Release of " Cinq vies de recherche " under the supervision of Pierre Lassave

This special issue retraces the intellectual itineraries of the five "pioneers" at the origin of the journal Archives de sociologie des religions, founded in 1956 and which became the Archives de sciences sociales des religions in 1973. Two of them, Henri Desroche (1914-1994) and Émile Poulat (1920-2014), are former priests who broke away from the Church; two others, François-André Isambert (1924-2017) and Jacques Maître (1925-2013), took part in the Resistance before militating for a time alongside Christian progressivism. Finally, Jean Séguy (1925-2007), who joined them in 1960, had had to give up studies in the Society of Jesus. All of them embraced science in order to make people understand and explain something that had marked their lives. We owe them the deconfessionalization of religious sociology and the establishment of an interdisciplinary and comparative space internationally recognized as the "French school of sociology of religions" in the triple heritage of Durkheim, Mauss and Weber. Their trajectories intersect sociology’s trajectories in France, from its "second birth" after the Liberation to its specialization, in a context marked by the rise of the CNRS and the VIth section of the École pratique des hautes études, created in 1948 and which became the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 1975.
The result of several years of collective work coordinated by Pierre Lassave, based in particular on the personal archives of the researchers, these five biographies shed new light on the intellectual history of the France of the Glorious Thirty. Existential torment is their common denominator. The biographers come from different disciplines and generations, thus offering complementary perspectives on the birth of the social sciences of religions.

(Text from OpenEdition)