Crisis of Progress, Antifascism and Social Sciences: the Journée d’histoire et de psychologie du travail et des techniques (Toulouse, june 1941)

Abstract

In June 1941 a colloquium on “the psychology and the history of technics and labour” was organized in Toulouse with the participation of several important social sciences researchers of the interwar period (Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Marcel Mauss, Georges Friedmann, Ignace Meyerson and others). This scientific encounter was one of the rare moments of collective reflection that could be held during World War II in the French social sciences in spite of the violent political charges brought against them by Vichy regime. This 1941 colloquium attests the efforts made in order to reaffirm the social and political role of the social sciences of the Durkheimian tradition: in a context of strong politicisation, their intellectual project, because it had to be defended, was clarified and expanded in its different aspects: the scientific mode of organisation it involved, the particular perspective it adopted on the social and political crisis and also the affinities it had with the ideology of progress.