Rationalisation, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Kunstwollen</Emphasis> et Moyens Techniques de L’Expressivité

Cet article cherche à retracer quelques-uns des éléments à la fois empiriques, historiques et sociologiques de la Sociologie de la musique de Max Weber. Même si ce dernier s’intéresse en premier lieu au processus de rationalisation qui traverse la civilisation occidentale, sa Sociologie de la musique est fondée sur l’idée de médium technique, qu’il explore dans plusieurs directions différentes. Nous revisitons ici cette idée au moyen de quelques exemples tirés de la musique occidentale et en particulier du répertoire romantique pour le piano.     

Échange,Contrat et Civilisation

With the word «exchange», the confusion is often made between the savage of social contract and the savage of the market. This paper would a contrario set the one against the other, in showing how the two characters agree in fact to two absolutely different kinds of argumentation, which the Enlightenment led to coexist according to very distinct issues. Then the modern term of «civil society» has never solved this ambiguity and we find here the matter of several teachings, because it is possible to think at once about what is a «concept», a «historicity» and a «citizen». Methodology, anthropology and politics come therefore into sight as three horizons of an analysis which does not want to reduce the equivocation, but rather to measure its wealth.     

Livres, Pouvoir et Théorie

This article tries to understand what kind of theories is produced in books and only in books, without any institutional or scientific guarantee. Two cases are successively studied: a method for accountants and a treatise on nobility. Both contain theoretical proposals, although neither accounting nor knowledge of genealogies or aristocratic habits was considered more than mere practical competence at the time (the end of the xvii ^th century in France). The aim of this inquiry is to suggest that identifying material and social conditions of some evolution of thought (context of composition of an important book, circulation of printed materials or of information, literary market, relationships of the authors with powerful patrons) does not differ that much from a « Zeitgeist » analysis, as long as a book is viewed as a result or a product and its own action is not taken into account. This action consists here in an elevation of accounting and genealogical techniques to theory or even to quasi-political philosophy. Both case-studies then try to show that the adaptation of a book to political action is not an available explanation for historians; rather, it is nothing other than the fact of an interpretation of theoretical needs aroused by this action.