Populisme développementiste et populisme en sciences sociales : idéologie, action, connaissance.

J.-P. Olivier de Sardan — Developmentalist Populism and Populism in the Social Sciences : Ideology, Action and Knowledge. The relation of intellectuals to the « people » is a problem not just of knowledge in the social sciences but also of action for persons working in economie development. Moral populism, through which intellectuals discover « the poor » as well as exotic, dominated "popular cultures", may resuit in two major strategies of knowledge : cognitive populism and "miserabilism." With respect to collective actions, especially in matters of development, these strategies exist in the form of, on the one hand, "basism" or "spontaneousism" and, on the other, "missionarism" or "avant-gardism." However the constraints of action make it necessary to compromise between these two attitudes.