Polemicizing (over) social sciences: A rhetorical analysis of parliamentary debates in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom

Whether in France, Germany, or the United Kingdom, social sciences research and knowledge production activities have been recently re-inscribed within political confrontations which take academic neutrality, freedom, engagement, responsibility, or impact as divisive policy issues (Fecher et al. 2021; Beaud 2021). The multiplication of political formulas and buzzwords by political stakeholders in the public debate to designate all or part of this disciplinary ensemble, such as "islamoleftism", "wokism", or "cancel culture", bears witness to this polarization of exchanges in the representative bodies of society when it comes to determining the political role assigned to (and taken by) the social scientist (Albæk 1995; Benneworth and Jongbloed 2010). What may have been seen as simple controversies, i.e. adversarial but argumentative exchanges that just had shifted from the scientific to the social arena (Cefaï 1996) on what social sciences should do and say, are in fact to be analyzed as a multidimensional sociolinguistic phenomenon (Jackiewicz 2017). Indeed, when the main objective of a debate between MPs becomes to win the confrontation and impose one's representation of the social sciences, reasoned discourse no longer works, and all tricks become permitted to disqualify the opponent: using purposely polemical categories is one way of doing so (Schmitt 1932; Charandeau 2017). To what extent do parliamentary discussions on the societal impact of social sciences, which are supposed to be the democratic debates par excellence, still play their role, namely deliberate? In this contribution, I will outline some thoughts on the evolutions of parliamentary discussions on the impact social sciences have on society. Those exchanges are sometimes controversial, at times polemical, and their evolutions have both policy and polity implications. To do so, I will draw on the rhetorical analysis of the debate transcripts of the national parliaments of the three study cases (Assemblée Nationale for France, Bundestag for Germany, House of Commons for the UK) over the period 2012-2022. Following the methodology employed by Wiesner, Palonen, and Haapala (2017), I will focus on how politicians talk about (and thus represent) the societal impact of research by identifying what argumentative strategies are mobilized and what associations of ideas run through them. All this will allow me to not only understand to which socio-discursive imaginaries these rhetorical tools refer (Charaudeau 2005), but also more broadly how political activity in French, German, and UK parliamentary cultures function (Steiner et al. 2005). Indeed, "social sciences" may be both a rallying and a structuring point for political interests as a "concrete antithesis" (Schmitt 1930), thus guaranteeing this collocation interpretative flexibility; but such definitional negotiations have greater significance as they both form and inform the public opinion on the role and usefulness of social scientists within society. The proposed paper thus suggests a policy implication for encouraging political stakeholders to return to the deliberative genre (Haapala and Palonen 2017), where the confrontation of several conflicting views, here definitions of "social sciences", is key for the survival of a democratic system.