Visions of the Social: Society as a Political Project in France, 1750-1950 (International studies in sociology and social anthropology)

Visions of the Social

International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology Series Editor

David Sciulli † Editorial Board

Vincenzo Cicchelli, Gemass, Paris 4 /CNRS, Paris Descartes University Benjamin Gregg, University of Texas at Austin

VOLUME 119

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/issa

Visions of the Social Society as a Political Project in France, 1750–1950

By

Jean Terrier

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

Cover illustration: ‘Sans titre,’ from the collection: ‘Est-ce ainsi que les hommes vivent?,’ by Virginie Restain. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Terrier, Jean. Visions of the social : society as a political project in France, 1750-1950 / by Jean Terrier. p. cm. – (International studies in sociology and social anthropology, ISSN 0074-8684 ; 119) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20153-8 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sociology–France. 2. Political sociology–France. I. Title. HM477.F8T47 2011 301.0944–dc22 2011011641

ISSN 0074-8684 ISBN 978 90 04 20153 8 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Concepts and Critiques of the Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Towards a History of the Social As a Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxii . The Collective Will: From the Political to the Social “Bearing the People’s Person”: Hobbes on Unity through Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “A Moral and Collective Body of Many Members”: Rousseau’s Unitary State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “A Unique Whole Composed of Integral Parts”: National Unity during the French Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Politics Is to Be Wrought by Social Means”: Burke and de Maistre on the Pre-eminence of the Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Natural and the Social: The Notion of Social Causality . . . . . . “Determined by Its Character and Past”: Taine’s Traditionalist Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Sociology for the Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Languages, Hybridised: Esmein on National Sovereignty. . .

1 2 5 9 14 21 27 31 39

. Nations and Their Adversaries As a Theme of Social Thought . . . National Singularity and the Community of Nations: Montesquieu, Encyclopédie, Mme de Staël . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Politics and National Characters: Rousseau and de Maistre . . . . . . Increasingly Distinct Nations in a Social Age: Michelet . . . . . . . . . . “A Spiritual Principle”: The Nation According to Renan . . . . . . . . . A Racial Theory of National Characters: Gustave Le Bon . . . . . . . . Societies and Nations As Totalities: Emile Durkheim . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Philosophy and the Figure of the Enemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45 47 54 58 62 67 70 75

. Severing the Link to Nature: The Rise of the Culture Concept in International Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “National Character”: Varieties of Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

81 84

vi

contents “A Continuous Fermentation”: The Social Ontology of Gabriel Tarde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 “No Such Thing As a Collective Personality”: Max Weber’s Nominalist Sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Exchange and Flux: Cultural Forms According to Franz Boas . . . 102 Society and “Conscience Collective”: Durkheim on Society and Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 An Object for the Human Sciences: The Rise of the Culture Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

. “In Us, but Not of Us”. The Location of Society According to Emile Durkheim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Durkheim’s Fundamental Question: The Location of Society . . . . The Question of the Material Substratum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Individual and Collective Representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collective Consciousness and the Externality of Social Facts . . . . Religion, Collective Ideation, and “Homo Duplex”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The National and the Transnational: Marcel Mauss. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Before Nations: From Hordes to Empires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nation As an “Integrated Society” of Politically Conscious Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Political Definition of a Social Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Excursus on Philological Problems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Everything Can Be Shared between Societies”: A Sociology of International Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Question of a Human Civilisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “An Entity with a Thousand Dimensions”: Society, Language, and the Category of Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

119 119 122 126 129 135 145 148 150 153 156 158 165 170

Epilogue. The Language and Dialects of the Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the preparation of this volume, I have benefited from the support of many persons and institutions. Its distant origins lie in research done at the European University Institute under the supervision of Peter Wagner, to whom I am glad to express here, again, my gratitude. Part of the research on the eighteenth century has been made possible by a grant of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. This grant has enabled me to use, over the course of several months, the library and facilities of the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung at the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle (Saale). I thank all three institutions for their support. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has provided me with the possibility to spend a year at Humboldt University and the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, during which I did research on Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Apart from the Foundation itself, I want to thank Hans-Peter Müller, Yves Sintomer and Pascale Laborier for their hospitality and scientific advice; also Uta Kühn of Humboldt University has been of invaluable help. Lastly, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin has provided me with first-rate working conditions and a stimulating intellectual environment. I want to express gratitude especially to the director of this institution, Christoph Holzhey. Many colleagues and friends, whose names are mentioned in the corresponding chapters, have read one or more sections from this volume and made always insightful comments. I did my best to take them into account. Special mention must be made here of Gita Rajan, who read the entire manuscript and made extremely helpful suggestions concerning style, structure and content. All chapters of this volume appear for the first time in the English language. Chapter  is a modified and expanded version of an essay I wrote for the  “Seminar on the History of the Concepts of the European Political Tradition” at Università Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples. It was published as “Cohésion politique, cohésion sociale, et théories de l’ autorité politique” in Storia dei concetti, storia del pensiero politico. Saggi di ricerca, edited by Giuseppe Duso and Sandro Chignola (Naples: Editoriale Scientifica, ): –. It also entails some passages from my article: “The idea of a Republican tradition. Reflections on the debate

viii

acknowledgments

concerning the intellectual foundations of the French Third Republic,” Journal of Political Ideologies , no.  (October ): –. Chapter  builds on my “Âme et animosité des peuples: représentations de la singularité et de l’ adversité des nations dans la pensée sociale en France,” published in Ennemi juré, ennemi naturel, ennemi héréditaire. Construction et instrumentalisation de la figure de l’ ennemi. La France et ses adversaires (XVIIe–XXe siècles), edited by Burghart Schmidt and Jörg Ulbert (Hamburg: DoBu, ). A German version of Chapter  was published as “Die Verortung der Gesellschaft: Durkheims Verwendung des Begriffs ‘Substrat’,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie , no.  (): –. I am extremely grateful to the editors and publishers of these essays to have allowed their republication in the present volume. Chapters  and , as well as the Introduction and the Epilogue, are published here for the first time.

INTRODUCTION

Ours are interesting times for those studying the history of the concept of “the social”. The term has become ubiquitous in recent years, especially to describe some of the tools made available to us by the newest technologies of communication. Activities that once were invariably solitary, and often tedious—such as searching for books relevant to one’s idiosyncratic interests, organising a collection of photographs, or even keeping a diary—, now have acquired a social dimension. In this semantic passage, some connotations of “the social” have risen to prominence, while others have receded into the background. The social is increasingly perceived as a realm of freedom. It has moved towards a semantic area evoking friendship, dialogue, partnership, exchange, unconstrained cooperation. Previously above all the adjective of the noun “society”, understood as a bounded totality, “the social” today refers to associations embracing the ideals of common purpose and free membership. The meaning of the “social” entertains a relation of interdependence with the meaning of a few further notions, especially the “political” and the “natural”. It is hardly surprising, thus, that our understanding of politics itself is modified as a result of these semantic shifts. Many authors, including Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Cornelius Castoriadis,1 have argued that the association of “the political” with collective autonomy, with the collaborative establishment and enforcement of rules acceptable by all, receded in the years of the administration of things which characterised the “organised modernity” of the post-war era.2 It seems that this association is being further weakened today. Now that we have come to believe that our freedom is best expressed in the associations we voluntarily belong to—for instance, in the communities of the “social web” or the organisations which make up “civil society”—we envisage the political as the necessary evil in charge of all things nonassociative, constraining, conflictual, or even violent. Politics is taken to 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ); Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, ); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, ). 2 I borrow the notion of organised modernity from Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity. Liberty and Discipline (London-New York: Routledge, ).

x

introduction

be responsible for exerting constraints upon those who are unwilling or incapable of living up to the new ideals of the free, unpolitical association: by way of example, terrorists and unwanted migrants, religious fundamentalists and the unruly inhabitants of destitute neighbourhoods. The current weariness with politics, which has been much commented upon,3 may have something to do with this definitive disenchantment of the political, its loss of all connection with collective freedom. Generally speaking, the “social” is one of several notions we use to describe a specific kind of relation between human beings. Today we typically speak of social relations as opposed to political interactions, family ties, and economic or contractual exchanges.4 As Max Weber observed, the political describes not one, but two different sets of phenomena: on the one hand, the relations between already constituted polities, and on the other hand, a kind of purposeful, often collective action aiming at maintaining or modifying extant relations of power within a given polity.5 By contrast, familial relations are often envisaged as resting on ties of mutual affection, so that they do not involve power nor require formal rules: this is the old (and eminently patriarchal)6 idea that the order of family life emerges spontaneously. There is a further kind of relation between humans which is more purposeful and involves more individuals, while not being usually classified either as political in the strict sense nor as social. To refer to this dimension of life in common we nowadays use a variety of labels such as “civil” (for instance we speak of “civil society”) or “economic”. Similarly we call “associations”, “organisations”, and “corporations” the collective actors which perform them. Lastly, social relations stand for the daily, inescapable, horizontal (i.e., non-hierarchical and thus non-political) and non-contractual connec-

3

For example, Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, ); Peter Mair, “Ruling the void? The hollowing of Western democracy,” New Left Review  (November–December ). 4 I merely describe here commonly accepted definitions, without engaging into an assessment of their validity, relevance, or appropriateness. Alternative definitions and classifications of the various kinds of human relations will be presented and discussed at several points in the present volume. 5 Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” Gesammelte politische Schriften (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck, ), ; tr., “The profession and vocation of politics,” in Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 6 Carole Pateman, in The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), has rightly criticised this vision of the family as characterised by love, as well as the opposition public sphere/private sphere itself: the problem is that they prevent from the start any critical reflection of the familial order as violent, and of the private sphere as politically relevant.

introduction

xi

tions between individuals who are not intimates, without being entirely strangers. In this sense we speak for instance of one’s “social network” or of being “socially well integrated”. Concepts and Critiques of the Social Seen in historical perspective these current or at least emergent meanings of the “political”, the “familial”, or the “social”, irrespective of their relevance and importance, represent merely one semantic configuration in a very long series. In what follows, I try to offer a few further conceptual distinctions, looking especially at more technical uses of the concept of the social and at their historical developments. According to some, the distinction between the political and the familial suffices to cover all possible forms of relations between human beings, so that one may wonder what other concepts are needed. For instance Hannah Arendt, in a few well-known passages of The Human Condition (), vehemently denied that we needed a concept of “the social” at all. She saw in its use, which had been steadily growing since the French Revolution, one of the many manifestations of a dangerous conceptual and cultural confusion. In Greek thought, she argued, there had been a strict separation between the agora, the public square, and the oikos, the private household. Politics was understood as an agonistic (though non-violent) sphere in which citizens “appeared” and were recognised by their peers as unique individuals.7 By contrast, the household was seen as the sphere of bodily needs and of the work done to satisfy them. It was, thus, a sphere of necessity and fixed roles and hierarchies. It constituted a necessary material basis for the free action of citizens, a space in which the permanent scrutiny of the public gaze could be escaped, and in which the intimate domain, most importantly one’s true self with all its weaknesses and frailties, could be cultivated in all independence.8 In modern times, Arendt argued, the rise of the social blurred the boundaries of the private and the public.9 From then on the primary task of politics was taken to be the fight against deprivation, the search for solutions to economic problems. Need and necessity, instead of remaining hidden in the private sphere of each citizen, were now of collective 7

Arendt, The Human Condition, –. For a similar point, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Faber & Faber, ). 9 Arendt, The Human Condition, . 8

xii

introduction

concern. Thus the state was transformed into a gigantic administration responsible for the distribution of material benefits to atomised, identical individuals,10 and ceased to be the “sphere of appearance” in which citizens collectively exercised their freedom. With Hannah Arendt we are offered a first theorisation, which adopts a rather narrow concept of the social. Her suggestion is that, to qualify as “social”, something must fulfil two conditions: first, it must have something to do with human material needs; second, it must be a topic of public attention and interest. Insofar as she also believed that questions relating to material needs should remain confined to the private sphere, we can say that the social, for her, is the familial run wild: it is the familial overriding its limits to contaminate the political. I will come back to Arendt in the Epilogue to this volume, and discuss there the characteristics and limitations of her analysis. Hannah Arendt is by far not the only scholar to criticise the concept of the social. If anything, a sceptical or critical attitude towards the once hegemonic concept has become more widespread in recent years.11 A good indicator of this development is the existence of a debate among historians regarding the assumptions and methods of social history.12 Probably the most widely adopted approach to historical problems from the Second World War to the early nineteen-eighties, social history rested on three major assumptions. First, a distinction was made between phenomena, usually identified with economic and social structure, on the one hand, and epiphenomena, usually identified with pol-

