Abstract
This article proposes a new understanding of the constraints and opportunities that lead intellectuals engaged in different political and social fields to create alternative modes of resistance to domination. The study of the Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad offers insights into the social conditions of this mode of committed scholarship. On the one hand, this article applies Sayad’s theory of immigration to his transnational intellectual engagements. It establishes how immigrants’ intellectual work are conditioned by their trajectories, both before and after leaving their country, and by the stages of emigration (from playing a role in the society of origin to becoming caught up in the reality of the host society). On the other hand, the article illuminates the constraints and the spaces of possible action intellectuals face while moving across national universes and disparate political and academic fields. Sayad’s marginal position within the academy constrained him to work for the French and Algerian governments and international organizations while he was simultaneously engaged with political dissidents, unionists, writers, and social movements. In tracking Sayad’s roles as an academic, expert and public sociologist, the article uncovers the conditions that grounded improbable alliances between those fields and produced new forms of critique and political action. The article concludes by drawing out some reflections that ‘collective intellectual’ engagements elicit to the sociology of intellectuals.
Keywords
What has always struck me [about Sayad] is both his extraordinary determination to make an x-ray of reality, through an ethnographically based work close to human beings, and his availability to collaborate with politics, but in the most discreet and modest way that exists. Sayad was also an activist observer. Not an activist in the traditional sense of the word, but an activist observer. That is to say, he acted, he helped the cause and at the same time, he kept analyzing.
In an academic world characterized by unequal access to the ‘attention space’ (Collins, 1998), outsider intellectuals are typically compelled to engage in modes of work that adhere to the rules and expectations of academia. Nevertheless, some marginal intellectuals develop strategies that are distinct from dominant norms, creating alternative positions that challenge usual practice. This article aims to uncover the social conditions that ground marginal intellectuals’ work with other groups beyond the academy based on the career path of a pioneer in the sociology of immigration in France: Abdelmalek Sayad (1933–1998).
Sayad’s work is acknowledged today for its groundbreaking contribution to the understanding of immigration (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2000; Saada, 2000). I argue that his innovative approach was grounded by his participation in different social, academic, and political fields. Sayad’s marginal position in the French academic field and the lack of interest given to the study of immigration at the time compelled him to remain at arm’s length from academia. He sought to produce knowledge in collaboration with scholars, political activists, and unionists, and with the communities he was analyzing, in the process translating his research into political action.
Sayad’s work aimed to construct modes of collective critique and mobilization with different ‘specific intellectuals’ (writers, artists, scholars) and political actors. His intellectual work chimes with the figure of ‘collective intellectual’ as described by Bourdieu: those intellectuals who, together with activists, define problems and action; that is to say, who endeavor ‘to produce and disseminate instruments of defense against symbolic domination’ (Bourdieu, 2001/2003, p. 20) and contribute to collective political work. They differ from ‘government intellectuals’ who adhere to the social order and use their prestige and knowledge to legitimize its perpetuation (Noiriel, 2010). They also differ from ‘experts’ by refusing to intervene merely as advisors, allowing for the instrumentalization of knowledge by bureaucratic powers (Sapiro, 2009a). They are also different from ‘universal’ or ‘total’ intellectuals who stand as prophets in all domains, as master figures of truth and monopolizers of knowledge (Bourdieu, 2001/2003). Collective intellectuals, in turn, are in some sense similar to ‘specific intellectuals’ who intervene publicly based on their specialist knowledge in a precise field (Foucault, 2001). However, collective intellectuals go even further, by collaboratively producing empirically grounded knowledge of the social world. Based on the combination of different competencies and experiences, this collaboration of scholars engaged in activist work, and activists involved in research, seeks to define new forms of critique and mobilization able to contest domination.
This article aims to contribute to the sociology of intellectuals and modes of interventions (Baert, 2012; Eyal, 2003; Sapiro, 2009a) by studying the work of a collective intellectual – a notion that has been often theorized (Bourdieu, 1963, 2001/2003; Noiriel, 2010), but rarely analyzed in practice. The notion of collective intellectual itself could be seen as a contradiction: how can an individual be used to conceptualize a collective action? In examining Sayad’s work, I am particularly interested in exploring the modes of collaborative engagements he set up as an intellectual. This study brings insight into the conditions behind improbable alliances between actors from different fields. It also explores the intellectual strategies that set the basis for new politics for social justice.
