Warren, Jean-Philippe
The replacement of Le Playsian sociology by “doctrinal” sociology. Sociology and Catholicism in French Canada
- 2018.
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Even within the most clerical Canadian circles, Le Playsian studies enjoyed a certain audience and popularity at the turn of the 20th century. Subsequently, this form of sociology gradually disappeared from the French-Canadian intellectual landscape. Whereas Le Play’s doctrine appealed to some conservative or nationalist French Canadians, they tended to disagree with the dissident disciples of the School of Social Science, Edmond Demolins and Henri de Tourville. The reasons for the collective disinterest, which ultimately led to the almost complete marginalization of Le Play’s work in French Canada in the interwar years therefore lay in a displacement of the epistemological-political foundations of sociological practice, and not only in circumstances peripheral to social science itself.