10

Ibid., –. On this point, see William Outhwaite, The Future of Society (Malden, MA-Oxford: Blackwell, ). See also Peter Wagner, “ ‘An entirely new object of consciousness, of volition, of thought.’ The birth and (almost) passing away of society as a scientific object,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by Lorraine Daston (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). 12 Titles include: Miguel A. Cabrera, “Linguistic approach of return to subjectivism? In search of an alternative to social history,” Social History , no.  (January ); Miguel A. Cabrera, “On language, culture, and social action,” History and Theory , no.  (); Miguael A. Cabrera, “The crisis of the social and post-social history,” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms ,  (); Miguel A. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction (Oxford: Lexington Books, ); Patrick Joyce, “The end of social history?” Social History , no.  (January ); Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, ); William H. Sewell, Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). See also, by non-historians, the volume by Outhwaite, cited above, and Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). 11

introduction

xiii

itics and culture, on the other. Second, social historians took it to be legitimate to speak of causality in human affairs. Causality was here understood as meaning that (at least some of) the actions of individuals were explainable by reference to factors external to the action itself, typically operating without the intermediation of individual consciousness. This assumption is not specific to social history strictly speaking, since it was shared by other paradigms—for instance the geographic or racial determinisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or even some philosophies of history. The specificity of social history (and this is the third assumption) was that it took the most important “external factors”, in the sense just mentioned, to be the overall configuration of social relations in a given historical setting. In short, social historians set forth to explain social phenomena of all kinds by envisaging them as local effects of a determining underlying social structure.13 To be sure, it would be wrong to see social history as a monolithic methodology. Although the “social structure” or the “societal configuration” always was the point of departure, it could be understood in markedly different ways. For instance Emile Durkheim, at least in a common reading of his early writings,14 proposed to explain social forms and phenomena by looking at the density of interactions within a given territory. At the most general level, he explained the difference between traditional (communitarian and homogeneous) and modern (individualistic, diverse, and dynamic) social forms by reference to the density of the population. In territories with scattered populations, there are only limited possibilities of exchange and emulation: this gives birth to static, undifferentiated societies. In densely populated regions, by contrast, interactions are more numerous and often take the form of competition, which fosters individualisation and change.15 But Durkheim’s theory also allowed for sociological analyses of more circumscribed social events. A lack of interaction when solidarity is expected (a phenomenon Durkheim called “anomie”), or an abundance of interactions when more autonomy is desired, may lead to phenomena such as suicide, demoralisation, resentment, conflict, and eventually collapse of the social order. When

13

Cabrera, “The crisis of the social,” . I assess this reading of Durkheim’s work in Chapter  of the present volume. 15 The argument is to be found in Emile Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ); tr., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, ). 14

xiv

introduction

the quantity and quality of interactions are adequate, by contrast, positive social phenomena such as solidarity, discipline and religion come to the fore.16 While the methodology proposed by Durkheim had some influence, other kinds of analysis, this time emphasising class, were more widely endorsed by social historians. Both Marxist and Weberian historians adopted the focus of class, while offering quite different definitions of this concept: Marxists saw them as rooted in the economic infrastructure, and identified several antagonic classes on the basis of their relationship to property (owners of capital vs. sellers of labour force); Weberians tended to describe them as communities of status and lifestyle actively seeking to promote their material and ideal interests, possibly by way of temporary social alliances with other groups.17 According to Marxists as well as to Weberians, however, historical phenomena could often be accounted for in terms of (subjective or objective, i.e. not necessarily conscious) class interests. Political and religious doctrines could be understood as the expression of the social situation or aspiration of a given class; institutions could be seen as promoting specific class interests; and so forth. The relegation of all manifestations of the immaterial side of social life (not only ideas but also concepts and categories, social imaginaries, collective representations) to being a mere epiphenomenon of social structure constitutes a very strong, and thus obviously debatable, methodological position. As Miguel A. Cabrera observed in , the “assumption that social reality is an objective entity with the power to causally determine individuals’ subjectivity and behaviour has been subjected to a growing questioning over the last two decades.”18 Apart from the epistemological and ontological difficulties inherent to the concept of social causality and to the idea of society as a tightly bounded, “autonomous, self-contained, and self-regulated instance”,19 the denial of human agency typically leads to the historical problem of understanding social transformations, as well as to the political problem that such changes can hardly 16

On this point, see especially Emile Durkheim, Le suicide. Etude de sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ); tr., Suicide: A Study in Sociology (London: Routledge, ). 17 The theme of class alliance features prominently, for instance, in Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (London: Penguin, ). A good example of a Weberian approach to social history is the work of Hans-Ulrich Wehler. See for instance his classic Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, – (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ). 18 Cabrera, “The crisis of the social,” . 19 Ibid., .

introduction

xv

be advocated, for fear of sounding naive. Many new theories have thus emerged which tried to remedy the shortcomings of traditional social history. Following Cabrera, it is possible to distinguish between three different kinds of developments. To begin with, there is the attempt to revise social history with a view to make it more sensitive to immaterial—especially linguistic-discursive and cultural—phenomena. Histoire des mentalités, an inflexion within the paradigm of the Annales social history school in France, is a particularly telling example. The goal is to include cultural phenomena in historical analysis, while maintaining the preference of social historians for general and enduring phenomena. The result is a focus on deeply rooted, widely shared representations20 such as, to mention only one famous example, the “attitude towards death”.21 A more radical departure from postwar social historiography is represented by cultural historians. Finding inspiration in anthropology, and especially in the seminal work of Clifford Geertz,22 they take a further step away from the focus on social structure and tend to consider culture itself as the primary element structuring life in common.23 Here the accent is set not on the repartition of groups in society and on their (possibly conflictual) interactions but on the shared patterns of meanings available to individual and collective actors, as well as on the mobilisation of such meanings in historical situations. Often more sensitive than histoire des mentalités to one-time events and to short-term developments, cultural historians have nonetheless been often criticised for neglecting the diachronic issue of the emergence, transformation and collapse of cultural patterns, i.e. for taking culture as the immutable background of social action.24 20

Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme représentation,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales , no.  (November–December ). 21 Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death. From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). 22 For an assessment of the role of Geertz for historians, cf. William H. Sewell, “Geertz, cultural systems, and history: from synchrony to transformation,” Representations no.  (Summer ). Now reprinted under the title “History, synchrony, and structure: reflections on the work of Clifford Geertz” as Chapter  of Sewell, Logics of History. 23 On the notion of culture as structure, i.e. as an “objective” entity “existing regardless of the consciousness and the volition of their member human beings”, cf. Peter Wagner, A History and Theory of the Social Sciences. Not All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London: Sage, ), . 24 Cf. Sewell, “Geertz”. See also the critique of the work of the cultural historian Robert Darnton by Roger Chartier (“Text, symbols, and Frenchness,” Journal of Modern History , no. , ) and by Giovanni Levi (“Les dangers du geertzisme,” Labyrinthe , — available online, http://labyrinthe.revues.org/index.html. Retrieved on June , ).

xvi

introduction

Another alternative, hardly represented among historians but increasingly widespread in sociology and political science, is the theory of rational choice. At its core lies the complete reversal of one of the central assumptions of social history. The scholar is expected to operate on the basis of a distinction between phenomenon and epiphenomenon, but the terms are inverted: the “real” of human life are here individual actions, and structural phenomena are interpreted as the unintended consequences of such actions. The notion of social causality is dropped, since the individual is here understood as a conscious actor freely selecting the best means to realise subjective preferences and maximise satisfaction. Moreover, the emphasis on individual reflection and action may lead the theorists of rational action to deny than anything like “society” or “culture” exists as more than a provisional effect of individual choices. In other words, the very choices of the individuals themselves are assumed to be made independently from pre-existing shared representations, i.e. to reflect purely idiosyncratic hierarchies of preference (the fact that individuals, in their acting, do factor in the—supporting or obstructing—attitude of others is of course acknowledged by methodological individualists).25 The third alternative is what Cabrera calls “post-social” history. Like any “post-” position (from post-impressionism all the way to post-structuralism), this one cultivates an ambiguity concerning the extent to which it understands itself as a way of breaking with, or as a way of further perfecting, the views of its predecessor. At any rate, as I will argue in more detail in the Epilogue to this volume, the continuities between the classical approach to the social and Cabrera’s post-social theory of society are as striking as the differences between them. In Cabrera’s reconstruction and advocacy, the first move of post-social historians (a move inspired by the work of Michel Foucault),26 consists in exposing a tendency common to all three approaches mentioned so far: the tendency, namely, to consider as natural a particular unit of analysis (respectively society, culture, and the individual). By contrast, “new” or “post-social”27 historians 25 Cf. John Scott, “Rational choice theory,” in Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of The Present, edited by Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli, and Frank Webster (London: Sage, ). An exposition and discussion of methodological individualism, of which rational choice theory is a subset, can be found in Steven Lukes, “Methodological individualism reconsidered,” The British Journal of Sociology , no.  (), as well as in Outhwaite, The Future of Society, esp. on pp. –. 26 Joyce, “The end of social history,” , . 27 In his writings from the nineteen nineties, Cabrera speaks of “new history”, moving later to the expression “post-social”, which he borrows from fellow historian Patrick Joyce.

introduction

xvii

refuse to leave anything outside of their historicising gaze. Assuming that “[n]atural objects do not exist”,28 they perceive all aspects of human life as historical constructs. More specifically, they understand the individual as well as society and culture as products of discourse, itself defined as a “structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs.”29 Although a structure is posited to begin with, the new historians are quick to point out that it is a particular structure with a dual character, simultaneously enabling and constraining.30 Language dictates what individuals must do to be understood, but at the same time, as an instrument of communication, provides them with opportunities to achieve particular goals. There is, moreover, a further dimension of structure that new historians especially emphasise: the dimension of historicity.31 The major reference here, in my understanding, is to linguistics and to the famous Saussurean distinction between langue and parole.32 The social is made, among other things, of repertoires of meaning which operate like a grammar that individuals have to follow if they want their statements and actions to be understandable. At the same time, however, an instituted grammatical and semantic structure (langue) can be historically modified when the speakers progressively and collectively deviate from the norm, in processes which are non-individual and non-intentional and which we can describe, for this reason, as eminently social: Discourse imposes itself on individuals as an inescapable linguistic pattern, but on interacting with reality and on deploying itself socially, discourse modifies itself, producing new categories and leaving behind others, and finally discourse declines and transforms itself into another one.33

The “specific social realm”34 of pre-existing concepts and categories Cabrera either calls “discourse”35 or “social imaginary”: a “set of assumptions and principles . . . through which people make sense of social events, con-