This article also sheds light into the sociology of intellectuals by applying Sayad’s theory of the ‘stages of emigration’ (les âges de l’émigration). Sayad argued that the forms immigration takes are determined by both the social conditions of emigration and the trajectory of migrants in the host society, sketching three stages to characterize Algerian immigration to France in the twentieth century (Sayad, 2004, pp. 28–62). In this article, I show how his work evinces his own experience as an immigrant intellectual, as it itself went through the stages of emigration he described.
Let us start by outlining the historical background for the emergence of collective intellectuals. I begin by showing how Sayad’s experience in colonial Algeria and his collaboration with Bourdieu during the war of decolonization informed his sociology, grounded on a plurality of views. Then, I uncover the social conditions that led Sayad to practice different types of intellectual work in both Algeria and France. By tracing Sayad’s social origins and the position he occupied in various fields, I illustrate how his work as a collective intellectual was shaped by the stages of emigration he underwent. Finally, I reflect on how Sayad’s work across geographical spaces and social fields could contribute to our understanding of how to transcend the boundaries of relatively autonomous fields, giving a space for the emergence of new knowledge and new types of intellectual interventions.
The origins of a new intellectual practice
Sayad conceived of sociology as an instrument for social change. He sought to employ the scientific understanding of social reality as a basis for political action, prompting him to collaborate with groups outside his discipline. In the next paragraphs, I examine where his conception of sociology came from and how the figure of the collective intellectual emerged.
Sayad was born into a small rural family in Kabylie, Algeria, in 1933. Through his father’s contacts, Sayad was able to secure admission to a school mostly for Europeans, which later allowed him to enroll in the most prestigious institution for teacher training in Algeria: the École Normal d’Instituteurs of Bouzaréah (ENIB). His career was also defined by his activism during the Algerian liberation war against the French Empire from 1954 to 1962. Working as a schoolteacher while studying psychology at the University of Algiers (1958–1962), Sayad participated in the liberal movement against colonialism but was not completely aligned with the violent methods and views of the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front).
Another determinant element in Sayad’s early career was his collaboration with Pierre Bourdieu, whom he met at the University of Algiers in 1958. Both were profoundly shocked by the war and motivated by the need to have an impact in politics. For them, denouncing torture and calling for the end of colonization were certainly important but not enough. Between 1959 and 1963, they traveled around the country to conduct research on the transformation of Algerian society during wartime (Goodman & Silverstein, 2009; Wacquant, 2004). Their goal was to understand if and how the relations of domination they observed would persist beyond colonization, and to propose how the Algerian masses could transcend the precarious situation in which colonialism, war, and capitalism had put them (Pérez, 2020).
It was not by chance that Bourdieu’s idea of the collective intellectual arose during the decolonization era and reappeared and was conceptualized when the most brutal effects of neoliberalism regularized precarity in Europe (Bourdieu, 2001/2003). For Bourdieu and Sayad, there was an urgent need to break with those who sought to legitimize the inequalities of the colonial order, while avoiding prophetical discourses giving false hope to the colonized. Bourdieu and Sayad went beyond the interventions typical of ‘specific intellectuals’ based on situated knowledge (e.g., Vidal-Naquet, 1958) by undertaking their collective work in two ways. First, by bringing together economists, sociologists, historians, philosophers, ethnologists, writers, and activists (Pérez, 2020). The conjunction of Bourdieu’s scholarly disposition and Sayad’s anticolonial activism characterized their work together. Second, by proposing a politics of education to the masses, Bourdieu and Sayad intended to provide people with resources to better adapt to their economic and political situation (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964; Bourdieu et al., 1963). Their goal was to revolutionize how the social sciences frame the colonial order, to develop new scientific knowledge for the understanding of domination, and to construct a pedagogy able to foster the mental structures necessary for social emancipation.
Sayad maintained this conception of sociology as a political instrument in postcolonial times. However, this was neither a choice nor derived from a straightforward vocational path. How did Sayad manage to succeed in a social space and academic field that were new for him, and where his work was not acknowledged? In what follows, I argue that Sayad’s underlying strategy behind his intellectual work was conditioned by his immigrant trajectory and his marginal position in the academy.
