When Bourdieu Discovered Panofsky: The Editorial Making of Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique (Paris-Princeton, 1966-1967)

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Based on unpublished archival material and a new reading of various published texts, this article traces the editorial process behind Erwin Panofsky’s famous Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique. Published in French in 1967 by Éditions de Minuit, the volume appeared in the collection directed by Pierre Bourdieu, who translated, edited, and postfaced it. By examining the conditions of possibility of this seemingly improbable transatlantic and transdisciplinary encounter, in 1966-1967, between a young Paris-based sociologist at the beginning of his career and an elderly, world-famous historian residing in Princeton, the article seeks to historicize this classic work and to read it in a new, reflexive way. At the intersection of the historical sociology of the social sciences, the history of publishing, and the history of transnational intellectual circulations, it invites us to denaturalize our reading practices by taking our scholarly heritage as an object. The article analyzes in turn the young Bourdieu’s training and the first receptions of Panofsky in France in the 1950s and 1960s, the intellectual and editorial context of this importation and its multiple implications, and the concrete modalities of the book’s translation and publication. The final section focuses on the genesis of the afterword, in which the Bourdieusian concept of habitus was systematized for the first time—though not without certain misunderstandings (it was wrongly attributed by Bourdieu to Panofsky) that the archives make it possible to document and dispel.