On the Social Life of Ideas and the Persistence of the Author in the Social and Human Sciences. A presentation of the Symposium

This article introduce to a Symposium on the social life of ideas. It focuses on one central aspect of ideas' life, namely the patterns and mechanisms of their circulation across languages and national borders. Inspired by a seminal article of Pierre Bourdieu on the social conditions of the international circulation of ideas [2002], this Symposium is especially focused on the travelling of ideas and theories originally developed in the social and human sciences. In this presentation we illustrate the genesis of this Symposium and explain the rationale behind its contents, insisting on the persistence of the "author" as a driving force in the social life of ideas - their assemblage, their consumption, their diffusion, their discussion, their legitimation, their transgression.