The construction of society and conceptions of education. Comparative Visions in Germany, France, and the United States Around 1900

This chapter engages with emergence of the “social” as a distinguishable category and argues that from its very beginning, the “social” bore different meanings according to the different visions of political life: The “social” was obviously culturally biased, but it mostly showed up in a generalized or globalized “theory.” The chapter demonstrates this cultural construction of the “social” with its temptation to globalization, taking the example of the “social question” and the academic reaction toward the “social question,” especially in connection with sociology and the educational sciences, by comparing France, Germany, and the United States.