SOCIOLOGY, SCIENCE FICTION AND BEYOND? ETHICS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY

Abstract

At the twilight of his research on rurality, after announcing the civilizational tipping point of the end of the peasantry, sociologist Henri Mendras responds with fiction and speculation to the question he posed twelve years earlier: “What will a world without peasants be like?”. Through a historical, epistemological and literary approach, this article proposes to conceive Voyage au pays de l’utopie rustique (1979) as a gesture of “ethics of responsibility”. We study Henri Mendras’ novel through the prism of its hybridity, between human and social sciences and science fiction, problematizing its poetic and generic resonance as much as its epistemological and historical implications. More broadly, the hypothesis behind this article is to consider the metabolization of science fiction in the humanities and social sciences as a direct consequence of the crisis of modernity and the Anthropocene.