Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - RMZ

The Mertonian norms (1973), these institutional imperatives taken to compass the ethos of modern science, are by now well established. Communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organised skepticism nowadays find an echo in all the legitimate tools, procedures, and movements for regulating scientific practices: peer review, (societal) impact assessment, performance-based funding, replicability crisis, open science movement, project-based funding, etc. The social sciences are no exception to this codification (Imber 1998).

However, this moral and technical codification is subject to different policy interpretations depending on the political context in force. Under a socialist, liberal or conservative government, the framings and uses of science will vary, in terms of the subjects addressed, the methods employed and the scholars mobilised. Each institutional imperative is subject to a semantic shift that reveals underlying epistemic beliefs. This is true of the notions of neutrality and engagement, in the face of which the social sciences seem particularly vulnerable to reformulation (Fassin and Ibos 2022). All this while the social sciences continue to be publicly discredited for their inability to provide ‘plug-and-play’ solutions that can be implemented easily and quickly in evidence-based policies (Parsons 2002).

My contribution highlights these political redefinitions of the standards that should constitute the ethos of the social sciences. Are they thought to be achievable? Using the example of parliamentary debates involving this disciplinary field in France, Germany and the UK (2012-2022), I reveal the ‘general politics’ of truth (Foucault 2000) that this paradoxical injunction leads to by means of a critical discourse analysis.