28

Cabrera, “On language,” . Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: Or, the uses of poststructuralist theory for feminism,” Feminist Studies , no. , (), . 30 Cf. William H. Sewell, “A theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation,” The American Journal of Sociology , no.  (). Now reprinted as Chapter  of Logics of History. 31 This is a point of convergence with post-structuralism. On this, see Hannelore Bublitz, Diskurs (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, ). 32 Edmond de Saussure, Course of General Linguistics (London: Open Court, ). 33 Cabrera, “Linguistic approach,” . 34 Cabrera, “On language,” ; Cabrera, “Linguistic approach,” . 35 Cabrera, “On language,” . 29

xviii

introduction

ceive and delimit themselves as subjects, and justify their practice.”36 It is through the mobilisation of concepts and categories in historically specific situations by concrete individuals, i.e. through their “articulation” with reality, that meaning is created, which in turn inspires actions.37 On such premises, Cabrera proceeds to criticise the social theories he has described in the first place. His critique of methodological individualism focuses on the notion that social agents have individual preferences: far from existing in a social void such preferences, according to Cabrera, are embedded in historical (discursive and imaginary) contexts. While agents may possess an idiosyncratic hierarchy of preferences, such preferences are “selected” from a collective repertoire which attaches a positive or negative value to possible beliefs and actions (of course, the elements of the repertoire may be re-elaborated, individually or collectively). Moreover, the emphasis on rational calculation and conscious action obscures the fact that individuals typically act on the basis of deeply held, “authoritative” beliefs whose validity is not questioned.38 Concerning histoire des mentalités and cultural history, Cabrera suggests that in at least some of these models the autonomy of culture is not fully recognised: culture is here a reflection and re-elaboration of social divisions, and are thus depicted as dependent upon economic and social arrangements: “Categories, concepts, or cognitive schemata of perception are [seen as] an internalization, even if a symbolic one, of social reality itself.”39 Connected to this is the fact that while cultural historians rightly insist on the structural (constraining) character of culture, they miss the complex nature of all structures and are thus unable, like social historians, to offer a satisfactory theory of historical change: they either point to processes which are (falsely believed to be) exogenous to society itself, such as technological development or demographic change, or (contra36 Cabrera, Postsocial History, . The term “social imaginary” is borrowed from Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). Taylor himself draws upon Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ). 37 Cabrera, Postsocial History, . See also Cabrera, “Linguistic approach,” . 38 I will come back to the notion that beliefs have “authority” when discussing the work of Emile Durkheim in Chapter . 39 Cabrera, “On language,” . This is a comment on Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme représentation.” Cabrera’s interpretation seems debatable, though, since it focuses on the first part of a sentence on p.  (“collective representations” are described by Chartier as “incorporating” the “divisions of social organization”), without considering the second part (“collective representations as the matrix of practices which construct the social world.”). On the same point, see Joyce, “The end of social history,” .

introduction

xix

dictorily) invoke the intentional transformative action of individuals and groups. Instead, post-social historians envisage social transformation as a collective, usually non-intentional elaboration of new cultural representations, concepts and categories resulting from the invention of meanings deviant from existing semantic norms. Lastly, Cabrera criticises the vision of the social typically held by social historians—a critique to which I return in the Epilogue to this volume. Cabrera mentions three aspects which he finds especially contestable: first, the emphasis put on social structure, as opposed to other structures such as language and culture; second, the notion of structure as a cause that determines the behaviour of actors, as opposed to a preexisting resource that actors mobilise and possibly displace; and third, the conception of society as an entity with closed boundaries, as opposed to one at least relatively open to its environment. As in the case of Hannah Arendt the “social” of social historians, as we see, is rather narrowly understood. By contrast, the repentant social historian William H. Sewell, who in his later work seeks to develop a methodology combining the insights of social history with those of more discourse-oriented approaches,40 offers a much broader definition. Sewell’s main point is that we should apply the adjective “social” to relations of interdependence: the social, for him, is “the complex interdependence in human interrelationships.”41 While certainly ringing true, this formulation remains a bit too general and abstract. It may thus be worthwhile to further clarify its meaning. Human interdependence points to the fact that some things that individuals cannot possibly do or have alone are a necessary (though, of course, not sufficient) condition for the existence of society itself. We may distinguish between three dimensions along which human beings can be seen as interdependent. At the most basic level humans, as sexually differentiated animals, depend on each other for the biological reproduction of the species. This entails not only fecundation, but also child-rearing, i.e. the process of bringing an offspring to a point in which he or she can fulfill without special assistance certain functions seen as vital (such as eating, walking and speaking).42 Interestingly, child-rearing can also be described as a 40 Cf. Sewell, Logic of History, esp. ch. : “The unconscious of social and cultural history, or confessions of a former quantitative historian”. 41 William H. Sewell, “Refiguring the ‘social’ in social science. An interpretivist manifesto,” in Logics of History, . 42 Which functions are vital is of course a matter of cultural definition. The three I mention here are universal, but most societies consider that further functions must be

xx

introduction

process in which an individual, initially merely dependent, becomes capable of entering into relations of interdependence. This brings us to a second dimension, that of the division of labour—the fact, namely, that various individuals, typically possessing different skills acquired through specialised training, are involved in the production process of each good or service available in society. A third dimension, the most eminently social one, is the fact that individuals not only do things in common but also have things in common. I am not thinking here of collective property, but of things we would call by a different name if they were not possessed simultaneously by many individuals, i.e. of things which are inherently collective: things such as the meaning of words, cultural references, the belief in the legitimacy of given institutions, or religious rituals. From the above, we can deduce the following point: that language, politics, religion, culture and the economy all are social phenomena. Sewell’s “social as interdependence” is an Oberbegriff, a superordinate concept under which we can subsume all other dimensions of human life. In Cabrera’s and Sewell’s reflections, a consideration of the social as a structure of some kind (different at any rate from the “structure” of social historians) is still present. By contrast, this is precisely the element dropped by Bruno Latour in his critique of what he calls the “sociology of the social”.43 He calls by this name a vision of human relations built on a series of ontological assumptions concerning the nature of reality— especially, of course, human reality. Some of these assumptions, already described in this introduction, sound familiar: “there exists a social ‘context’ in which non-social activities take place; it is a specific domain of reality; it can be used as a specific type of causality to account for the residual aspects that other domains (psychology, law, economics, etc.) cannot completely deal with.”44 Like Cabrera, Latour fears that this ontological framework may prevent us from paying attention to certain crucial features of the social. Especially, he believes that sociologists show a widespread tendency to explain social events by reference to something which is only named or invoked (e.g. “social structure” or “class”), thereby leaving the really interesting questions aside: how did these all-powerful elements arise? How do their influence operate? In order to answer such questions, one needs to immerse oneself in the richness of the social acquired on top of this before one is declared an “adult” (for instance, according to some societies: reading, or hunting, etc.). 43 Latour, Reassembling the Social, Introduction. 44 Ibid., .

introduction

xxi

and follow actors in their actions, interactions, and associations. Latour’s alternative ontology, whose scientific translation he calls “sociology of association”, starts from the notion that society, far from being a context behind individuals, is an always provisional result of interactions and negotiations between individuals and groups. Latour, thus, introduces a notion of the social as “malleable stuff ”, which may be re-organised by conscious human action: social actors, argues Latour, “know very well what they are doing even if they don’t articulate it to the satisfaction of the observers”.45 And yet there is a crucial difference between Latour and the speakers of the eighteenth-century voluntaristic language of politics to which I shall turn in a moment: the very conception of what humans are. In Chapter , I will discuss some aspects of the sociology of Gabriel Tarde, and demonstrate how his work, despite its emphasis on individual action, has nothing to do with the rationalism of the Enlightenment nor with contemporary rational choice theory. For Tarde, individuals are not beings patiently meditating on how to reach the good, or calculating costs and benefits; they are open, contradictory entities traversed by fluxes of desire. As we will see Bruno Latour, in his own sociology, explicitly tries to follow Tarde’s inspiration, and in particular to adapt for his own purposes the vitalistic ontology and the optimistic anthropology of his predecessor. What can be concluded from these different reflections concerning the concept of the social? What is most striking is perhaps the fact that there seems to be a wide agreement across the board concerning some of the features of the social. Despite marked theoretical differences, and despite the fact that some advocate and others criticise the concept, most participants in these recent debates see “the social” as a realm of human life made up of elements exerting a constraint over the action and reflection of a large number of persons. Individuals may encounter social constraints of an objective kind (as in the case of what Durkheim called “social morphology”: social density, geographical placement of groups on a territory, etc.) or, more often, of an immaterial kind (as in the case of representations, institutions, values, traditions, beliefs). In all cases, however, we are dealing with phenomena which social actors cannot transform by way of individual action. At most, they can privately navigate away from social constraints (e.g. by dropping certain beliefs or querying certain values). But they cannot easily bring large numbers of

45

Ibid.

xxii

introduction

other social actors to do the same. Because of this, “the social” always has a certain stability, a certain rigidity. If at all transformable it is transformable by way of, not individual, but collective action. Towards a History of the Social As a Language While widespread in the social science of the postwar era, neither the emphasis on constraint and stability, nor the definition of “society” and “the social” as the highest, most encompassing level of human reality, are necessary connotations of these two terms. This can be demonstrated by looking at the history of these concepts, as Keith Michael Baker, among others, has done. Baker describes the steady increase, in France, of the use of terms such as “social”, “society” and “sociable” in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “Society” initially “carried a range of essentially voluntaristic meanings, clustered around two poles: association of partnership for a common purpose, on the one hand; friendship, comradeship, companionability, on the other.”46 Around  the word “society”, thus, evoked sociétés savantes and salons, perhaps even professional guilds and aristocratic courts, but not that highest context of all social interactions that today we would call by such names as ethnic communities, peoples, or nations, each being a particular kind of society.47 According to Baker, however, the semantics of society and the social changed again in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which the association of the social with freedom, without disappearing entirely, was downplayed. To begin with, another semantic layer increasingly moved to the foreground during the Enlightenment, when “society” could be used to describe a politically organised ensemble of individuals living on a delimited territory: [t]he earlier, voluntaristic associations of the term with partnership, companionability, and civility do not disappear; but they are joined by a more general meaning of society as the basic form of collective human existence, at once natural to human beings and instituted by them, a corollary of human needs and a human response to those needs. Henceforth, the semantic charge of société oscillates between the twin poles of freedom

46 Keith Michael Baker, “Enlightenment and the institution of society: notes for a conceptual history,” in Civil Society. History and Possibilities, edited by Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 47 It may be tempting to suggest that the current conceptual developments have brought us back to this initial semantic situation.

introduction

xxiii

and necessity, between the voluntarism of free contract, on the one hand, and the constraints of collective human existence on the other.48

The analysis proposed by Keith Michael Baker may be further spelled out. It seems that many thinkers of the Enlightenment distinguished, more or less explicitly, between two kinds of relation between the social and the political. On the one hand, in some situations, the social dominates the political. Collective habits as well as ingrained perceptions (“prejudices”) may determine the shape of the polity. While many thinkers deplored this situation, they recognised that it was a rather common one. The main problem here, they argued, was that freedom was nowhere to be seen. History or climate or institutional religion had brought about a certain arbitrary, artificial configuration of social relations, upon which equally arbitrary and artificial forms of power could easily grow. The absolute monarchies of Europe, as well as other despotisms across the globe, had prospered precisely on the blind, habitual acceptance of existing institutions, often justified through recourse to false metaphors of the social. (One common example is that society was depicted as a family writ large, with the monarch in the position of a head of household.) However, such subordination of politics to society was not regarded as inevitable, since the social could be remodeled by voluntary political action. This notion was adopted, it seems, by most thinkers of the Enlightenment.49 Collective habits and prejudices were, in the worst case, only second nature, capable of being cast off to reveal a truer, simpler, more reasonable nature. Politics, in particular, could be transformed after the model of the free associations which were gaining importance at the time. This would inaugurate a new relation of the social and the political, in which the former would be clearly subordinate to the latter, in the same way that the needs of the body and the passions of the mind should be subordinated to the guidance of reason. That the state itself could be turned into an association of citizens was one of the central ideas of the promoters of the theory of the social contract—not least, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Social Contract () belongs to the first works bearing the term “social” in their 48

