School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in the context of "Jacques Le Goff"

Claude Lévi-Strauss (/klɔːd ˈleɪvi ˈstraʊs/ klawd LAY-vee STROWSS; French: [klod levi stʁos]; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world.

Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1955) which established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Alexander Vladimirovich Vovin (Russian: Александр Владимирович Вовин; 27 January 1961 – 8 April 2022) was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France. He was known for his research on East Asian languages.

Pierre Bourdieu (UK: /bʊərˈdjɜː/, US: /bʊərˈd(j)uː/; French: [pjɛʁ buʁdjø]; Gascon: Pèir Bordièu; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields (e.g. anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts). During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.

Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order is maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Building upon and criticizing the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky and Marcel Mauss among others, his research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and methods, and introduced such influential concepts as the cultural reproduction, the habitus, the field or location, symbolic violence, as well as cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital (as distinct from traditionally recognized economic forms of capital). Another notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔmɑ pikɛti]; born 7 May 1971) is a French economist who is a professor of economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, associate chair at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Piketty's work focuses on public economics, in particular income and wealth inequality. He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. Piketty proposes improving the education systems and considers diffusion of knowledge, diffusion of skills, diffusion of idea of productivity as the main mechanism that will lead to lower inequality. In 2019, his book Capital and Ideology was published, which focuses on income inequality in various societies in history. His 2022 A Brief History of Equality is a much shorter book about wealth redistribution intended for a target audience of citizens instead of economists.

The Paris School of Economics (PSE; French: École d'économie de Paris) is a French research institute in the field of economics. It offers MPhil, MSc, and PhD level programmes in various fields of theoretical and applied economics, including macroeconomics, econometrics, political economy and international economics.

PSE is a brainchild of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, where the students are enrolled primarily), École normale supérieure · PSL (ENS), the École des ponts and University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. It is physically located on the ENS-PSL Jourdan campus, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. It was founded in 2006 as a coalition of grandes écoles, a university and an école normale supérieure to unify high-level research in economics across French academia, and was first presided by economist Thomas Piketty.

Pierre Charles Nora (French: [pjɛʁ ʃaʁl(ə) nɔʁa]; 17 November 1931 – 2 June 2025) was a French historian elected to the Académie Française on 7 June 2001. As editor at Éditions Gallimard, he established the Library of Social Sciences in 1966 and the Library of Histories in 1970. He was director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences from 1977 for four decades. Nora is known for having directed Les Lieux de Mémoire, four volumes focused on places and objects of remembrance which incarnate the national memory of the French, writing a new history (nouvelle histoire).