___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Praktiske Grunde. Nordisk tidsskrift for kultur- og samfundsvidenskab, nr. 1-2, 2017, 7-16 ISSN 1902-2271 www.praktiskegrunde.dk The Craft of Sociology. Epistemologial Preliminaries Frédéric Lebaron With Le métier de sociologue. Préliminaires épistémologiques (translated into English under the title: The Craft of sociology. Epistemological preliminaries in 1991), Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron provide an epistemological introduc- tion to contemporary sociology. First published in 1968 (second edition, 1972), this is an edited collection of texts in the history and philosophy of sciences, which relates to a class given by Bourdieu and his colleagues at the Ecole pratique des hautes études, but the book first aims to establish more soundly the scientific legitimacy of the discipline, by situating sociology within the continuum of the natural sciences, particularly physics and biology. The Craft of sociology constitutes an important moment in the struggles inside the French, but also the international, field of sociology. It serves as an epistemological critique of positivism (dominant in the 1960s), recalls the relevance of the novel conceptualisations of the ‘founding fathers’ (Marx, Durkheim and Weber), and newly insists on their unity, as all share a common habitus, a set of ‘interiorized scientific principles’ that are incorporated into research. The book mobilizes philosophical resources from two strands (the Anglo-saxon philosophy of language and the French history and philosophy of sciences), and these are used as instruments to establish and strengthen the scientific legitimacy of the discipline. Keywords: epistemology, social science, science, truth, construction of the research object, scientific language. In its entirety, and through the collection and critiquing of significant texts on the history and philosophy of science, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron provided an epistemological introduction to contemporary sociology in Le métier de sociologue. Préliminaires épistémologiques / The Craft of sociology. Epistemological preliminaries, first published in 1968 (second edi- tion, 1972). The authors intended to complete it with the publication of a more ped- agogical and methodological book, which never appeared. At the outset The Craft of Sociology aims to establish more firmly the scientific legitimacy of the discipline, by situating sociology within the continuum of the nat- ural sciences, first and foremost within physics and biology. As last born among the empirical sciences, “this science like the others that sociology would like to be” 1 can benefit from its predecessors, especially when its disciples have a knowledge of their history and of their processes of development. Sociology could claim the