3 Less Lego: French IR origins and arguments in a comparative perspective

The differentiation of academic from societal discourses

Discourses on the "international

Institutional origins of French IR

Media for academic knowledge production in French political science

French versus Scandinavian integration into transnational-American IR

Sixty years of IR research practice compared

Justification of data sets, methods of selection

Findings

4 Close readings: dissertational patterns versus Lego science

Theory: linguistic turn/turn to practice/epistemology

Contrastive rhetoric

Contrastive studies on the French language

Characteristics of the "dissertation

The dissertation versus the modern social science research article

Examples of standardisation including style manuals

Progressive Lego convergence: transnational-American examples

Close reading of French research practice.

Referencing through allusions

Concluding sections

Absent or weak thesis statements

Thesis statements with qualifiers

Identifications of theoretical ramifications

5 Writing like a state

High culture as state in practice

The continuity of the French state as aristocratic Republicanism

The reproduction of literary Cartesianism

The political sociology of a genre

6 Conclusion: French IR and social science writing between state and discipline

The troubled methodological origins of IR as a discipline

Future perspectives

Notes

References

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on metadata supplied by the publisher and other sources.

ISBN:

9781138289444

1138289442

9780203403167

0203403169

9781135044299

1135044295

OCLC:

849935779