Modes of engagements of an immigrant intellectual
Sayad’s relatively late tenure at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1977 and the meager acknowledgment of his academic work while he was alive 1 impelled him to extend his work beyond the academy, while seeking to maintain a reputation for intellectual autonomy and using sociology as an instrument for political change.
Sayad’s research with other scholars and his collaboration with senior officials, political opponents, and community activists took different forms across time. An analogy can be drawn between Sayad’s framework of the stages of emigration to analyze Algerian migration to France and the development of his own public work. Though Sayad’s scholarly disposition and social trajectory are quite different from those of the Algerian workers and families he analyzed, his intellectual engagements are closely linked with his evolving status as migrant, vis-a-vis both Algeria and France. Following Sayad’s own methodology of the three stages, 2 an analysis that considers his dispositions and social position, both before and after leaving Algeria, can help elucidate the direction of his thinking.
First stage: Returning to the origins of the revolution
In the first stage of emigration, the emigrant’s mind remains oriented toward the country of origin. Despite exile, emigrants stay attached to their society, by contributing from exile to improve the conditions that led to their emigration. The same applies to Sayad’s career as he arrived in France in 1963. As a first-generation emigrant, he sought in France what he was not able to do in Algeria: to contribute to his country through his sociological work and political action, even if from exile. To understand this mode of intellectual engagement, let us describe the conditions in which Sayad found himself after Algerian independence in 1962.
In Algeria, Sayad could not find a job. The internal struggle for power of the new Algerian elites and their distance from the principles that inspired the revolution, the marginalization of critical thought, and the short autonomy given by the new authorities to the Association for Demographic Economic and Social Research (ARDES), where he worked with Bourdieu, led him to seek refuge in France. There, the situation was not easy either. His aim was to pursue a doctorate on the uses of bilingualism – Arabic/Berber and French from a perspective of relations of power (Sayad, 1967). However, French academia mostly supported Orientalist studies, at a distance from the analysis of contemporary history from political, economic, and social perspectives (Brisson, 2008). Following the classic Orientalist approach on philology, literature, and medieval history – in which most of the young scholars coming from Algeria, other colonies, or new independent nations between 1955 and 1964 were enrolled – was not something Sayad wanted to do. After the rejection in 1963 of his candidacy to the CNRS, based on his research project on bilingualism, Sayad began a career as an independent contract researcher until 1977, when he finally secured tenure at the CNRS.
But Sayad did not wish to remain disconnected from the political situation in Algeria, which became increasingly authoritarian as the government centralized the economic sector and extended its political power across bureaucracies and trade unions (Stora, 2004). To act in his home country, Sayad proposed a new socialist Algeria based on his sociological research, all while keeping a foothold in Parisian academia.
Social change and political action informed by sociology
First, Sayad operated through the academic field. The last chapters of the books Travail et Travailleurs en Algérie (Labor and Workers in Algeria) and Le Déracinement (The Uprooting) (Bourdieu et al., 1963; Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964) are in a way proof that Bourdieu and Sayad were keeping abreast of the policies of Ben Bella’s new regime (1963–1965). Throughout these works on the urban working classes and on peasants and proletarians in rural areas, they proposed economic reforms against the interests of the power elite, against their mistaken representations of the Algerian peasantry without considering their material and cultural conditions of existence after colonialism, and against the bureaucracy that grounded agrarian policies.
Second, Sayad employed the findings of these books and other fieldwork he conducted with Bourdieu – such as on family consumption and on the living conditions in public housing – to intervene in the political field. He collaborated discreetly with the emergent clandestine party Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS – Front of Socialist Forces). His examination of the state policies behind the precarious living conditions of Algerians informed the party’s program. To have this influence, he reconnected with contacts he made in Kabylie during his anticolonial activism days. Sayad did not have extensive political capital and his discreet mode of collaboration evinced his disinterest in fame. He also refused any political compromise, for instance, by rejecting FFS’s ‘criminal mistake’ of supporting an armed uprising in September 1963, which led to severe state repression for peasant communities in Kabylie (Mahé, 2001).
Sayad actively participated in the drafting of the constitution of the FFS, especially its statutes of 1 October 1964. The principles of the organization were stated in its first lines:
The FFS is an avant-garde organization whose essential goal is the recovery of the Algerian Revolution and its continuity on the road to socialism based on the support of working-classes which alone guarantees social justice and freedom.
