Lost in the crowd

Abstract

The text examines a forgotten public debate between Serge Moscovici and Pierre Bourdieu which was held in Paris in 1982 on account of the former’s book, “The Age of the Crowds”. The interest if not the actuality of the debate resides, as it is attempted to show, in the inherent boundaries and underlying disciplinary ambiguities which pervade the field of social sciences as in the case here between social psychology and sociology. At the time the encounter concluded, a truce between the two parties had not yet been achieved.