None of the continental languages, either historically or during postwar decades, developed indigenously synonyms for professions or roughly equivalent terms. Even today, instead of studying professions in particular, continental sociologists typically study much broader socio-economic and socio-cultural formations. Thus, when Anglo-American sociologists were developing the sociology of professions before and after World War II, European sociologists had difficulty envisaging the point of the exercise. We review the evolution of the Anglo-American sociology of professions, the etymological divide just noted, and how the Continent's received Burgertum approach to middle class occupations differs from a professions approach.

One consensus in the sociology and history of professions is that law, not medicine, pioneered the first professionalism projects in Western history. English law is typically cited as the exemplar. We challenge this consensus by demonstrating that visual academies, led by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture of Paris, preceded along a professionalism project centuries in advance of English law.

More than anyone else, Magali Sarfatti Larson in 1977 established today's received wisdom in the sociology of professions, in reaction against Talcott Parsons' earlier functionalist approach. However, she acknowledges that she had failed to provide a theoretical alternative to Parsons' functionalism. Today, Larson has substantially reevaluated her approach to professions, and indeed now accepts one of Parsons' central arguments, namely that professions introduce important consequences into the larger social order. But from 1977 to today, she has still not developed consistently any identifiable theoretical approach to professions. One result of lacking any mooring at a conceptual level is that her descriptions and explanations of professionalism across her entire career suffer as a result, being at once ad hoc, unreliable and ultimately contradictory.

Aside from English law being cited as pioneering the first professionalism project, French law is also frequently treated as an exemplar of early professionalism. We challenge this consensus by demonstrating that the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture of Paris preceded along a professionalism project centuries in advance of French law. Using this comparison, we also provide alternative explanations for questions and issues which remain troubling in the literature of French law.

For over seventy years the sociology of professions has revolved around empirical generalizations drawn from four modern exemplars of nineteenth century Britain and United States: law and medicine, science and engineering. We identify qualities constitutive of professionalism in an occupation during the ancien regime, on the Continent, and in a field unrelated to the four just noted: seventeenth century French painting and sculpture. These constitutive qualities point to the significance of a distinctively structural and institutional approach to the sociology of professions.

Visual academies were unique social formations in the ancien régime, so distinctive that they are best studied as prototype professions. Alone among academies, they were responsible for offering instruction. Alone among educational institutions, they linked liberal instruction to occupational practice. Alone among ‘learned’ occupations, they accommodated an irreducible manual component. The visual Académie in Paris in particular established literally the first ‘graduate school’ in any field of activity and admitted students on the basis of anonymously scored student competitions. Equivalent activities will not begin to emerge in medicine or law until the mid-19th century. Our historical case, in short, calls into question the received orthodoxy regarding the time and place of the first professionalism projects. Instead of focusing on 19th-century Britain, we are now considering mid-17th-century France and thereby preparing the way for a new start in the sociology of professions.

Continental sociologists did not contribute to the sociology of professions until the 1980s in part because no continental language developed indigenously a synonym for profession. Today, however, some continental sociologists are contributing to this literature, but they are inadvertently recapitulating within it the theories and concepts that for decades were applied to the middle classes more generally. This article explores why these theories and concepts revolve around cultural and social psychological variables, and why they neglect invariant structural qualities. The article concludes by proposing schematically a structural and institutional turn in the study of professions that distinguishes professions from middle-class occupations and reveals the consequences that professions uniquely introduced into civil society.