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The question for Sayad was how to trace the path of the Algerian Revolution toward socialism. In the handwritten pages and scattered ideas sketched in the draft of the FFS constitution, one observes Sayad’s insistence on the need to constitute a revolutionary vanguard party.
Much of the FFS’s political agenda was devoted to the agrarian revolution, which sought a radical transformation of traditional agriculture by giving material means and educational training to proletarians, sub-proletarians, and peasants to develop a self-management economy. When completing the final manuscript of Le Déracinement, late in 1963, Bourdieu and Sayad were writing a conclusion entitled ‘The Survival of Contradictions and the Agrarian Policy of an Independent Algeria’ (La survivance des contradictions et la politique agraire de l’Algérie indépendante), 4 which later became a part of their last chapter. They noted that the self-management policies that the government was applying in rural areas focused on a peasantry that did not exist anymore after the impact of capitalism and colonial settlements. The results of this research prompted Sayad to propose instead a ‘coherent and planned development of agrarian cooperation and self-management (agricultural and industrial).’ 5 His aim was to transform traditional agriculture and establish a program of rational education, as Durkheim had initially conceived for France (Durkheim, 1922/1956). In other words, the goal was to end the inequalities caused by colonialism by providing the masses with specific resources to better adapt to the transformations of the world in which they lived.
This sociologically based engagement shows how Sayad’s attempts to enter the French academic field did not inhibit his political goals, or indeed the political character of his research. Sayad worked with political opponents of the Algerian regime to pursue his scholarly and intellectual engagements.
In sum, the first stage of Sayad’s intellectual work as an immigrant intellectual was characterized by his attempt to render his sociological work relevant to the FFS, putting his sociology to work in the political arena. Sayad did not pretend to be knowledgeable on topics beyond his specialty, even less so publicly. His refusal to lock himself within the institutions of academia and his need to anchor his politics in his academic practice, and vice versa, were at the heart of his positioning as a collective intellectual. Drawing on extensive primary research, his intellectual collaboration with the FFS movement sought to deconstruct the political ideology of the Algerian government and to propose rational utopias to improve the destiny of Algerian masses.
Second stage: Subverting the order from inside
During the 1970s, a new type of emigration from Algeria to France arose. Previous emigration waves had accelerated the agricultural crisis and affected the social ties of rural Algeria. Within this context, the morphology of emigration changed: from emigrant workers to families. In this new stage of emigration, instead of maintaining an affiliation to the group of origin, emigrants were much more invested in their quality of life in France. Sayad’s own intellectual trajectory took a similar path.
Without a stable position in the academic field, obtaining only meager research funding outside the academy – especially from international organizations focused on development – Sayad returned briefly to Algeria to do some consulting for the Algerian state, the Algerian embassy in France, and the French government. The next section shows how Sayad navigated between antagonistic fields while seeking to maintain his autonomy.
When the conditions of the commissioned study become the case study
For Sayad, it was impossible to adhere completely to the policies of a government as centralist as Houari Boumédiène’s (1965–1976), which promoted Arabization (1966), put Islam at the heart of government, and imposed a constitution in 1976 that reinforced the power of the state (Stora, 2004). While Sayad rejected many offers to become a state official, he did accept a contract as an external expert. This status allowed him to engage in politics from a distance. According to Mohammed Harbi, a former high official and later a dissident in exile, ‘in the intellectual field, Sayad belonged to this category of Algerians who wanted to understand their country . . . to avoid general policy that did not correspond to anything.’ 6 His consultancy work on agrarian reform and industrial policy came not only from the recognition of his work with Bourdieu on the rural world, but also from his social capital. Many of his contacts from his activist years during the war later became ministers and high-ranking state officials.
Sayad’s research focused on the effects of agrarian reform. His personal correspondence reveals how he was first tasked with overseeing surveys on agrarian reform and proposing research projects on the social conditions of the policy’s beneficiaries.
Being an expert in a context where many other scholars were summoned to carry out research closely linked to the Algerian government’s concerns (Guerid, 2001) was in a way frustrating and limiting. Sayad had no margin for decision-making. He faced many dead ends, as the government did not consider his admonitions (Pérez, 2014). Sayad avoided endorsing any state policy, and he made his reservations known to close colleagues in government.
