School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

• 1. Introduction

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  The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, known in France as the École des hautes études en sciences sociales or EHESS, sits on the boulevard Raspail in Paris, in a building that Fernand Braudel himself helped consolidate as the school's home. It is a place where 830 researchers work alongside roughly 3,000 students, a ratio that would be unthinkable at most universities. Entry is not through grades or entrance exams alone; applicants are judged almost entirely on the quality of their proposed research project. That unusual standard raises an immediate question: what kind of institution builds itself around the idea that a student's own intellectual ambitions should drive their education? And how did a small department buried inside another school become one of the defining forces in how the world studies history, sociology, economics, and the human past?

• 2. Origins in the Annales

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  Lucien Febvre took the helm of the newly created VIe Section in 1947, the year the unit was established within the École pratique des hautes études. Febvre was a leading figure of the Annales historical school, the dominant current in French historical thinking during the interwar years. That school had pushed against event-driven narrative history in favor of long social and geographic processes. When Fernand Braudel succeeded Febvre in 1956, he carried that project further and gathered the institution's scattered study groups into the building on boulevard Raspail, funded in part through money from the Ford Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation had been an earlier patron, investing in French social science research from the 1920s onward. After the Second World War, the Foundation directed additional funds toward non-Marxist sociological inquiry in France, a priority that shaped which intellectual currents the school could develop. From those institutional conditions emerged the concept of what Braudel and his colleagues called a nearly imperceptible passage of history, the slow-moving undercurrents of time rather than the drama of battles and kings.

• 3. Intellectual Tensions

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  Claude Lévi-Strauss applied pressure on the Annales historians from within French academic life, pushing them to bring sociology and ethnography into their framework rather than keeping history sealed in its own methods. That pressure produced a genuine synthesis, though not without friction. Critics charged the structuralists and Annales historians together with ignoring politics and the choices of individual people, a pointed accusation during the years when colonial wars of liberation were reshaping the world. Jacques Le Goff, one of the school's central figures, was among those who navigated that debate. Jean-Marie Pesez contributed a different current, renewing interest in methodology in medieval archaeology and introducing the concept of material culture as a category of historical analysis. François Hartog, who directed the school's ancient and modern historiography department, challenged the Eurocentric habit of treating European time schemas as universal, arguing that the problems of modern conceptions of time cannot be blamed entirely on an imperialist past.

• 4. New History and Its Critics

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  During the 1970s, EHESS became the center of what came to be called New History, a movement associated primarily with Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora. At the same moment, a generation of ethnologists working within the school turned a critical eye on France's own colonial legacy. Scholars working under the influence of Georges Balandier and Marc Augé brought modern sociological frameworks to the study of third world countries, a deliberate break from the assumptions embedded in earlier French anthropology. The decade also saw a shift in economics. Professors including Louis-André Gérard-Varet, Jean-Jacques Laffont, François Bourguignon, and Roger Guesnerie steered the school toward quantitative methods. Their work did not stay inside EHESS. They were the founding architects not only of the Paris School of Economics but of the Toulouse School of Economics and of Grequam in Aix-Marseille.

• 5. A Conference Disrupted

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  In 2019, EHESS hosted the New Polish School of Holocaust Scholarship conference. The event was disrupted by Polish nationalists. EHESS President Christophe Prochasson stated that he could not recall a disturbance so violent at any scientific conference in his experience. French Minister Frédérique Vidal condemned the Polish authorities for what happened. The incident drew attention to the school as a site where historically and politically charged research remains live and contested, not safely historical.

• 6. People Who Passed Through

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  Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Thomas Piketty each spent time at EHESS, as faculty or students, and each reshaped their respective disciplines in ways that reached far beyond France. Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Milan Kundera also appear on the faculty roster. The alumni list runs from economist Esther Duflo to novelist Édouard Louis. The school's requirement that students design their own research paths means it has functioned as a kind of extended apprenticeship. With more than 40 research centers, 22 doctoral programs, and 13 of those doctoral programs run in partnership with other French universities and grandes écoles, EHESS became an independent institution on the 23rd of January 1975, nearly three decades after the VIe Section first opened. Its partnership with PSL University, formalised in 2014, connects it to the broader constellation of Paris's research institutions, while exchange agreements with universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, Yale, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Peking University have placed its graduates in research communities on every continent.