The systemic turn in French Rural Studies

The emergence of French rural studies was deeply embedded in two decades of agricultural modernisation. However, the crisis of the 1970s led to the emergence of radical forms of criticism, both among social actors and researchers. They questioned the way biosciences and economics had contributed to legitimating the process of rationalization. This period of doubt has given rise to a fundamental epistemological aggiornamento, whose unfolding we can still witness today in rural and environmental studies. Based on a co-elaborative project with agronomic institutions as well as on a corpus of scientific archives and oral sources, this article aims to explain the rise of holism in the reappraisal of the "agrarian question" in the last quarter of the twentieth century.