His critiques, however, did not only take the form of ‘moral indignation.’ The strength of his position lay in the fact that he considered expertise itself an object of study. In 1979, Sayad took a consulting job for the Algerian Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Revolution. Through the course of several seminars, various civic and military managers of agrarian policy met ministry representatives and experts, including Sayad. However, discussions turned tense as military authorities monopolized the debate. Sayad considered these sessions to be an integral part of his research findings. In a long letter, Sayad confided to Bourdieu his field notes on what he experienced in this ‘expert field.’ 7 His reflexive position not only allowed him to observe how peasants found themselves lost under a new system of self-managed agriculture closely supervised by the army; these seminars also allowed Sayad to observe how distanced Algerian technocrats were from the lives of peasants and how this fact induced paradoxical effects on the agrarian reform.
While unable to influence public policy, Sayad’s entry into the world of decision-making helped him obtain unique information on practical politics, which informed his work on the transformations experienced by Algerian peasantry and their emigration to France.
Switching political practices and representations
At the same time, Sayad offered his consulting services to the French government and international organizations in France. His first research into immigration was in response to directives issued by development-oriented organizations (such as the OECD and the UN) and by senior officials wishing to understand immigrant populations in France during a period of economic crisis. Sayad’s thoughts about immigration developed slowly (Sayad, 1973). At the end of an OECD research seminar, Alain Gillette (an official of this institution) proposed to Sayad collaborating on a book about Algerian immigration, which became The Algerian Immigration to France, published under Sayad’s pseudonym Malek Aith Messaoud (Gillette & Aith Messaoud, 1976). This pseudonym is his family’s genealogical name, changed to ‘Sayad’ by the colonial administration in 1882. According to Gillette, 8 Sayad’s use of a pseudonym allowed him to intervene critically on the immigration issue without exposing his identity, since Sayad was simultaneously working as an expert for both the Algerian and French governments.
This multi-positioning provided Sayad with an original vision distinct from that of other academic scholars in the field of migration studies during the 1980s. This positioning from inside the official institutions allowed him also to transfer his research to propose changes to immigrant policies. For instance, it was through his relationship with the movie director Tewfik Farès, whom he had known since their 1960s involvement in anticolonial activities in France, that Mosaïque, a TV show about immigration, was born in 1977. Sayad participated actively in the production of TV shows on Algerian emigration to France. His aim was to break with the typical ethnocentrism through which immigration was presented by the French state that essentialized the problems of adaptation without considering emigrants’ departure conditions or living and working conditions in their adopted country (Pérez, 2014; Sayad, 2014a). Similarly, through his work for various government offices, Sayad was interested in establishing a program to counter the exclusion of children of immigrant workers in French schools (Sayad, 2014b).
Sayad’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a rare feat of social gymnastics across several antagonistic fields. He was neither dominant nor dominated. Close to administrative circles while being ideologically distant, he occupied an intermediate position. He rejected any offer to become an officer of either the Algerian or French government that could betray his political ideals or compromise his scientific work. Sayad kept his political engagements discreet through different strategies, explaining why this facet of his expertise is a little-known part of his intellectual career.
Far from being segmented or incompatible worlds, the expert and sociologist roles Sayad played were different facets of the same story: they coexisted and fed each other because it was Sayad’s reflection on his own practice that allowed him to preserve his scientific autonomy while acting intellectually. If some of his collaborative work failed because of the power relations between the independent expert and the government, others – such as Sayad’s collaboration with a movie director on the creation of a TV show on immigration – could take place through alliances of minorities within the space of political power.
Third stage: ‘To exist is to exist politically’
In the third stage of emigration, emigrants are much more detached from their society of origin and act, as their children do, more openly and explicitly in the host society. Sayad’s trajectory conforms to this principle. His work was caught up in the burning reality of political measures against immigrant workers and their multiple demands for social and political rights.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were a decisive time in the history of immigration to France. It was then that the myth of the return of immigrant workers to their home countries was dispelled, immigration was constituted as a public problem, and the ‘March for Equality and Against Racism’ (1983) by the children of immigrants emerged (Noiriel, 2007). If during the first postcolonial decades Sayad’s innovative approach was overlooked, his work started to get attention when the public debate framed immigrants as responsible for the economic crisis and as a threat to the national culture. In this context, Sayad intellectually engaged by putting his scientific knowledge of immigrant rights into practice.