Baker, “Enlightenment,” . Even Montesquieu, in spite of his insistence on the solidity of social relations and the logic inhabiting them, believed that customs could be voluntarily transformed if sufficient caution was observed. This point is further discussed in Chapter . Concerning the rise and fall of the notion of will as the central concept of politics, see Patrick Riley, “How coherent is the social contract tradition?” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (October–December ). 49

xxiv

introduction

title. Even though Rousseau never expressed much enthusiasm for the various particular societies mushrooming in his lifetime, which he judged superficial and insufficiently political, he argued that societies could be transformed from mere chaotic and unjust “aggregations” ruled by strong men, and even possibly despots, into free “associations” governed by reasonable citizens.50 In this process, human beings would be in a position to recover, at least in part, the original independence and simplicity which was theirs in the state of nature, i.e. before the inception of societies in which inequality and artifice had always reigned supreme. During the French Revolution an admirer of Rousseau, the Jacobin Jacques Billaud-Varenne, published a work with a title in which the term “social” also featured prominently, namely the Principles for a Regeneration of the Social System (Principes régénérateurs du système social, ).51 In it, Billaud-Varenne presented the social as the malleable stuff which is the primary material of the action of governments. Degenerate customs where selfishness, the love of gain, or the desire for glory prevail are caused by corrupt, arbitrary governments. In the same way, a virtuous society, based on fraternity, mutual help and union, would result from the establishment of a just and rational political constitution. While social systems may be composed of relatively stable habits and worldviews, a skilled legislator can always reform customs and create a new union based on a spirit of devotion to the public. In other words, it is wrong, according to Billaud-Varenne, to “suppose that one has to adapt [the shape of] a new government to the customs and to the spirit of the people”.52 Rather, the people have to be rendered conform to just political principles, themselves derived from an observation of nature: “All is good in nature, when the chain of its combinations is followed exactly.”53 In such reflections, there is an implicit notion of a hierarchy with three components. On top of it is nature, understood as a model, an origin. In the middle is politics, understood as reason and free will, which implements the precepts of nature in the human realm. At the bottom is society, understood as malleable social relations, which politics should 50 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social; ou principes du droit politique, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, ), ; tr., The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, in Political Writings (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), . 51 Both Rousseau and Billaud-Varenne are discussed at more length in Chapter . 52 J.N. Billaud, Principes régénérateurs du systême social (Paris: Imprimerie Vatar, ), . 53 Ibid., .

introduction

xxv

shape, control, and cultivate. Corruption occurs when this hierarchy is shattered and “counter-natural” relations develop, for instance when the social determines the political. This volume, for its part, is dedicated to yet another transformation of the meaning of the “social” and the “political”. It will show that a complex language emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century, the “language of the social”, which in its pervasiveness, extension and practical ambitions can only be compared to the language of natural jurisprudence which it sought to replace.54 The chapters of this volume delineate precisely how the three elements I mentioned above, the social, the political, and the natural, were redefined, as well as their relations rethought. In order to avoid anticipating my arguments, I will here only briefly indicate two aspects of the transformations of the meaning of the social in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First of all society and the social, previously associated either with freedom or with removable, self-incurred limitations, now were brought in connection with constraints of a more fundamental kind. Far from being easily pliable and malleable, the social was taken to be that which always resists concerted, purposeful action; or even that which inflexibly and irresistibly causes humans to behave in certain ways. An emphasis on constraint (from the simple notion of “blind habits” to the idea of a causal determination of human action by external factors) was commonplace among the thinkers of the sociological tradition in the broad sense, i.e. including its “precursors”.55 As a first suggestion of this, some particularly famous quotes can be provided here. At the very beginning of L’ Esprit des lois (), Montesquieu suggested that his entire reflection was built on the assumption that human relations unfold with a necessary regularity:

54

The scholarly literature on natural law and natural right is immense, and growing. I have found a few texts useful: Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Antonio Passerin d’ Entrèves, Natural Law. A Historical Survey (London: Harper & Row, ); Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights. Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, – (Atlanta: Scholars Press, ). 55 On the question of the sociological tradition, see Raymond Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique. Montesquieu. Comte. Marx. Tocqueville. Durkheim. Pareto. Weber (Paris: Gallimard, ); Donald N. Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, ); Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (London: Heinemann International, ).

xxvi

introduction I have first of all considered mankind; and the result of my thoughts has been, that amidst such an infinite diversity of laws and manners, they were not solely conducted by the caprice of fancy. I have laid down the first principles, and have found that the particular cases follow naturally from them; that the histories of all nations are only consequences of them; and that every particular law is connected with another law, or depends on some other of a more general extent. . . . Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things[.]56

In a famous passage in his Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (), Karl Marx defended a similar, though clearly stronger, understanding of social and economic relations as something which can not be modified at will and heavily influences human behaviour: In the social production of their existence, men invariably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will . . . The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.57

Lastly, in his Rules of Sociological Method (–), the sociologist Emile Durkheim defined the primary object of his discipline, the social fact, in the following way: “they consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.”58 The second important transformation is really a consequence of the first one. It consists in a tendency to see all spheres of human life as necessarily subordinated to the social. In other words, the hierarchy I mentioned earlier was revolutionised and turned upon its head: in the language of the social, political institutions and even individual political behaviour are typically envisaged as constrained by the overall shape of social relations. The political actors who try to modify the social briskly, and without mediation, in most cases trigger violent reactions, 56 Montesquieu, De l’ Esprit des lois, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, ),  (Preface),  (I, ); tr., The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), xliv, . 57 Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), . 58 Emile Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), .

introduction

xxvii

and almost always eventually fail. From the vocabulary I am using in the present paragraph, one can easily perceive that some of the first examples of a stronger notion of the social appeared in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. As I show in Chapter , counter-revolutionary thinkers such as Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre criticised the Revolution by arguing that it rested on an erroneous understanding of the intrinsic logic of human relations. The irony of the concept of the social, thus, is that its political efficacy is conditional upon a denial that the political is at all efficacious, at least when it comes to changing the shape of society. The centrality, as well as the interrelatedness, of the two aspects I just mentioned have been emphasised by Franck Fischbach in his recent Manifesto for Social Philosophy: “The invention of the concept of society”, he writes, “makes it possible to think that individuals are always first subjected to a primary social constraint, of which the properly political constraint exerted by the institutions of the same name may be seen as a derivation.”59 Concerning these two elements, one of the guiding ideas of the present volume is the following one: even though the idea of social constraint is logically prior to the notion of the subordinate character of politics, it seems that in terms both of historical sequence and of human motivation it is the desire to re-orient political thought which engendered the emphasis on the solidity of society. For this reason, it makes sense to argue that it is the subordination of the political to the social which represents the differentia specifica of the language of the social among the various discourses on human relations and the nature of collective life. This point can be demonstrated if we consider some aspects of the work of Marcel Mauss. As we shall see in Chapter , Mauss had a notion of society which was much lighter than the one heralded by nineteenth-century positivist, racialist, or nationalist thinkers (discussed in Chapters  and ). It also differed from the holistic understanding of society promoted by his uncle Emile Durkheim (discussed in Chapter ). Not only did Mauss reject, like Durkheim, the idea of a determination of social relations by race or climate; he also gave more importance to individual action and emphasised the openness and complexity of society, as opposed to its boundedness and coherence. In all this, Mauss stood closer to eighteenth-century political philosophers than most of his peers in the human sciences of the time. For this reason, the points of 59 Franck Fischbach, Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale (Paris: La découverte, ), .

xxviii

introduction

divergence between these philosophers and Mauss’s social thought will immediately reveal the most characteristic assumptions of each of these two discourses. In , Mauss published a short “Sociological assessment of Bolshevism”. In it, he took a stand not only on the occurrences in Russia at the time, but also on the more general question of the revolution itself, understood as a way of transforming society through access to exclusive control of the state apparatus. Mauss argued that social change, radical or otherwise, can occur only by re-orienting the social relations themselves, by changing customs (moeurs) through the collective, “clear, conscious action” of citizens acting in common,60 instead of through their (self-appointed, in the case of Russia) representatives. He called “political fetishism” the strong but erroneous belief that laws or more generally state decisions can easily modify social relations, a belief which proves false even in the case of a systematic recourse to violence.61 In other words Mauss, in spite of his view of society as an open, fluid entity, and in spite of his conviction regarding the capacity of individuals to act autonomously, remained faithful to this central notion of the language of the social, i.e. that, if anything, society determines politics and not the reverse. This is clear in Mauss’s definition of what he meant by the art, or craft, of the social (art social). Far from referring to the political capacity to transform social relations, as eighteenth-century thinkers tended to use the expression,62 for Mauss the social art was the “art of living in common”.63 It was not an ability, but a tendency of individuals and collectives to arrive at situations in which persons, institutions and things are arranged to form an equilibrium. And Mauss added that “Politics, Morals and Economics” should be seen merely as “elements” of this fundamental social art.64 Through my evocation of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Burke and de Maistre, I have already suggested the point of departure of the present essay. Similarly, my brief comments on Mauss and Bolshevism give an indication concerning its point of arrival. Between these two points, a vari60

Marcel Mauss, “Appréciation sociologique du Bolchevisme,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale  (), ; tr., “A sociological assessment of Bolshevism,” in The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, edited by Mike Gane (London: Routledge, ), . 61 Ibid., ; tr., . 62 Cf. for instance Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, Qu’ est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (n.p. [Paris], ), –; tr., “What is the Third Estate?”, in Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), –. On “art social”, see Keith Michael Baker, “The early history of the term ‘social science’,” Annals of Science , no.  (). 63 Mauss, “Appréciation sociologique,” ; tr. (modified), . 64 Ibid.

introduction

xxix

ety of authors will be introduced, and their similarities and differences discussed, in an attempt to create a kaleidoscopic view of the numerous facets of the language of the social. One of my aims will be to show the pervasiveness of the core assumptions of the language of the social, but also to give a sense of its complexity and historicity. Of course, these two characteristics—pervasiveness and complexity—are intimately related and mutually condition each other. In speaking here of a “language”, I borrow directly but somewhat freely from J.G.A. Pocock. Finding inspiration in Wittgenstein, he describes as one of the objects of intellectual history these “distinguishable language games” which all possess their “own vocabulary, rules, preconditions and implications, tone and style” and “operate so as to structure thought and speech in certain ways and to preclude their being structured in others”.65 For my own purposes, I retain from this Pocockian notion especially four aspects. First, the study of “languages” entails a consideration of continuities and commonalities. Languages are shared resources made of a common vocabulary, collectively recognised problems, typical commonplaces or topoi, and (sometimes unavowed) assumptions, all of which are taken up in different times and places. Second: besides this emphasis on langue (to use the Saussurean distinction introduced above), the historian of “languages” is aware that they exist only through their particular instantiations, i.e. in the specific acts of communication of parole. Unlike Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms,66 languages do not have to be homogeneous. Their core assumptions can be combined in many different ways, so that each speaker naturally develops unique actualisations of their potential. Therefore, disagreements and controversies are normal dimensions of the life of languages. Far from being destructive, their occurrence often exerts a reinforcing and reinvigorating influence. Third: languages are rarely, if ever, hegemonic: they typically coexist with one or several rival languages. This is crucial to understand the vitality of languages and their dynamic transformations, which can be seen as reactions to the continuous, and in most cases direct and explicit, challenges posed by other languages. Such interactions between languages are, of course, not without consequence for the singularity of each, as they often

65 J.G.A. Pocock, “The concept of a language and the métier d’ historien: some considerations on practice,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 66 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ).

xxx

introduction

result in highly interesting hybrids, whose existence demonstrates that languages do not have clear-cut, but merely blurry boundaries (I present a concrete example of hybridisation when discussing Adhémar Esmein in Chapter ). And this brings me to my fourth point: it is important to remember that “languages” are constructions of the historian, mere heuristic devices used or abused to make sense of a historical material which happens to have been gathered. In the case of the “language of the social”, this is especially relevant since the transformation of the adjective “social” into a noun, at least in French, does not occur before the twentieth century.67 In consequence, probably none of the authors I am dealing with in the chapters of this volume would have been aware of speaking it. Needless to say, undertaking an exhaustive study of any of those “languages” in Pocock’s sense is impossible in a single volume. I have thus introduced four crucial limitations to the scope of my analysis. First, a geographical limitation: my focus is on France, with occasional comparisons with other countries and linguistic areas. Second, a temporal limitation: I study especially the years of the French Third Republic (– ), with outlooks into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Third, a disciplinary limitation: my corpus is made of works written by scholars in the human sciences (mostly sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and legal studies).68 But even then, I make no claim to exhaustiveness. I have selected a number of authors—some very wellknown, and others less so. I have also almost entirely left aside not only minor, but also major figures (for instance Auguste Comte). My main wish is to render plausible a story concerning the development of the language of the social and its dominant features. This I do by way of an identification of a series of milestones. Assessing how further authors may fit (or not) into the story I am trying to tell will be the task of subsequent research. This brings me to my fourth limitation, a thematic one: this is a study in conceptual history. My main interest is to explore the 67

