Conclusion: Common Sense and Scholarly Sense

Abstract

In The Craft of Sociology, the authors attribute a central role to the “epistemological break” through which the sociologist must attain detachment from the false evidences of common sense and, in constructing his object, avoid the snares of spontaneous sociology and the illusions of transparency.1 In the case of a French researcher working on French society, the situation with which the authors are primarily concerned, “familiarity with the social universe constitutes for the sociologist the epistemological obstacle par excellence” (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron, 1968: 27). The sociologist is permeated to some extent with the same common sense as those he studies and must thus break free from all the stereotypes it entails.