Using institutional sources to fight for political rights
Sayad’s first strategy was his investment in revealing the migratory measures of both the French and Algerian states. By his involvement within administrative circles in the creation of cultural policy, Sayad was aware of a program to return immigrants to their country of origin by not renewing residence cards, particularly those of Algerians, and by setting up a return assistance program. The failure of these ‘voluntary’ return policies helped contribute to the introduction of a series of restrictive measures aimed at reducing the foreign population residing in France by making arrests and deporting illegal aliens to the border (Blanc-Chaléard, 2001). To denounce these policies, Sayad was actively engaged in the creation of the Collective of Maghrebian Workers and Intellectuals (COTIM), with – among others – the writer Nabile Farès. In a series of articles and leaflets, Sayad and other writers and activists criticized these policies against immigrant populations:
We denounce, besides the arbitrariness of the law, its racist character: under the pretext of a renewal of the titles of residence of a part of the population (the holders of the certificates) it is all the Algerian immigration which is globally aimed and condemned in this way to a stay of one year simply because of their nationality, irrespective of age, and duration of stay in France.
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Sayad was able to put his work with the French and Algerian states to the service of the militant cause. His expertise at the Algerian Embassy in Paris gave him access to correspondence between the State Secretariat for the Status of Immigrant Workers and the Algerian ambassador to France that revealed the power relations that governed the ‘negotiations’ between states. As Sayad observed, Algeria had very little freedom to enter into a truly bilateral agreement. Second, Sayad questioned both states’ real concern for the fate of immigrants by pointing out how ‘this exchange of letters is rather an exchange of civility between men of good will, more concerned with administrative amenities than the fate of immigrants, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children; more concerned with rules, on the backs of immigrants and at their expense’ (Sayad, 1979a, p. 7).
Sayad was able to make this criticism public by publishing a series of articles anonymously in the militant press, especially in the weekly Sans Frontière (1979–1985) – composed of former support committees for Palestine and from the Arab Workers Movement and focused on the fight to improve the living conditions of these workers and their families – and through publishing articles in a prestigious scientific journal (Sayad, 1979a, 1979b).
Sayad became increasingly interested in the destiny of the immigrant community. He became involved in a collective of civil rights activists that brought together political and social actors from diverse backgrounds. In 1985, this movement created the campaign ‘Civic Initiatives’ that gave analytic instruments to antiracism activists and immigrants themselves on how to replace the abstract discourse of individual rights with a more socioeconomic- and policy-based rights discourse:
The Civic Initiatives campaign that the Civil Rights Collective has already launched aims to combat the challenge of giving the antiracist social forces additional resources and new arguments. And to challenge all communities with an immigrant background to assume their responsibilities by using the rights granted to them by the laws of the Republic to defend themselves against those who would exclude them and intending to constitute together, with all the democratic social forces, the foundations of a more cohesive society.
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While Sayad was not openly involved in these collective actions, articles, and leaflets written in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he gradually began to reveal his identity. For the second edition of his pseudonymous book published almost 10 years later, Sayad no longer had the same reasons to remain discreet and he used his real name (Gillette & Sayad, 1984). Two reasons explain this. First, his tenure as a researcher in the CNRS in 1977 provided more autonomy than did his role as an expert. Second, as his work progressively achieved more recognition, he was able to use this symbolic capital to openly help the immigrants’ struggles for social justice in France.
Transferring sociological research to union struggles
An example of this was his engagement in the struggle of Ouvriers Spécialisés (OS – Specialized Workers) facing the car industry’s robotizing process. Sayad used the results of his sociological inquiry – started in 1984 – about the condition of OS immigrants and their families (Sayad, 1986) to prepare for the union negotiations over the closure of the Renault plant in Billancourt (1987–1991). Sayad became involved with Farouk Belkeddar, who was an active unionist, in the creation of a place of reflection and action that aimed to inform, and guide dismissed workers.
Among the options explored by Renault – early retirement, a conversion allowance in addition to severance pay, the voluntary return to the origin country of immigrant workers established by the conventions of the National Office of Immigration, and the reintegration in France of employees with their families – Sayad considered the latter option most appropriate. His research showed very clearly how difficult reintegration in the country of origin would be for migrant workers. For this reason, Sayad fought for the ‘re-employability’ of 240 licensed workers of the Billancourt plant. In doing so, he mediated between the militant workers and the trade union confederation. He also used his knowledge and social capital to spread this fight into the media world (Pitti et al., 2013).