Cf. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française vol.  (Paris: Le Robert, ), . In English, the substantivation of the adjective “social” seems to have a longer history: it was used in the eighteenth century to mean either a companion or a gathering. See Mary Poovey, “The liberal civil subject and the social in eighteenth-century British moral philosophy,” Public Culture , no.  (), ; reprinted as Chapter  of Joyce, ed., The Social in Question. 68 For earlier periods, during which strictly defined academic disciplines did not exist, I have especially concentrated on the authors whom human scientists described as their precursors (such as Rousseau), or otherwise discussed at length in their publications (such as Hobbes).

introduction

xxxi

relation between the concept of the social and that of the political, and more precisely the way in which “society” as well as other notions central to the human sciences (such as “national character”, “culture”, or “collective consciousness”) have been used in political arguments. Here “society” refers to the general institutional and cultural context within which human interactions take place. In other words, I leave aside the question of the political role of “societies”, in the sense of “associations”. Similarly, when reflecting on the history of “the social”, my concern will be exclusively for the adjective of the noun “society”, as opposed to other related meanings. Most importantly, I have not taken into account the rich literature on “the social” in the sense of “relating to the poorer classes of society” (social question, social justice, social legislation/droit social, etc.).69 The first two chapters of this volume deal with two central problems of politics. Chapter  is devoted to the problem of the modalities of rule-setting, i.e. the question of collective will, sovereignty, and political regimes. Chapter  deals with the problem of political boundaries, collective identity, and the relation that may exist between existing polities. I will show how each of these classical political problems was reformulated in new terms, and how the “language of the social” sought to offer “fresh” solutions to them, in terms of arguments, style of reasoning, and vocabulary used. Chapters  to  concentrate on the social and political thought of some of the founders of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, such as Emile Durkheim, Gabriel Tarde, Max Weber and Marcel Mauss. The aim of these chapters will be to identify the modifications these authors introduced in the language of the social. In particular, I will show how many of them criticised their earlier colleagues for failing to conceptually sever the link between the social and the natural.

69 For a treatment of this aspect, see Marie-Claude Blais, La solidarité. Histoire d’ une idée (Paris: Gallimard, ); Jacques Donzelot, L’ invention du social. Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris: Fayard, ).

chapter one THE COLLECTIVE WILL: FROM THE POLITICAL TO THE SOCIAL

The question of unity has been central to political thought, at whose core lies an exploration of the criteria according to which collectives should be formed, and of the means to maintain and transform them. External criteria, including factors such as physical appearance or language, have engendered numerous debates regarding their relevance to the formation of individual and collective identities. And yet, “real” unity has often been seen as emanating from a deeper, more elusive core, located in the inscrutable realm of human interiority, in the dispositions of the mind or the resolutions of the will. Thus, human will and mind have been the subject of contentious debates in political thought that sought to characterise and define humans as a political beings. The problem underlying much of political thought, namely how human actions can impact the collective, has rendered the question of unity prominent. Unless we assume that political action can only work by directly bearing upon each separate individual, the question of the delimitation and the relative cohesion of the collectivity upon which one is planning to act must emerge.1 Moreover, if the political action is collective (as it is in most cases, the exception being the limit case of a despotic ruler exercising power alone), the problem of unity appears twice: on the one hand, as the problem of the cohesion of the collectivity which is acted upon, and, on the other hand, as a problem of coordination among those who are undertaking the action. Even in non-representative regimes, for instance in democracies of the Rousseauian type which I shall describe below, the two problems exist, although they can sometimes be distinguished only analytically. The question of unity has generated two different kinds of responses. One conception sees unity as a political phenomenon, insofar as it results 1 In a society based on the rule of law, for instance, the lawmakers make an assumption concerning the existence of a social system of information which diffuses a broad awareness of the law, so that they do not have to take special measures to individually reach each member of society.



chapter one

mostly from political processes—i.e., processes aiming at the purposeful establishment of binding rules. Another conception views unity as social cohesion, a phenomenon that precedes and delimits the political sphere. The specificities of each of these two orientations will become clearer as the argument of the present chapter develops. “Bearing the People’s Person”: Hobbes on Unity through Representation Contractarian theories, such as the one proposed in his Leviathan () by Thomas Hobbes (–), rely on the concept of unity. If political authority is a derivative of an original compact, then unity, be it only as a transitory moment of agreement, is central to its understanding and execution. However, the kind of unity entailed in the notion of a compact does not need to be complete nor enduring. In Leviathan, it is none of these things since the compact is envisaged as the result of a series of negotiations among individuals: “a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one.”2 The second step, in which the nature of the representation (monarch or assembly) is decided upon and sovereignty established, does not require unanimity: Hobbes argued that in the first step, by the mere fact that they “entered the Congregation of them that were assembled,” individuals had “tacitly covenanted”3 to accept the decisions of the majority concerning the form of the commonwealth: to whatsoever Man, or Assembly of Men, shall be given by the major part, the Right to Present the person of them all, . . . every one, as well he that Voted for it, as he that Voted against it, shall Authorise all the Actions and Judgements, of that Man, or Assembly of Men.4

As we see, thus, in Leviathan the problem of unity (“every one”) emerges at the earliest stage of the political: that of the passage to the civil state. And yet, in Hobbes’s model, a much stronger form of cohesion later appears. According to the theory expounded in Leviathan, the birth of civil society is accompanied by the transformation of a collection of separate 2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),  (ch. XVIII). 3 Ibid.,  (ch. XVIII). 4 Ibid.,  (ch. XVIII).

the collective will: from the political to the social



individuals, called the multitude, into a people.5 In the state of nature, individuals are strangers who have very little in common—despite being roughly equal in physical strength and intelligence and despite having similar desires.6 Each strives for his or her own advantage, and since, as Hobbes maintained, there is no notion of right or wrong before the establishment of sovereignty, nor any notion of property, but only overlapping rights to all things, this pursuit may very well take place at the detriment, including injury or death, of other individuals.7 All this amounts to saying that the social, understood both as ordinary relations between individuals and that which makes such relations possible, such as a common language, or common cultural references, does not exist in the state of nature: Hobbes indeed noted that in such condition there is “no Society.”8 In contrast to the multitude in the state of nature, the people is an entity whose primary characteristic, in Hobbes’s depiction of it, is cohesion. The people is a people because it is unified, and it is unified because it possesses a uniform political will. In turn, this uniform will exists because of political representation. This is certainly one of the most stringent elements of Hobbes’s philosophical construction.9 In a famous chapter of Leviathan,10 it is argued that the representative chosen in the original compact can always attribute his decisions to the will of the represented. The justification of such possibility lies in the original, complex, and somewhat ambiguous theory of the representative as a mere actor, and of the represented as the real author, of sovereign decisions. In the original moment of agreement of all with all, Hobbes maintained that individuals collectively decided to consider themselves the authors of the decisions taken by the sovereign they elected.11 On this basis, the 5 On the significance of this idea, see Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on persons, authors and representatives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, edited by Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). 6 Leviathan, – (ch. XIII). 7 In a particularly telling passage of his earlier text, On the Citizen (), Hobbes even suggested that simple acts of communication are likely to turn into aggression. Hobbes, On the Citizen, edited by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, ),  (I, ). 8 Leviathan,  (ch. XIII). 9 Cf. Skinner, “Hobbes,” esp. , . 10 Leviathan, ch. XVI. 11 The commonwealth is “One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutual Covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the Author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient for their Peace and Common Defence.” Ibid.,  (ch. XVII).



chapter one

sovereign is said to personate the people (to “bear his person”),12 as if he was the main actor in a play in which the people has the first role, a play so inspiring that the spectators (the people) completely identify with their own character, as played by the sovereign, and endorse the actions they see on stage to the point of recognising them as their own, and of taking responsibility for them in their real lives. The unity of the people emerges from this relationship between authors and actors. The will of the sovereign is unique; his decisions, and eventually the laws which derive from them, are incontestable. The members of the people, insofar as they recognise such decisions and laws as their own, are unified by this very process of recognition, unified sufficiently to even become one collective person. In other words, the unity of the state is not the expression or reflection of a pre-existing cohesion in the people, but the productive origin thereof: A Multitude of men are made One Person when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one Person: and Unity, cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude.13

In the Leviathan, thus, there is (political) unity because there is a permanent unity of the people’s will.14 However, this unity is imposed from the outside, and a posteriori, to the persons who compose the people. The people is not a “willing unity” to begin with, but is transformed into such an entity in the representative process. The kind of unity described in Leviathan seems like a fiction15—in both the common meaning and the etymological Latin sense of fingere: to create or produce.

12

Ibid.,  (ch. XVI). Ibid.,  (ch. XVI). 14 The representatives (man or assembly) “reduce all their wills . . . unto one Will.” Ibid.,  (ch. XVII). 15 On the topic of the state as a fiction, see David Runciman, “What kind of person is Hobbes’s state? A reply to Skinner,” Journal of Political Philosophy , no.  (). Quentin Skinner’s own position can be found in his “Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state,” in Hobbes and Civil Science, vol.  of Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). 13

the collective will: from the political to the social



“A Moral and Collective Body of Many Members”: Rousseau’s Unitary State The question of political unity is also present in the work of one of the great followers of Hobbes’s inspiration, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (– ). In his political writings, especially in his Social Contract (), unity loses something of the fictitious nature it had in the work of his English counterpart, while remaining mainly (though not exclusively) political, and a posteriori. Rousseau, despite not using this notion per se, preferring “popular government” instead, is an advocate of popular sovereignty. According to that notion, the supreme political authority is located in the people, in the sense that the laws to which the members of the polity are subjected can be described as legitimate only if they derive from the explicit will of the people itself. Against Hobbes’s representative model, Rousseau declared that all citizens are and remain sovereign at any time after the establishment of civil society, and that they have the right, in consequence, of taking part in person in the elaboration of legislation. As in Hobbes, on the other hand, Rousseau understood the people as a collective subject emerging from political processes: it was a result, not a cause; an end, not an origin. The predominance of the will in Rousseau’s political thought is commensurate with the central role he accorded to the notion of unity. One of the salient features distinguishing human beings from other species, according to Rousseau, is the faculty of volition.16 As Rousseau argued in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (), human beings possess two main passions (the instinct of self-preservation and compassion) and two mental dispositions (intelligence and free will). Free will, in turn, is conceived of as the capacity to overcome the pull of natural forces (including internal ones such as passions), which otherwise would determine humans actions. Free will represents the autonomy to apply to oneself a given rule, independent from spontaneous preferences—to use a Kantian formulation which owes a lot to Rousseau. To this voluntaristic conception of action corresponds a voluntaristic definition of sovereignty. In the state, the exercise of political authority is closely bound to what the citizens actually want, so that, in the final analysis, the will of the citizens is the sole component of sovereignty. As Hegel

16 On this point, David L. Williams, “Justice and the general will: affirming Rousseau’s Ancient orientation,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (), –.



