Writing the history of science 

The history of science has undoubtedly been one of the most profoundly renewed fields of history in the last thirty years. Alongside the history of scientific institutions and the French-style historical epistemology of Koyré, Canguilhem and Foucault, the social studies of science have offered new perspectives. In these studies, the production of scientific knowledge is never separated from its conditions of possibility, i.e., the places where the work of discovery is carried out, the instruments or machines that make it possible, the practices of scientists or the forms of publication and circulation of knowledge. Over the decades, an original questionnaire has been developed. It has focused attention on the relationship between knowledge and know-how, on the links forged between science, war and power, and on the encounters between Western science and knowledge of the natural world in territories discovered, colonized or dominated by Europeans.

This three-volume work takes stock, albeit provisionally, of these new perspectives. Edited by Dominique Pestre and published by Éditions du Seuil, it is entitled Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. Each volume has had its own editor : Stéphane Van Damme for the first, " From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment ", Kapil Raj and Otto Sibum for the second, " Modernité et Globalisation ", dedicated to a long ^XIXth century that began in the last third of the ^XVIIIth century, and Christophe Bonneuil and Dominique Pestre themselves for the third, entitled " The century of technosciences (since 1914) ".

In this second Collège de France history debate, I'll be presenting this major undertaking (almost 1 500 pages and 70 authors) in the company of two of its authors : Dominique Pestre and Kapil Raj, who are both directors of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.