These distinct collaborations with social movements, unionists, and activists allowed Sayad to put his knowledge to the service of the immigrant communities and build new knowledge and collective political actions. These activities also forced him to adopt different modes of intellectual engagement favorable to the political fight. Although his sociological work was becoming more visible, he still had limited recognition in 1980s academic circles. His impact was much more evident in the politicized world of social movements, public intellectuals, and union institutions.
Toward a sociology of collective intellectuals
Throughout this article, I have illustrated that the modes of Sayad’s intellectual engagement can be read through the three stages of Algerian emigrants to France: a first in which Sayad was keen to play a role in his society of origin, a second in which he acted in the interest of both host and origin societies, and a third in which demands for civil rights in the host country became central. His emigration to France in 1963 did not diminish his commitment to Algeria; it was, in fact, the precondition for using his intellectual work for influencing Algerian society and the fate of Algerians in France. In that sense, his long-term residence in France informed his thinking. Sayad’s work was gradually focused on the study of the Algerian immigration in France.
The study of an immigrant intellectual such as Sayad offers an avenue for understanding how social context, habitus, and the structure of the academic field orient intellectuals’ strategies (Bourdieu, 2001/2004). Refusing to become part of the Algerian intelligentsia, and in a marginal position due to his object of study and late tenure in France, Sayad was constrained to exist at the borders of different fields. The first strategy described earlier was undertaken discretely from exile, as he used his sociological work in the struggle for a socialist Algeria. The second was illustrated by his reflexive work while working with both the French and Algerian states. His position as an expert working for Algerian and French officials was an ideal place to understand the mechanisms that governed both states’ practices toward the Algerian population from within, and to use his insider knowledge to propose alternative politics. The third mode of intellectual work was visible when he worked with associations, activists, unionists, and writers to build a coalition for the defense of immigrants’ economic and political rights. These modes of collective work were grounded not only in the provision of specialized knowledge, as a specific intellectual would, but also through collaboration with different groups to provide them with instruments for their emancipation.
Sayad’s scholar trajectory illuminates the different constraints and tensions intellectuals deal with while crossing different spatial universes, or within different fields. It also sheds light on the spaces of possible action within those different arenas. Indeed, dealing with this positioning within many fields structured by antagonistic logics was taxing. Sayad had to deploy different strategies to preserve his reputation for scientific autonomy and achieve his goals as a public intellectual. Far from a passive or apolitical image of Sayad’s intellectual career, I have shown how he employed discretion as a strategy for political action. First, at a time when criticizing the new independent Algerian government was risky, Sayad prudently participated in creating the constitution of the FFS by using his research to ground an alternative politics to ameliorate the living conditions of the Algerian masses. Second, to counter the impasses of his expert practice for both French and Algerian governments, Sayad reconciled opposites: he used the knowledge obtained in his position as an expert working for state officials to inform social movements against restrictive immigration policies. Finally, his engagements became explicit only when his employment as a contract expert was no longer necessary because he received tenure. Likewise, when his work began to receive more recognition, he could use his prestige to promote immigrants’ political causes in the public domain.
Unlike those scholars who produce and perpetuate in the dominant representation of the social world (Bourdieu, 1997), Sayad intervened against the status quo. His strategy was to subvert this order from the inside to build collective knowledge and alliances to better combat domination. He used his sociological knowledge to construct a political project geared toward reducing social inequalities and to intervene in politics against the authoritarianism of the new independent government. He worked with technocrats, seeking to change their views on immigration. He helped immigrants and their descendants decipher the tensions of the migratory experience and contributed to the restoration of the civil rights they were often denied.
Sayad’s role was that of a collective intellectual. His alliances with unions, associations, government bodies, and international organizations shaped his peculiar mode of work in the political world. He pursued ‘the means and the principles of political action in which the achievements of the research would be transformed into successful political manifestation or even instruments of rapid intervention’ (Bourdieu, 2001/2003, p. 41). In brief, his purpose was not to use his knowledge to speak ‘in the name of’ people, but to oppose from above the hegemonic politics on immigration and create alternative ways of mobilizing immigrants from below.
