La Maison des sciences de l'homme de Paris

To be published in February in the "54" collection of the Éditions de la MSH

"La Maison des sciences de l'homme de Paris. Une utopie braudélienne réalisée. 1963-2005. La genèse d'une nouvelle culture des sciences sociales en France" from Marcel Fournier

There are many of us who wish that our institutions had a greater concern for their own history, for the reasons for their success and also for their limitations or even their failures.

Alain Touraine, « Hommage à Clemens Heller », 2002

The project to create an Institute of Social Sciences in the 1950s and the creation, in Paris in 1963, by Fernand Braudel, of the first Maison des sciences de l'homme deserved this important work of returning to the sources. Reconstructing the history of an institution in pursuit of a scientific objective requires both qualifying its achievements and being able to situate them in the institutional context of research in the humanities and social sciences. From the end of the 1960s to the year 2005, the changes in this field were numerous, profound and significant, which did not prevent the Braudelian utopia from continuing to develop.