Canguilhem, Georges (1904–1995)

He is known mainly as the intellectual éminence grise lurking behind some of the most influential post-World War II French social theorists, notably Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Although he was an influential teacher and thinker, he published few major texts and, to date, these are not readily accessible in English translation. Born in southwest France, he was taught in Paris by the philosopher Émile Cartier (1868–1951), otherwise known as Alain, before entering the École Normale Supérieure in the same year, 1924, as Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), and Paul Nizan (1905–40). He wrote a postgraduate thesis on Auguste Comte under the supervision of Célestin Bouglé (1870–1940) and taught philosophy at Toulouse from 1936 to 1940 while commencing medical studies. He was active in the Resistance in the Auvergne during the Vichy regime and resumed teaching at Strasbourg in 1944. He submitted his doctoral dissertation in medicine in 1943. This was published in 1950, and republished many times after 1966 as On the Normal and the Pathological – famously, in 1978, with an introduction by Foucault (whose dissertation on madness and unreason had been examined by Canguilhem in 1960). He succeeded Gaston Bachelard (1884– 1962) as Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1955 and retired in 1971. He specialized in the history and philosophy of science, with particular reference to the life sciences, publishing Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences (1977 [trans. 1988]). He made important contributions to epistemology and his discussions of health and disease relate as pertinently to the societal as to the individual condition. DEREK ROBBINS

capitalism

The study of capitalism represents a classical topic in sociology. Both Karl Marx and Max Weber were, for example, deeply interested in capitalism and made it their main focus of research. During much of the twentieth century, on the other hand, sociologists have tended to take capitalism for granted, often neglecting to discuss it in their analyses of society. Exceptions exist, and there are also some signs that capitalism is currently enjoying a comeback as a central topic in sociology. We are, for example, witnessing an increasing number of studies on the theme of “varieties of capitalism.”