chapter one

observed, sovereignty for Rousseau is will through and through.17 Yet the crucial question here, as Hegel also emphasised, it to precisely determine to what kind of will Rousseau referred. One of the central elements of his political thought, indeed, is that the will, as the basis of sovereignty, should not simply derive from spontaneous desires, nor from preferences resulting from the reflexive identification of individual needs or interests; rather, it should derive from the discovery of a common good. In order to better understand the need for a mechanism through which individual wills eventually converge on the basis of a search for the common good, we must remember that, according to Rousseau, individuals initially have preferences that are possibly conflicting. Since sovereignty must be unique, a method to reconcile and unify them must be found. One of the possible solutions to this problem would consist in adopting a majoritarian decision system, in which the option preferred by the highest number of individuals is adopted by all. However, Rousseau could not be content with such a system, since it entails several risks. Most important among those risks is the perennial fear of republican thought, namely that, in the worst case, a minority may impose its views to the majority. However, even in less dramatic cases, majority and minority may end up constituting rival factions, thereby weakening the state. Instead of an exclusively majoritarian system, Rousseau thus suggested in his Social Contract that the most important sovereign decisions, especially

17 “[I]t was the achievement of Rousseau to put forward the will as the principle of the state, a principle which has thought not only as its form (as with the social instinct, for example, or divine authority) but as its content, and which is in fact thinking itself. But Rousseau considered the will only in the determinate form of the individual [einzelnen] will . . . and regarded the general will not as the will’s rationality in and for itself, but only as the common element arising out of this individual [einzelnen] will as a conscious will.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),  (§ ) (translation slightly modified, JT). The notion that sovereignty is pure will has been a topic of disagreement among commentators. In some interpretations, opposed to that of Hegel, the citizens cannot collectively will any thing: the general will must, at least in part, conform to immutable principles of justice (such as those deriving from natural law). The latter position has recently been defended by Williams, “Justice and the general will.” Williams targets mostly Leo Strauss, whose Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) depicted Rousseau as one of the main proponents of a replacement of the notion of universal justice with that of collective will. Dérathé’s compromise, that Rousseau, as a transitional figure in the history of natural law, is ambiguous on the subject, is probably most satisfactory. Robert Dérathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris: Vrin, ), –.

the collective will: from the political to the social



the passing of laws, should ideally be taken unanimously.18 In his reflections on the Government of Poland, he proposed the establishment of a system that would require qualified majorities for certain kinds of decisions.19 Rousseau’s passion for unity, deriving from his fascination for the model of compact polities offered by the Ancients, is especially evident here.20 The citizens, he further argued, may unanimously support a decision if the decision in question clearly benefits all of them equally, and is of advantage to no one in particular. This is the idea of the common good or “common interest”: It is what these several interests have in common that constitutes the social bond; and if there were no point on which all of them were in agreement, there could be no society.21

When the wills of individuals are unified in the consensual identification of this common interest, there emerges the general will whose political expression is the law—the law, in other words, is characterised by a double universality: subjective universality (its authors possess a will which tends to unanimity); and objective universality (its object is the common good).22 Despite the democratic premises of his argumentation in the Social Contract, Rousseau expressed, in a twist, his scepticism concerning the capacity of individuals to identify the general interest,23 and thus argued 18 “The more important and crucial the decision is, the more nearly unanimous should be the opinion which prevails.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social; ou principes du droit politique, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris, Gallimard, ),  (IV, ). All hereafter translations for the Social Contract: or Principles of Political Right are from Political Writings, edited by Frederick Waktins (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), here . 19 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée, in Œuvres complètes, vol. ,  (ch. ); tr., Considerations on the Government of Poland and its Proposed Reformation, in Political Writings, . 20 On this topic see Robert Dérathé, “Introduction,” in Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, vol. , xcvii–xcviii. Also Patrick Riley, “A possible explanation of Rousseau’s general will,” The American Political Science Review , no.  (March ). 21 Rousseau, Contract social,  (II, ); tr., . This formulation is striking insofar as it makes the very existence of society conditional upon the political process of collective decision-taking. 22 On this point, see Dérathé, Rousseau, –. The formulation can be found in Rousseau himself, in the first version of the Social Contract, the so-called Geneva Manuscript: Rousseau, Du contract social ou essai sur les formes de la République (première version), in Œuvres complètes, vol. , . 23 “How will a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wants (since it rarely knows what is food for it) carry out on its own an enterprise as great and as difficult as a



chapter one

that the laws should be initially instituted by a political genius endowed with a supremely clear political vision, the legislator, whose task is to elaborate legislative proposals potentially corresponding to the general interest.24 However, as Rousseau emphasised, the legislator is not himself part of the sovereign political body (i.e., not a member of legislative power: “He who drafts the laws, therefore, has, or should have, no right to legislate”)25 and the laws he elaborates are only proposals which subsequently need to be accepted by an (ideally as large as possible) majority of the citizens. In the Government of Poland, in contrast, Rousseau suggested that the identification of the common good and its concomitant task, the elaboration of legislative proposals, should be the competence of local assemblies (the “Dietines”). While they are required to choose deputies to speak for them in the Polish legislature, such deputies have to remain closely tied to the Dietines, which impart detailed, mandatory instructions to their representatives. This theory of binding mandate is crucial, insofar as it allows Rousseau to remain faithful to his critique of representation: the deputies have no will of their own, they are merely the vehicle of the will of their electors.26 The questions of political unity and political cohesion are thus fundamental themes in Rousseau. Unity, as in Hobbes, exists here only after the establishment of sovereignty and through it. In other words, for these authors, no real unity is conceivable outside of the political, as exemplified in Rousseau’s striking formulation: “everything depends radically on politics”.27 Seen from a purely social perspective, the individuals have no connexion with one another except purely contingent ones, and constisystem of legislation? By itself the people always wants the good, but by itself it does not always see it.” Contract social,  (II, ); tr. (modified), . 24 The explicit reference is here to the classical notion of a foundation of political orders by charismatic figures such as Moses or Solon. This leaves open the question of the legislative process in normal times (after the establishment of the constitution). Could it be that the legislator should become a permanent function in the state? There is little evidence for this in Rousseau’s text. At some point, he suggests that the elaboration of legislative projects should be the task of the executive (IV, ), but one may argue that his discussion of this point, relatively to its importance, is a bit too cursory. At any rate, there is here an ambiguity which has been discussed by Dérathé, Rousseau, , note . To account for his briefness on the elaboration of legislative proposals in the Social Contract, Dérathé emphasises that, in Rousseau’s mind, the really important moment is the one of the original constitution, and that only few laws need to be passed after that. 25 Contract social,  (II, ); tr., . 26 Gouvernement de Pologne, – (ch. ); tr., –. 27 This statement (“tout tenait radicalement à la politique”) comes from Rousseau, Confessions, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel

the collective will: from the political to the social



tute only a heterogeneous and arbitrary collective. Before the social contract, as Rousseau wrote in the Geneva Manuscript, there exists only a “multitude of relations without measure, without rules, without consistency, that men continuously alter and change.”28 Unlike Hobbes, however, Rousseau could not say, because of his rejection of representation, that unity is imposed from without to the members of the body politic. On the opposite, he believed that complex processes of mediation should ideally transform each individual will and make it conform to the unitary general will. In spite of such differences with Hobbes, it is striking to observe that Rousseau, in order to give flesh to his notion of unity, made use of the same personalistic metaphor: insofar as the social contract yields a unitary will, the state, as the bearer of this will, must be conceived as a person: At once, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body composed of as many members as there are voices in the assembly, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will.29

In Chapter  and in the Epilogue to this volume, I will return to the question of collective personality and discuss its role in social and political thought. “A Unique Whole Composed of Integral Parts”: National Unity during the French Revolution The question of unity posed, among many others, by Hobbes and Rousseau played an important role—as one could expect—in the debates which took place during and after the French Revolution. A prominent example of a reflection on this topic can be found in the work of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes (–). A deputy at the National Assembly in charge of drafting the new French constitution, he delivered there in September  one of his most famous speeches, entitled “On the

Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, ), . Cited in Michel Launay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain politique (–) (Genève-Paris: Slatkine, ), . 28 Rousseau, Contract social (première version),  (I, ). 29 Contract social,  (I, ); tr., . On these points, see Philippe Crignon, “La critique de la représentation politique chez Rousseau,” Les études philosophiques , no.  ().



chapter one

Royal Veto”.30 In this speech, he opposed the notion that the King, in the constitutional monarchy that was to be established, should retain the right to reject the laws prepared by the national legislature. Sieyes first made clear that he agreed with the Rousseauian conception that the law, as an “expression of the will of the governed”,31 must be unique and impose itself equally to all: any other option would be equivalent to a return to the morally horrifying era of privilege, which he had denounced in his Essay on Privileges, published anonymously a year before.32 Like Rousseau, Sieyes, too, considered the uniqueness of the political will on any given territory to be fundamental. However, contrary to Rousseau (and closer to Hobbes), he insisted on the inevitability of representation: the great majority of our fellow citizens has neither enough education nor enough leisure to be able to directly take care of the laws which ought to govern France; their opinion consists therefore in electing representatives.33

This theory of an exercise of political authority on behalf of the people, as well as the emphasis put on representation for the elaboration of the national will, led Sieyes to conclude that “the people or the nation can have only one voice, that of the national legislature”.34 And this is how 30

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, “Discours à l’ Assemblée nationale du  septembre . Sur le véto royal,” in Archives parlementaires de  à . Première série, de  à , volume VIII (Paris: Libraire administrative Paul Dupont, ). 31 Ibid., . 32 Anon. [Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes], Essai sur les privilèges (n.p., n.d. [Paris, ]); tr., “An Essay on Privileges,” in Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, ). 33 “Discours,” . As this quote clearly suggests, the need for representation comes for Sieyes from two facts. On the one hand, the incapacity of individuals to spontaneously know the real interests of the nation—as we saw above, this theme was already present in the Social Contract, even though a quite different conclusion was drawn from it. On the other hand, another, more original element was introduced by Sieyes, concerning the lack of free time and the division of labour. In an era characterised by the progress of commerce, the individuals are too deeply caught in their private affairs to dedicate their time to political reflection and action (cf. “Discours,” ). This topic became integral part of the liberal discourse in the nineteenth century: Benjamin Constant delivered in  an influential lecture in this spirit, later published as an essay on “The liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Modern,” in Political Writings, edited by Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). On all these points, see Keith Michael Baker, “Representation redefined”, in Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, ), –; William H. Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and ‘What is the Third Estate?’ (Durham: Duke University Press, ), ch. . 34 “Discours,” .

the collective will: from the political to the social



Sieyes argued against the royal veto, which would amount to giving two voices to the nation, that of the king and that of the assembly. In another text he wrote that “even though the national will . . . is independent of any form, it nonetheless has to take one to be understood.”35 The elaboration of this one form, argued Sieyes, is precisely the task of the representative assembly. Concerning the question of unity, we can characterise the position of Sieyes as close to the one Hobbes had expressed in Leviathan, namely that it is the will of the representatives which determines the will of the citizenry, and not the opposite.36 At the same time, two differences with Hobbes’s position should be emphasised. To begin with, Sieyes pointed out that sovereignty should not be absolute: the legislature is bound to respect the norms entailed in a formal constitution, itself established by a special power—the pouvoir constituant (which should typically take the form of a constitutional assembly).37 Second, Sieyes suggested that unitythrough-representation is not the only aspect of social unity. From the perspective of conceptual history, Sieyes’s conception of unity is interesting for its connection with the idea of “nation”: the unity which interested Sieyes was specifically a national one.38 In agreement with the thinkers of the social contract I have been discussing above, he had a resolutely political understanding of the nation, which was taken up in some of the most important texts of the Revolution: for him, the nation “can be no other than the generality of Citizens”,39 “it is a body of associates living under a common law and represented by the same legislature”.40 Apart from this political dimension, however, Sieyes also less explicitly mentioned another—equally “subjective”—principle of national unity. A nation, he suggested, is made of those who are willing to perform a useful

35

Sieyes, Quelques idées de la constitution applicables à la ville de Paris (), cited after Pasquale Pasquino, Sieyes et l’ invention de la constitution en France (Paris: Odile Jacob, ), . The ellipse is Pasquino’s. 36 On this point, see Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, ), ; Giuseppe Duso, La rappresentanza politica. Genesi e crisi del concetto (Milano: FrancoAngeli, ), esp. –. 37 This is one of the main points of Pasquino’s Sieyes. 38 Cf. Crignon, “La critique,” –. See also, among recent contributions to the history of the idea of nation in France before and during the Revolution, David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, – (Harvard: Harvard University Press, ). 39 Essai sur les privilèges, , tr., . 40 Sieyes, Qu’ est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (n.p. [Paris], ), ; tr., “What is the Third Estate?” in Political Writings, .



