Normalizing the European “revolution”

This article studies the production of university handbooks on the European Communities in two of its founding member states: France and the FRG. The aim is to connect two sets of research on a particular group of intellectuals—academics—who have maintained only loose relations so far. On the one hand, handbooks have given rise to rich works exploring their role in the construction and legitimization of power in national states. On the other hand, research in historical sociology has drawn attention to the participation of academics, and particularly jurists, in the production and legitimization of a European political order. Here, we examine the way in which an academic literature about the Communities has been produced and has, as such, participated in the standardization of certain forms of knowledge of the European Communities.By adopting a comparative approach, the article intends to show the different forms that this process has taken in different national contexts. The article is based on research on a corpus of 58 textbooks dealing with the European Community published from the 1950s to the 1990s in France and the FRG. It uncovers the social conditions of production of these handbooks, and suggests that the Community object has not been captured in the same way by French and German academic knowledge, which is reflected in the production of handbooks. This observation calls for an examination of how these books have in turn contributed to the solidification of different definitions of the European object in both countries.