Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; List of figures; List of tables; Preface; Acknowledgments; 1 Introduction and method; Introduction; The paradoxical case of French IR; Inter/national: French versus transnational-American IR; How the argument is construed; Chapter overviews including methods and sources; 2 Theory: legitimate forms of expression; Towards a political sociology of legitimate forms of expression; The meta-IR debate: proposal for a structure; A heuristic model of variables in national IR disciplines; Form and the domestic internal-external dynamic
Archaeology: socially dependent knowledge productionDomestic-external variables: contents and dynamics; Moving from content to form; Social science between science and literature, university and the public sphere; Genre as sociological structure: contrastive rhetoric and composition studies; Conclusion; 3 Less Lego: French IR origins and arguments in a comparative perspective; The differentiation of academic from societal discourses; Discourses on the international -- Institutional origins of French IR; Media for academic knowledge production in French political science
French versus Scandinavian integration into transnational-American IRSixty years of IR research practice compared; Justification of data sets, methods of selection; Findings; Conclusion; 4 Close readings: dissertational patterns versus Lego science; Theory: linguistic turn/turn to practice/epistemology; Contrastive rhetoric; Contrastive studies on the French language; Characteristics of the dissertation -- The dissertation versus the modern social science research article; Examples of standardisation including style manuals; Progressive Lego convergence: transnational-American examples
Close reading of French research practiceReferencing through allusions; Concluding sections; Absent or weak thesis statements; Thesis statements with qualifiers; Identifications of theoretical ramifications; Conclusion; 5 Writing like a state; High culture as state in practice; The continuity of the French state as aristocratic Republicanism; The reproduction of literary Cartesianism; The political sociology of a genre; 6 Conclusion: French IR and social science writing between state and discipline; The troubled methodological origins of IR as a discipline; Future perspectives; Notes
Summary
Why is the French International Relations (IR) discipline different from the transnational-American discipline? By analysing argument structures in research articles across time, this book shows how the discipline in France is caught between the American character of the discipline and the French state as regulator of legitimate forms of expression. Concretely, French research arguments are less explicit about what their propositions are and what academic discussions they draw on and add to than their transnational-American counterparts. Based on a comparative