These scientific and political engagements elicit several considerations. Without intending to be exhaustive, I now sketch six potential elements that the study of immigrant intellectuals and their collective engagements could contribute to the sociology of intellectuals.
First, Sayad’s work shows how an overly rigid typology of public intellectuals, centered on competition over the definition of what is worthy, risks ignoring the diversity of the work of marginal scholars (Topalov, 1997). A focus on academic achievements tends to neglect the different meanings and practices marginal scholars could assign to their activities. This is a crucial aspect of the tensions between intellectuals’ social dispositions, intending to build alternative paths, and the rules and expectations that constrain their participation in the academic field.
Second, the study of Sayad’s trajectory casts a light on the movement of intellectuals across fields. Sayad was not a free-floating scholar in relatively autonomous spaces. His actions remained constrained by his marginal position in the academic world, and his multiple collaborations and interventions were based on his social and symbolic capital. However, tracing his connections to the worlds of experts, academia, and politics shows the social and political affinities that make collaboration across fields possible. Thus, there is a need to study the conditions that create these spaces between fields among different groups and make the transfer of knowledge possible between one place and another (Eyal, 2002). For instance, how is scientific thinking informed by its engagement with politics and how is political commitment re-examined by knowledge? I argue that one could not understand Sayad’s pathbreaking work on immigration without reconstructing these multiple positions across fields (Sayad, 2004).
Third, the study of immigrant intellectuals sheds lights on the transnational dynamics of scholars’ work (Sapiro, 2009b). It gives new insights on how strategies are related to different positions in the academic and political fields across nations (e.g., how Sayad’s dominant position in Algeria allowed him to become an expert, even while he was marginalized in the French academic field). It also sheds light on how the transfer of different positions happens across asymmetric spaces. The study of the strategies of immigrant intellectuals who come from dominated geographical spaces into metropoles could enlighten us on the different adjustments needed to have an impact in dominant fields. Finally, tracking how immigrant intellectuals navigate different spaces could help us understand knowledge production beyond methodological nationalism.
Fourth, the political engagement of collective intellectuals chimes with the figure of the ‘public sociologist’ as sketched by Michael Burawoy, who not only intervenes publicly but also engages and produces knowledge with academic peers, as well as with the social movements and minorities they study (Burawoy, 2005). However, collective intellectuals surpass Burawoy’s typology of sociological work. If the academic, the expert, the critical, and the public sociologists are certainly interdependent, Sayad’s case shows how a collective sociologist could sometimes move across these roles. Sayad also contradicts Burawoy’s division of labor between sociologists who address academic (critical and professional) and extra-academic audiences (public and policy) and those who produce conventional or subordinated knowledge (critical and public). Sayad was not only a rigorous social scientist in the academic field, but also reflective as a public sociologist.
Fifth, being constantly reflective is a precondition for collective intellectuals who navigate in fields that produce forms of knowledge that are in tension with each other. Because of the specificities of social sciences – often bothersome to those in power, with weak autonomy, and enmeshed in the world they describe (Bourdieu, 2001/2004) – scholars need to analyze the political pressures and socials constraints they are exposed to. Sayad was cautious of not simply following problems as set by the state, but questioned the very basis of state-funded research on immigration. Awareness of his own position allowed Sayad to neutralize the constraints in his work, preserving his autonomy, all while employing different forms of knowledge from across the worlds of experts, state officials, intellectuals, and activists. It was also key for his sociological imagination: bolstering the originality of his understanding of society and prompting him to intervene collectively to contribute toward social change.
This brings us to the sixth and final reflection. The analysis of Sayad’s intellectual trajectory offers a paradigmatic case study of how the politics of collective intellectuals can counter the constraints of the academic and political fields. Practicing committed scholarship is not easy: the practice of what is known today as ‘critical sociology’ can disturb those in power. Its political commitments challenge the ivory-tower ideal of the guardians of the scientific field, and its scholarship confronts political authorities as it unveils the mechanisms behind relations of domination (Bourdieu, 1984/1993). There are multiple ways of blurring these constraints and intervening in the academic and public spheres by transforming social research into action. Through the detailed analysis of the politics of an immigrant scholar and his collective activities, my goal was to show the social conditions behind a mode of intellectual work engaged with groups other than one’s peers. These collaborative endeavors transcended the constraints of the academic field, and propose alternatives for the transformation of social reality.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.