Intérêt, rationalité et culture

Interest, Rationality and Culture. This article uses the recent debate between James Coleman and William H. Sewell, Jr., as a foil to survey the struggle between two rising currents within the field of American sociology : so-called "Rational Action Theory" and historical and cultural sociology. Indeed, beyond these two authors, two opposed epistemological poles and two divergent conceptions of social action and of social science are found to be in contention. On the one hand, the offensive of homo oeconomicus, which Coleman partakes of, has found a most supporting environment in the resurgence of microsociology and theory (including the micro-macro debate), the proliferation of economic models throughout the social sciences and in the "invention" of Analytical Marxism. On the other hand, the disrepute, at once political and scientific, into which modernization theory and functionalist evolutionism fell in the 60s has given a new life to comparative historical sociology. Having noted the aporias into which each of these approaches leads when taken to an extreme, it is shown that Rational Action Theory remains trapped within an ahistorical and ungendered conception of the individual and an atomistic social on- tology and that it has yet to produce unequivocal and universal criteria of rationality. The social success of the rational choice model in the American academic community is due essentially to its elective affinity with the dominant vision of the social order as the mere aggregation of freely-made individual decisions and to its function of derealization and of exorcism of the threat of collective action.