chapter one

economic function. In this sense, in eighteenth-century France the nation was equivalent to the Third Estate—the community of producers— and did not extend to the aristocracy, whose existence was parasitic upon the work done by other classes.41 With this conception, Sieyes was in a position to argue that the aristocrats, qua aristocrats, were not part of the political body and should therefore not be allowed to take part in the elaboration of new constitutional principles for the French state.42 What is important is that Sieyes’s views on representation, the unicity of the law, and nationality, however juristic and “subjectivist”, resulted in a strong notion of social unity: France “is a unique whole (un tout unique), composed of integral parts”.43 The political thought of Sieyes is quite complex, and we can already see at work in it some of the conceptual transformations which will accelerate during the nineteenth century. On the one hand, without denying that there are national habits, or even some kind of collective character prior to political action and independent from it, Sieyes resolutely emphasised the capacity of governments to transform collective habits.44 This appears clearly in the first pages of his Views on the Executive Means (), written at the very beginning of the Revolution: there he mocked the traditionalists who were asking “barbarous centuries for laws that are suitable for civilised nations.”45 In What is the Third Estate? he wrote that no existing law or constitutional form, even the most enduring or traditional, could bind the will of the nation: “a nation is independent of all forms and, however it may will, it is enough for its will to be made known for all positive law to disappear in its presence, because it is the source and supreme master of all positive law.”46 On the other hand, unlike many of his contemporaries, Sieyes did not believe that this transformation should be understood as a way of making society more conform to nature. As Pasquino observes, Sieyes rejected the jusnatural41

Sieyes’s position concerning the clergy was more ambiguous. While not economically active, they did perform useful social (not only religious, but also educational) functions. On this ambiguity, see Sewell, Rhetoric, ch. . 42 On this point, cf. Pasquino, Sieyes, –; Sewell, Rhetoric, –. 43 “Discours,” . 44 Cf. Bronislaw Baczko, “The social contract of the French: Sieyes and Rousseau,” The Journal of Modern History  (September ), S. 45 Sieyes, “Vues sur les moyens d’ exécution dont les Représentants de la France pourront disposer en ” (n.p., ), ; tr., Views on the Executive Means Available to the Representatives of France in , in Political Writings, . 46 Qu’ est-ce que le Tiers-Etat?, ; tr. (slightly modified), . See also the observations in Sewell, Rhetoric, –, in which this passage is also quoted.

the collective will: from the political to the social



istic notion of “an Order of Nature or of creation”, of a “value external to the dimension of history.”47 Instead, he defended a theory of historical development according to which modern social relations are increasingly influenced by commercial exchange. A corollary of this is the importance of the division of labour, whose political equivalent is the principle of representation. Central to him, thus, was the notion that politics should take as a model the organisation of social and economic relations, whose efficiency, he believed, no longer had to be demonstrated.48 As we will see, this argument according to which political institutions should reflect, not the order of nature, but the order of social relations, played an increasingly important role in the human sciences of the nineteenth century.49 During the French Revolution, however, such conceptions were far from being the dominant ones in the Revolutionary camp. While initially extremely influential, the figure and thought of Sieyes progressively lost their appeal.50 Instead, it is the idea of a natural order and of a necessary transformation of malleable social relations which inspired the action of many revolutionaries—especially, according to Daniel A. Bell, Jacobin revolutionaries.51 Many of them advocated the immediate destruction, in the words of Jacques Billaud-Varenne, of “this dominion of habit which in the long term shapes a national character distinctive from that of other peoples and other men” with a view to “dissolve all the ties that bind a degenerate nation to ancient usages”.52 The notion was that new customs could be created if the right reforms and institutions were introduced. In other words, a politics of the will can transform corrupt traditional social relations and replace them with new ones based on virtue. In a revealing passage, Billaud-Varenne contrasted the “social body” of monarchies, where there is no unity of the subjects, but only different opinions and prejudices, and an economic competition of all against all, with the “political body” of democracies, where the citizens have “the 47

Pasquino, Sieyes, . Cf. ibid., ch. , and the references to Baker and Sewell in the footnote, above. 49 As it appears, the inventor of the term “sociology”, as recently demonstrated by Jacques Guilhaumou, is not Auguste Comte, but Sieyes himself. See Guilhaumou, “Sieyès et le non-dit de la sociologie: du mot à la chose,” Revue d’ histoire des sciences humaines  (). 50 This is an important theme in Sewell, Rhetoric, for instance on pp. –. 51 Bell, The Cult of the Nation. See also Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Modèle politique français. La société civile contre le jacobinisme de  à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, ), –. 52 J.N. Billaud, Principes régénérateurs du systême social (Paris: Imprimerie Vatar, ), –, cited in Bell, The Cult of the Nation, . 48



chapter one

same spirit, the same sentiments, the same rights, the same interests, the same virtues”, culminating in “brotherhood” and “union”.53 “Politics Is to Be Wrought by Social Means”: Burke and de Maistre on the Pre-eminence of the Social Many counter-revolutionaries questioned the vision of the social defended by the promoters of a politics of the will and, in the nineteenth century, so did many thinkers across the political board. In his analysis of the conceptual history of the terms “society” and “community”, Manfred Riedel presents the nineteenth-century notion of “society” as something which the political can neither ignore nor entirely control, something which constrains politics while escaping its grasp, something which is always in excess of the political. In short, society is a “hard fact”, a datum. Riedel especially emphasised the importance of the idea of society as a “given” for Romantic thinkers, above all in Germany. The famous linguist Friedrich Schlegel wrote, for instance, that society and community cannot be derived (hergeleitet) out of the pure concept of law (Recht); one must always already assume the existence of society as an empirical datum (empirisches Datum).54

More generally, Riedel noted that such understandings of “the social” became prominent in many interpretations of the failures of the French Revolution. Edmund Burke (–) and his Reflections on the Revolution in France () are a case in point. His “central doctrine”, in the words of J.G.A. Pocock, “is that the social order antedates the human intellect and sets the moral and practical conditions under which both theory and practice must be carried on.”55 Burke deployed an architectural metaphor to contrast the politician who thinks that “violent haste” and “defiance of the process of nature” is “the marks of a bold, hardy genius”,56 on the one hand, with the “true lawgiver”, on the other.57 Only 53

Billaud, Principes, –. Friedrich Schlegel, Die Entwicklung der Philosophie in zwölf Büchern (–), cited in Manfred Riedel, “Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol.  (E–G), edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, ), . 55 J.G.A. Pocock, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), xliv. 56 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, . 57 Ibid., . 54

the collective will: from the political to the social



the latter, who knows the constraints of the material he is building with (“not brick and timber but sentient beings”),58 who takes into account existing habits, peculiar views, sensitivities, who proceeds sufficiently slowly, may contribute to establish or preserve “that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at.”59 Burke summarised his point, in a striking formula, by affirming that “[p]olitical arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means.”60 Similar reflections can be found in the work of another prominent counter-revolutionary political theorist, Joseph de Maistre (–). In his essay on sovereignty, which was published posthumously (the date of writing must have been around ),61 he argued resolutely against the theory of the social contract, and in particular the idea that polities originate in the explicit will of their individual members, in a primitive agreement of all with all: It is a fundamental mistake to imagine the social state as a state of choice founded on the consent of men, on a deliberation and on a primitive contract, which is impossible.62

Among contractarians, the notion of consent served to solve the problem of political obligation, of the stability and legitimacy of political orders. What alternative solution was proposed by de Maistre? On the face of it, his answer seemed to be a classical one, namely that what provides any polity with stability is the cultivation of a political center—of a sovereign—legitimised through different modalities of consensus formation. However, de Maistre’s definition of the supreme authority was different from both the theorists of popular or national sovereignty and from the thinkers of “divine right”.63 Far from taking up the classical notion of 58

Ibid. Ibid. 60 Ibid. This sentence is interesting for its complex, equivocal meaning. Burke used the adjective “social” in two main ways. First, as an equivalent of civil and civilised, i.e. soft, polite: “civil social man” (); “unsocial, uncivil” (). Second, as the adjective of that religious, natural and historical totality that is society: “social arrangement” (), “social union” (, ). Both meanings seem to be intertwined here: the meaning of “social” as “soft” probably predominates, but the sentence lends itself to being interpreted as saying that the political must be subordinate to the existing state of social relations. 61 Joseph de Maistre, Etude sur la souveraineté (Oxford: Pergamon Press/The French Revolution Research Collection—Archives de la Révolution Française,  [microform]). 62 Ibid., . 63 On this point, see Pierre Manent’s entry on de Maistre, in Dictionnaire des oeuvres 59



chapter one

the Old Regime, according to which the only sovereign is the monarch, he adopted the view of a sovereignty that was shared between the people and God: sovereignty comes from God, since he is the author of everything, except evil . . . And yet this sovereignty also comes from men in a certain sense, that it to say, insofar as this or that mode of government is established and proclaimed (déclaré) by human consent.64

As the use of the term “consent” indicates, de Maistre retained the conceptual link between sovereignty and the will. While consent was not the foundation of polities, it was responsible for their sustenance. But what exactly is here meant by “consent”? In order to understand better the relation between the concepts of will and sovereignty according to de Maistre, we need to introduce his notion of national characters. He argued that political regimes are determined by the character of the nation, so that any attempt at a radical transformation produces a violent reaction. This is precisely the fact which the revolutionaries had neglected: their attempt to establish a republic could only lead to chaos in France, since “this people was perhaps the most monarchical in Europe; the love it had for its kings was the main feature of its character.”65 De Maistre explained that national character had been created in a remote past by a powerful legislator inspired by God, and that, once in existence, they remained unchanged for “an infinite number of generations”: It is always from a single man that each people received its dominant trait and its distinctive character. To know why and how a man literally engenders a nation, and how it endows it with a moral temperament, a character, a general soul which, over the course of centuries and an infinite number of generations, will subsist and remain perceivable and distinguish the people from all others, is a mystery like so many others, on which one can meditate uselessly.66

In this passage, two elements are especially remarkable. First, the theory of the original legislator allowed de Maistre to consider national character as the product, not of a variety of factors, but of a “single cause”.67 As we shall see in the next chapter, this position is markedly different from politiques, edited by François Châtelet, Olivier Duhamel and Evelyne Pisier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 64 Etude sur la souveraineté, . 65 de Maistre, Trois fragments sur la France, in Ecrits sur la Révolution (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 66 Etude sur la souveraineté, . 67 Ibid.

the collective will: from the political to the social



Montesquieu’s, who insisted on the joint influence of laws and mores in the formation of the general spirit. Second, de Maistre thought that it was not desirable, and perhaps even impossible altogether, that one should change the character of a nation. After their creation, these characters traverse history unchanged, influencing the action of individuals, orienting customs, and determining appropriate social and political institutions. “Nations”, wrote de Maistre, “have a general soul and a true moral unity which makes them what they are.”68 To mark the difference with the individualist assumptions present in Leviathan as well as in the Social Contract, de Maistre emphasised that this soul had to be understood as a “national reason which is nothing other than the annihilation of individual dogmas and the absolute and general rule of national dogmas, i.e. of useful prejudices.”69 De Maistre thus rejected the voluntarism of the revolutionaries, writing for instance that human action could only have a very limited influence over the world: “human power cannot create anything” since “everything depends on the primordial attitudes of peoples and individuals.”70 Against the background of his theory of “national character”, it is possible to appreciate how de Maistre turned many well-entrenched assumptions of the preceding political theorists on their heads. In a short story entitled “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (), Jorge Luis Borges imagined how an author of the twentieth century could rewrite, word for word, the entire Don Quixote, and still produce a different book, with a different overall meaning.71 This was approximately what de Maistre did to the Social Contract in his essay on sovereignty, in which Rousseau was discussed and criticised, and often cited directly. In an important chapter, however, several passages from the Social Contract were reproduced, but without being indicated as quotations, so that the reader is invited to take them as an expression of de Maistre’s own thought. One of these pilfered passages reads thus: these general objects of every good institution should be modified in each country with reference to the local situation and the character of the 68

