Bourgeoisie Interdisciplinary Borrowings in the Study of a Social Group

The paper presents a reading of research on the bourgeoisie that has been carried out in various countries since the Sixties in three disciplines – history, anthropology and sociology. It attempts to show how borrowing among the disciplines contributes to the process of producing knowledge in the human and social sciences. It has no critical aim; rather, the comparison of successive research results reveals blind spots in the various approaches. The analysis focuses on the results, rather than on the processes leading up to the explicit or implicit borrowing. It attempts to show the advantages of decomparmentalising, from a disciplinary as well as a national standpoint. This interdisciplinary approach is rightly considered to be the prerequisite for scientific inventiveness – the position on which this journal is based and which it firmly supports.