The 15th issue of the journal “Histoire et politique” from the History Science Po Center is now available and includes the following articles:
Faire école : les alumni universitaires indiens de la London School of Economics par Marie Scot
This paper retraces the careers of the Indian Alumni who were trained at the London School of Economics in the first half of the twentieth century and who became professional economists. How many were they? What did they study in London? What positions did they hold in the academic or political fields once back in India? Did these mobile go-betweens play a crucial role in making cross-cultural interactions possible? The statistical treatment of the alumni directories and the content analysis of their early works provide some insights into the question of knowledge dissemination.
La circulation transnationale du livre : un instrument de la guerre froide culturelle par Ioana Popa
This article proposes a viewpoint about the Cold War based on East-West cultural transfers and, more specifically, on transnational book circulation. The analysis deals with the book flows from Western to Eastern European countries initiated after the “thaw”. Focused on the actors of this transfer, as well as on their practices and editorial projects, it points out the anti-communist struggle strategies based on transnational circulation of printing and on translation. This approach adds new perspectives about the Cold War going beyond a simple opposition between two political “blocs” that were hermetically sealed and a monolithic system view on Eastern Europe.
L’Unesco : une plate-forme pour les circulations transnationales de savoirs et d’idées (1945-1980) by Chloé Maurel
From 1945 to 1980, Unesco played an important role in the international and transnational cultural relationships. Unesco’s action for the production, the diffusion and the circulation of ideas and knowledge was intense and manyfold. This action was made by many means: creation of institutions, organization of conferences, publication of books, realization of operational field projects. Nevertheless, the realizations did not always correspond to the ambitions: they were often occidentalocentric. As the example of NWICO (new world information and communication order) shows, these circulations of ideas and knowledge often reflected the relations of domination in the world. The East-West major project, as the History of Mankind, did not obtain all the impact that Unesco hoped in the world opinion. In spite of these shortcomings, Unesco contributed in an important way to international circulations of ideas and knowledge in the world.
Contribution à l’analyse de la circulation internationale des idées : le « moment 1900 » de la philosophie française et la philosophie pragmatiste américaine by Romain Pudal
This analysis of pragmatism’s receptions in France at the beginning of the twentieth century proposes several systems of interpretation about the international circulation of ideas. This article attempts to highlight the social and intellectual mechanisms which contribute to the diffusion of foreign intellectual work in French thought but also the obstacles they encountered.
Le polycentrisme des marges. Les « filières » belge et québécoise d’importation de la philosophie politique étasunienne contemporaine en France” (Mathieu Hauchecorne)
This article aims to analyze how the reception of John Rawls and US theories of justice among French philosophers has been impacted by their previous introduction in francophone philosophy departments in Belgium and Quebec from the start of the 1990s. We thus stress the necessity to distinguish linguistic frontiers and national frontiers in the study of the international circulation of ideas. We first explain why these francophone margins happened to be more open to US political philosophy than the French philosophical field. Then we show how this prior reception within the francophone periphery helped to accelerate the French reception. We study lastly how US theories of justice got politicized through this process, and translated according to the classifications prevailing in the Canadian and Belgian political fields.