Henri Mendras
Henri Mendras (16 May 1927 – 5 November 2003) was a French sociologist.
Biography
Henri Mendras was born in Boulogne-Billancourt into a wealthy military family. Mendras spent his childhood in the village of Novis in Aveyron, France's leading sheep farming department. It is there that the author, who presents himself in his autobiographical writings as "son of the castle", had access to a certain intimacy with the world of breeding.
Mendras studied with sociologists Georges Gurvitch and Georges Friedmann. He made his mark, at the age of 40, in 1967, with the publication of his book La Fin des paysans (The End of the Peasants), in which he noted the disappearance of the peasant mode of production, characterized by a subsistence economy accompanied by a great deal of autonomy in the organization of the production process and work, even though the peasant was subject to it. He also shows that the French peasantry is gradually replaced by agricultural professionals who organize their production according to a capitalist mode. It is precisely the integration of the work of the land and peasant production into the global capitalist society that causes the destructuring of the foundations of the peasant economy — a phenomenon he calls "capitalist integration". In France, which is very attached to rural values, this book provoked a polemic.
Considered a sociologist specializing in peasantry and rural societies, to which he devoted several works, he published La Seconde Révolution française in 1988, in which he noted, according to a "cosmographic approach to society," the now decisive weight of a "central constellation" as well as the decline of the symbols of the Republic, the abandonment of statism and national identity in favor of decentralization, liberalism and globalization.
His field of analysis then shifted from French society to European societies. He worked at the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques (OFCE). In what he considered his intellectual autobiography: Comment devenir sociologue ou les mémoires d'un vieux mandarin, Mendras describes the birth, the university circuits, the systems and traditions of sociology.
Henri Mendras died in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.
Mendras' top
In the context of studies on the moyennisation[1] of society, Mendras modeled graphically in the form of a top the middle class, in the center of the top, surmounted by the wealthy classes and surmounting the poorest classes.
Works
- Sociologie de la campagne française (1959)
- La fin des paysans (1967; 1970)
- Éléments de sociologie (1967)
- Les sociétés paysannes (1976; 1995)
- Voyage au pays de l'utopie rustique (1979; 1992)
- La sagesse et le désordre (1980)
- La Seconde Révolution française, 1965-1984 (1988)
- Six manières d’être européen (1990; with Dominique Schnapper)
- Le changement social (1991; with Michel Forsé)
- Atlas européen. 340 millions d'européens (1995; with Frédéric Reillier)
- Le paradigme informatique (1995; with Christopher Freeman)
- Le Recrutement des élites en Europe (1995; with Ezra Suleiman)
- Comment devenir sociologue ou les mémoires d'un vieux mandarin (1995)
- Les grands auteurs de la sociologie: Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber (1996; with Jean Étienne)
- Convergence et divergence des sociétés (1996; with Michel Forsé)
- L'Europe des européens. Sociologie de l’Europe occidentale (1997)
- L’œil du sociologue (1998; with Dominique Jacques-Jouvenot)
- La société française en tendance, 1975-1995. Deux décennies de changements (1998; with Louis Dirn)
- Les grands thèmes de la sociologie par les grands sociologues (1999; with Jean Étienne)
- Le sociologue et son terrain (2000; with Marco Oberti)
- La France que je vois (2002)
- Français, comme vous avez changé (2004; with Laurence Duboys-Fresney)
Notes
- ↑ The idea of a French society with nothing but a middle class, a 'middlised' society in which class cleavages have been erased.
