Studies on political and social elites: contributions from sociology and history

Abstract

This work has the purpose of analyzing the relation between sociological analysis and historically situated elites. This choice is justified for two reasons: fi rst, because the overlapping of historical research and sociological studies on the elites has been a dominant subject in the Social Sciences in the last decades, especially in France, and second, due to the fact that the theoretical and methodological analysis of this relation lacks delimitations, especially in order to analyze the intellectual elites in peripheral contexts, as is the case of Brazil. Thus, we demonstrate, initially, how those theoretical projects had been used in some historical research. Following that, we approach the type of sociological treatment used over historical trajectories, both individual and in groups of elites. We demonstrate, therefore, one of the methodological resources available between historical research and sociological analysis: prosopography.