Profile Michel Crozier

"IL?A?UN cote playboy," remarked a French journalist about Michel Crozier. Though this image seemed slightly ???? for the sociologist who wrote The ??? enough French girls have claimed to be enchanted by his quiet elegance and charm to dispel my doubts.

Sometimes ??? hides other aspects of his personality, which he calls "my ??? personality." This self-description made me recall the previous week when I passed Crozier's office on the ??? floor of William James and saw him working in the somber light of a cloudy Cambridge morning. He was keeping the lights off to save electricity just as he would in his office in Paris at the top of two flights of rickety stairs. A ??? consumer" Michel Crozier is not.

His appointment as visiting professor of Social Relations for the Spring semester is hardly the Harvard student's first introduction to Crozier. He was also a visiting professor in 1967, and any student who has taken ??? course on France is undoubtedly ingrained with Crozier's hypothesis of French bureaucracy as a response to the special French view of authority and their lack of face-to-face relationships.

After leaving Harvard in 1967, Crozier became a professor of Sociology at Nanterre, the new American-style university outside of Paris, which was the breeding ground for the student revolt in May 1968. He could not have chosen a more agonizing time or place. After the failure of the moderate student strike in November of 1967 for smaller classes, a library, and less stringent degree requirements, the university turned from campus to battlefield.

Jean-Pierre Dutcuil, one of the leaders of the student movement, told me. "We anarchists wanted one thing. To destroy the liberal university." Alaine Touraine, a Sociology professor at Nanterre, called what happened "a premeditated rape of the university."

What happened? Students battled with police, they shouted down and insulted professors, disrupted classes daily, took over rooms and amphitheaters, and scandalized a cabinet minister who came to dedicate a new swimming pool. The inept response of the administration and faculty heightened the tension and psychological insecurity which reigned at Nanterre.

THOUGH Cohn-Bendit's enrage's left few professors unscathed, they often fired their heaviest artillery at Crozier, who found himself to the right of everybody in the "reddest" department at Nanterre and probably all of France. Taking Crozier's reserved admiration for the American bureaucratic system as evidence of his pro-establishment and technocratic bias, the revolutionary students denounced him and taunted: "Mr. Crozier, is the American style of bureaucratic organization useful in Vietnam? Is it efficacious for liquidating the Vietnamese?"

As one would expect, a man as mild and unaggressive as Crozier found the year "a very great ordeal" and later wrote his American colleagues: "This is a hard time to be a sociologist ... Sociologists have been forced out of their traditional voyeurist position and made part of the sad game of survival politics and they don't know yet how to behave."

Surprisingly, Crozier is optimistic about the future of France despite the apparent lack of change following the turmoil of May-June, 1968. He is willing to speculate that "we are at the end of the old system" because of "the loss of faith by the people at the top." When this loss of faith eventually filters down to the lower echelons, change will become mandatory.

Crozier suggests at least two reforms to help France create "a social system where people can be free." The first is the decentralization of government decision-making into regional assemblies in order to replace the confused patterns of centralized authority and to increase citizen participation. "Decision making was more rational in 1900 than it is today in France." In a recent study of how the decision was made to extend the Paris Metro, Crozier was amazed to discover that the Ministry of Finance had no idea of who initiated the plan and how the decision was taken. In terms of cost analysis the construction of the Paris Metro for the Exhibition in 1900 was "much better."

His second reform is to eliminate France's system of Grandes Ecoles (which Crozier labels "the most elitist system in the world") by incorporating them into the broader university system. The Grandes Ecoles have changed little since the 19th century. L'Ecole Nationale d'Administration (l'ENA), a kind of super Harvard Business School, graduated 250 students in 1880. In 1960 it graduated 300.

The Grandes Ecoles continue to train their students in a severely traditional mode. Because their graduates hold a virtual monopoly on top government jobs. Crozier points out that it is "absolutely impossible to recruit any new specialists." In the future recruitment must come from a much broader spectrum of the populations.

CROZIER'S belief that "we must change the system from the top" conflicts with the pet theories of most of his French colleagues who being much further left, glorify the role of worker and trade unions. But he does not "take very seriously" his image as the American sociologist in France. "I don't have any kind of complex." Instead Crozier muses on the ambivalence of his French colleagues-they bemoan American sociology as "so awful, horrible, and the chaining of the human race" precisely because "they believe it's so good."

Obviously Crozier finds more satisfaction in the American academic community than he does in the French. He enjoys the personal contacts and sense of community so lacking in France, where the only thing that the professors do together is to elect new professors. The enthusiasm of his students in his Harvard seminar on the role of intellectuals in social change is far more gratifying than the trickle of communication at Nanterre, "where nobody wanted to talk."

UNLIKE many French intellectuals, Crozier was born in a small town in the Champagne district of France of "very modest means." His father's family were peasants and farmers, and his mother was the daughter of a gardener. Academic brilliance was his only ticket to mobility and he made good on it.

Like many French intellectuals Crozier first wanted to become a writer and poet. A small volume of poems, jokes, and slogans came out of this early period of artistic activity. Ironically, this little volume was "rediscovered" by the Parisian publisher Gallimar and published in 1968 as an early example of Pop Art, only to be lost again when the revolt of May-June broke out.

"Great luck" struck Crozier in 1948 when he received a fellowship from the French government to study in the United States. Admitting that "I was pretty much a radical at that time," he became fascinated with American trade unions and toured the country interviewing hundreds of workers. Extremely critical of what he saw, he let his criticism soon gush its way into print.

"The greatest shock of my life came when I went back to France." The first week he found that France was no better. Two or three years later he felt it was worse.

ARTISTIC yearning fell before the urge "to know and understand" the forces of societal change. A synthesis began to emerge from what he called his internal dialectic. There were always two urges in him during these radical years: learning and fighting politically. Becoming a sociologist brought the discrete arts of his personality together; or maybe it is more accurate to say that, in "putting knowledge first," one was sacrificed for the other.

Profound points are few and often ludicrous, but perhaps one may be ventured here. Re?ization of the world's complexity-that no policy or ideology is right-are sometimes fatal thoughts for a would-be activist. Ignorance, and not knowledge, makes political bliss.

"Putting knowledge first" may have lost us a political activist, but it has given us a brilliant and charming sociologist, a species far too ra?e in either the United States or France.