Information Beyond Borders by Rayward W. Boyd;

Author:Rayward, W. Boyd;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

L’Université Nouvelle and the Institut des Hautes Etudes

As members of the Institut des Sciences Sociales, Otlet and La Fontaine were not only part of one of the most innovative sites of sociological debate in Belgium but also lived through the tumultuous events associated with attempts to institutionalize sociology in the Free University of Brussels. A beginning had been made in 1889 when Denis, De Greef, and Eugène Van der Rest (1848–1920) set up an interfaculty program in for the political and social sciences (Wils 2005, 276–8). In 1894 the Academic Board of the University, following anarchist uprisings in France, cancelled a series of lectures of the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus whom it had appointed to a Chair. Hector Denis, who had invited his friend Reclus to give these lectures, resigned in protest as rector of the Free University. Student demonstration erupted. Several other professors, notably De Greef and Picard, also left the University in protest and together they founded a new dissident Université Nouvelle (Despy-Meyer 1994). Guillaume de Greef acted as rector of the new university and managed to establish an internationally oriented university programme with the social sciences as its point of focus, the first major academic program in this field in Belgium (Wils 2001, 314). One of the fundamental educational principles of the Université Nouvelle was that it aimed to offset academic specialization with a synthetic and encyclopaedist sociological perspective. In 1894 an Institut des Hautes Études opened its doors as part of the Université Nouvelle and provided a programme of evening classes and public lectures in the social sciences. Between 1899 and 1911 a Faculty of Social Sciences replaced the Institut des Hautes Études. When the Université Nouvelle was dissolved in 1918, the Institut des Hautes Études was transferred to the Free University of Brussels (Despy-Meyer et al. 1976, 88). The programme of the Institut des Hautes Études and the Faculty of Social Sciences was explicitly international in that about half of the population of the students were foreigners and it made use of the presence of many foreign professors in Brussels. The Institute was, as one of its founders Edmond Picard described it, the “crown” of the Université Nouvelle, open to the public and not focused on gaining grades but on providing a generalized form of education that orchestrated the multiple sciences in a series of “exciting” conferences (Picard 1897, 7). As La Fontaine expressed it: the institute emphasized the idea that “a synthetic overview, at the same time theoretical and practical, of the intellectual domain is indispensable for those who want to carry out social action in a well thought-out manner, as well as for those who want to undertake in a fully rational manner the study of a particular branch of human knowledge” (Fontaine 1900, xviii).

The Institut des Hautes Études at the Université Nouvelle may be considered, after the Société d’études sociales et politiques and the Institut des Sciences Sociales, the third sociological research centre in which Otlet and La Fontaine were involved. Unlike

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