Histoires pragmatiques. A Conversation with Simona Cerutti and Yves Cohen

Based at the EHESS in Paris, Simona Cerutti and Yves Cohen are among today’s most authoritative advocates of a “pragmatic” or “pragmatist” approach to historical research. By these terms we mean both a focus on the practices of actors as an object of study, and a methodological concern for the ways the actors themselves justify those practices on the level of theory. The way “histoire pragmatique” has drawn on classical philosophical Pragmatism will be at the centre of this interview. Cerutti’s area of specialization is the history of modern Italy. In particular, she has studied the genesis of social groups and the transformation of the understanding of justice in Piedmont, with a focus on the link that Ancien Régime societies established between the actual possession of a status and its theorization. Her two most recent books are Giustizia sommaria. Pratiche e ideali di giustizia in una societè di Ancien Régime (Milan 2003), and Etrangers. Étude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Paris 2012). Yves Cohen is a historian of the twentieth century. His research has been principally devoted to a comparative investigation of the 20th Century’s passion for leadership and command in different geographical contexts. In his Le siècle des chefs. Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l’autorité (Paris 2013) he compares Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany to the liberalism and the development of Taylorism in France and America, from the viewpoint of intellectual history and from that of a history of practices. He recently published Histoires pragmatiques (Paris, 2016) with Francis Chateauraynaud. The interview was conducted in French and later translated by Roberto Gronda and Tullio Viola.