Dominique Schnapper, a sociologist and political scientist, was a member of the French Constitutional Council from 2001 to 2010. She is a of director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the president of the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism (MAHJ), in Paris. She was born in 1934. She is, notably, the author of La France de l’intégration (1991), La Communauté des citoyens (1994), La Relation à l’autre (1998), La Démocratie providentielle (2002) and Qu’est-ce que l’intégration? (Gallimard, 2007), which was awarded a prize for best political book).

Dominique Schnapper is a leading French sociologist and political scientist. She is the daughter of Raymond Aron and she was married to the late art historian Antoine Schnapper.
In her memoirs, she evokes growing up in the shadow of her famous father; the beginning of her career as a sociologist in the late 1950s, during the early days of the French school of sociology, led by Crozier, Touraine, Mendras and Morin; her decisive encounter with Pierre Bourdieu, who was then a young teaching assistant at the Sorbonne; her Italian sojourn in Bologna, with her husband, in the early years of her marriage; her return to Paris and the beginning of her career as an academic, at a time when the teaching of sociology was undergoing major changes; her break with Bourdieu; the post-1968 environment.
She focuses on her teaching career, when she published her most important works. She explains the specific characteristics of her approach and of her works, and she gives us her opinion on the developments that French sociology has undergone until the present day.

• A brilliant overview of French sociology over the past half-century, by a leading intellectual.