pp. 353-372

Over the last generation, a major field of research on « celebrity culture » has developed in the English-speaking academic world that has no equivalent in France or French. Following a discipline-by-discipline critical review of this research, an attempt is made to elucidate why there is such a discrepancy between the English and French social sciences on this point, and to identify obstacles in each of these traditions that may yet hinder the development of a sociological approach to celebrity capable of shedding non-normative light on the many facets of a phenomenon that, in the twentieth century, became virtually universal.