America in an age of memory: Pierre Bourdieu’s “The assassination of Maurice Halbwachs” - commentary and translation

Abstract

Maurice Halbwachs? name has become familiar, in America, with the emergence (and proliferation) of memory studies, yet references to his work tend to be superficial or totemic. This translation and commentary of a remarkable tribute written by Pierre Bourdieu in 1987 sheds light on his methodological and political commitments. It provides a finer grained picture of Halbwachs as a scholar, sociologist, and product of the post-Bonapartist French system of education in the late 19th century, a context of commitment to human progress, while showing, in greater detail, the nature of the German sociology of the 1930s and 1940s that Bourdieu argues we should consider is directly related to the Shoah in which Halbwachs died.