Ibid., . Ibid., . 70 Ibid., . See also de Maistre’s statements in his Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines (Paris: Société typographique, ), . He said that human beings are no more the authors of “the social order” than a gardener is the creator of the oak whose acorn he has planted. 71 Jorges Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Fictions (London: Penguin, ). 69



chapter one inhabitants; and it is with reference to these conditions that we must assign to each people a particular system which, though it may not be intrinsically the best, is best for the state for which it is intended.72

These lines can be found in a chapter of the Social Contract whose meaning is not immediately evident. It seems that Rousseau was offering some indications as to the degree of equality which can be achieved in a given society, which is a function of its economic resources. In a second step, placing himself under the authority of Montesquieu, he reflected upon the fact that each society, depending on its geographic location and history, has a principal occupation in which it excels (e.g. art, commerce or navigation). Overall, Rousseau was suggesting that some aspects of the organisation of social life would need to be determined according to local and historical circumstances, and not to universal, rational rules. Still, he also said in the same chapter that such rules, which he called “principles which are common to all”,73 do exist.74 By contrast, de Maistre understood the passage above in a much broader sense; he gave it the meaning that all social and political institutions should be modelled after collective habits, something which would stand in sharp opposition with the very notion of a social contract, as de Maistre insisted: if the forms of the government are imperiously prescribed by the power which has given to the nation such and such moral, physical, geographic, commercial, etc. position, it is not possible to continue speaking of a pact.75

De Maistre suggested, therefore, that Rousseau had been unaware of a contradiction in his treatise, emphasising the will on the one hand, and the inexorable limitations to this will on the other. All that de Maistre’s Rousseau saw as limiting the will—habits, customs, character, prejudices—de Maistre himself considered at the outset as a form of national will upon which sovereignty could be based. Directly contradicting the allegations of his opponent,76 de Maistre sug72

Etude sur la souveraineté, . The translation, slightly modified, is from Rousseau’s Political Writings: Social Contract,  (II, XI). 73 Rousseau, Contract Social, ; tr., . 74 I take such maxims to be those pertaining, to evoke the subtitle of the Social Contract, to the fundamental “principles of political right”. On the notion that, according to Rousseau, a balance should be found between the requirements of social situations and the ideals of justice, see Ryan Patrick Hanley “The ‘Science of the Legislator’ in Adam Smith and Rousseau,” American Journal of Political Science , no.  (April ). 75 Etude sur la souveraineté, . 76 Cf. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la Montagne, in Œuvres complètes vol. , –, in which he affirmed that political obligation cannot have a “foundation safer than free commitment”.

the collective will: from the political to the social



gested that electing these limits as a base would result in a more stable construction of the social than Rousseau’s contract could ever produce, since the complicated moment of mediation between individual preferences and of an identification of a common interest would not be necessary. Thus, de Maistre proposed to maintain Rousseau’s connection between sovereignty and collective will, but he could do so only by modifying the notion of will itself. He now defined the national will as “preferences” deriving from a stable collective character that historical analysis could describe. On this basis, de Maistre rejected the Rousseauian predicament concerning the exercise of sovereignty, arguing that a unique interpreter or a small group of interpreters could legitimately exercise sovereignty as a whole in the name of the nation.77 In the emphasis on the independence of the representative, de Maistre’s position may appear reminiscent of that of Hobbes, but its theoretical foundation is radically different. While Hobbes distinguished between actorship and authorship for justifying the sovereign’s independence, in de Maistre the justification was to be found in his assumption of a social homogeneity prior to the political moment.78 A similar line of reasoning was picked up by many conservative or traditionalist political thinkers in the course of the nineteenth century, during which broad conceptual transformations further pitted the social against the political, and increasingly subordinated the latter to the former. It is during the French Revolution that such changes were initiated, and in its aftermath that they gained currency. According to the

77

As we have seen, in the Social Contract too there is an interpreter of the collective will—but this interpreter, as Rousseau emphasised, is not part of the sovereign. His proposals must always be confirmed by the assembly of citizens. Moreover, and although Rousseau said that the legislator should take into account climatic conditions and local habits, his proposals derive mainly from a calculation of the general interest as equally distant from the interest of each, and not from historical analysis. On the idea of calculation in the Social Contract, see Alexis Philonenko’s entry on Rousseau in the Dictionnaire des oeuvres politiques. 78 Another important difference with Hobbes is the following one: de Maistre’s believed that there are limitations to the will of the sovereign. In Etude sur la souveraineté he explained that all European monarchies, far from being entirely arbitrary, respected some fundamental principles—for instance, they refrained from directly exercising judicial power (delegating it to magistrates) and took advice from certain representative assemblies (such as the General Estates in France or the British Parliament). Tellingly, however, de Maistre justified these limitations by reference to their traditional nature, and not by reference to abstract principles of justice. In the monarchies of Asia, by contrast with the European situation, such limitations are not customary. There, argued de Maistre consistently, absolute monarchy is perfectly appropriate. Cf. Etude sur la souveraineté, –.



chapter one

nominalistic assumptions which, in the evaluation of Laurence Kaufmann, were prominent in late-eighteenth-century social and political thought, only individuals exist, so that the social bond was seen as a “relationship which is external, contingent and a posteriori.”79 This notion inspired the action of many revolutionaries, but it was also heavily and directly challenged by empirical facts: the failure of the French Revolution, argues Kaufmann, had demonstrated that the “pre-constituted whole of traditional norms and practices”, resisted the “constitution of the new society.”80 According to Kaufmann’s interpretation, thus, the return to an “objectivist apprehension” of “nominal beings such as the Nation or public opinion”81 at the beginning of the nineteenth-century must be understood as an attempt to correct the ontological and epistemological flaws inherent to revolutionary thought. Among the conditions of possibility of such inflexions in the conception of collective life, one needs to mention, above all, the changes in the way in which individual agency was conceptualised. While Rousseau had stressed the dimension of volition in his depiction of political action, the authors I am about to turn to, in order to make an “objectivist apprehension” of national unity plausible, had first to distance themselves from the voluntarism and individualism of the theoreticians of the social contract. In a passage which deserves to be quoted at some length, Robert Wokler observed the following: the human sciences were not so much invented around  as superseded then by fresh scientific schemes, which had eliminated notions of human action and human will as objects of scrutiny. Perhaps the most striking feature of the new sciences of society portrayed in Foucault’s conceptual history of the birth of the modern age, is their removal of politics from explanations of human nature, redescribing legislation and political action as abstract, utopian, metaphysical and, after the Terror, dangerous to know. . . . The proponents of the fresh approaches that arose from around  were far less committed than their predecessors to changing the world. They sought instead, by interpreting its internal functions, to preserve it.82

79 Laurence Kaufmann, “Le Dieu social. Vers une socio-logie du nominalisme en Révolution,” in L’ invention de la société. Nominalisme politique et science sociale au XVIIIe siècle, edited by Laurence Kaufmannn and Jacques Guilhaumou (Paris: Editions de l’ EHESS, ), . 80 Ibid., . 81 Ibid., . 82 Robert Wokler, “Repatriating modernity’s alleged debts to the Enlightenment. French Revolutionary social science and the genesis of the nation state,” in The Social in

the collective will: from the political to the social



In other words, post-revolutionary social scientists sought to undermine the centrality of free will as a factor of individual action. They supported instead the view that human actions are influenced, or even determined, by causes external to the action itself. The Natural and the Social: The Notion of Social Causality Lorraine Daston has proposed to distinguish between three concepts of nature: “specific nature”, “local nature”, and “universal nature”.83 The specific nature refers to “that which makes something the kind (or species) of thing it is” and is close to the notion of “identity” or “character.”84 Local nature describes the regularities that can be observed in a given area. When applied to the realm of social relations, this concept is akin to “customs” or mores, comprising actions undertaken “most of the time,”85 as opposed to those occurring by inexorable necessity. Universal nature refers to “comprehensive, uniform laws” which suffer no exception.86 As long as the second concept prevailed (roughly until the eighteenth century), political arrangements were thought of as resting on complex historical compromises, as well as on habitual rule-following. By contrast, a wider diffusion of the third concept inspired attempts to entirely reform political institutions with a view to make them conform to uniform principles. We recognise here the move of French Revolutionaries, described above—but even absolute monarchies had sought to suppress local customs and to establish a more homogeneous order: In the course of the eighteenth century, the notion of natural regularities modeled on customs gave way to that of regularities modeled on laws. This was a momentous metaphorical shift and drew much of its force from the coeval attempts of early modern absolutist monarchies to centralize and consolidate royal authority by re-placing disparate local customs with uniform laws of the realm.87

Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, edited by Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, ), . 83 Lorraine Daston, “I. The morality of natural orders: the Power of Medea. II. Nature’s customs versus nature’s laws,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. , edited by Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, ), . 84 Ibid., . 85 Ibid., . 86 Ibid., . 87 Ibid., .



chapter one

The passage from one concept of nature to the next (which should not be understood as a paradigmatic revolution, but as a shift of emphasis, insofar as both concepts were available at both times, although their role and importance varied) was accompanied by a challenge against teleological understandings of the world. A widespread view of nature before the nineteenth century was that it has an inherent purpose, so that it may serve as a source of inspiration for moral reasoning as well as for political action. This was most often justified by an appeal to a Christian notion of the world as divine creation, but (as the example of David Hume suggests) it could also be detached from explicit theological presuppositions. At any rate, the vision of nature as possessing a moral authority was widely diffused during the Enlightenment: Enlightenment thinkers . . . generally agreed that teleology had been abused in the past. But they were impressed with the idea that organisms are understandable only teleologically, only in terms of some internal principle or nature that cannot be reduced to mechanism; and they relied freely on the idea of human nature, characterized by inherent purposes, in their political reasoning.88

The notion that nature was endowed with a recognisable end was questioned by many human and social scientists of the nineteenth century. Instead, they preferred to see nature as a morally neutral unfolding of regular events caused by universal laws. Of course, it had been a topos since at least the seventeenth century that nature was subjected to laws, a notion by and large foreign to Ancient thought (with the possible exception of Stoicism).89 Yet this very notion of a law of nature had in many cases a theological motivation. It could be used to import a form of classical atomism into modern science and thus to supersede Aristotelism and its views of nature as a living organism made of hierarchised parts (as opposed to a homogeneous machine).90 At the same time, the idea that the laws of the universe were a product of God’s will or reason was posited to avoid the embarrassing aspects of the thought of Epicurus or Lucretius: especially, the two related assumptions that nature works irreg88 Stephen Turner, “Cause, teleology, and method,” in The Social Sciences, vol.  of The Cambridge History of Science, edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 89 Catherine Wilson, “From limits to laws: the construction of the nomological image of nature in Early Modern Philosophy,” in Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe, edited by Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis (Aldershot: Ashgate, ). 90 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –.

the collective will: from the political to the social



ularly and at random, and that it may be devoid of overall purpose.91 So the philosophers of the “Scientific Revolution” introduced the notion of a law of nature as the “divine regimentation of inanimate particles.”92 By contrast, scientistic and positivist thinkers such as August Comte (–) or John Stuart Mill (–) now argued that, when trying to understand a situation or object, one should always look only for its immediate empirical causes, as opposed to primary, universal and possibly supernatural causes or reasons.93 As early as , in his Opening Lecture to the Course on Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte described as typical of a “theological state” of the mind the belief that observable phenomena are caused by “supernatural agents” acting with a purpose. It is only in the “positive state” of humankind, which Comte saw dawning in his lifetime, that it would become evident to all that one should care only for regularities, for “effective laws” and their “unchanging relations of succession and similitude”,94 and not for the intrinsic cause or reason of phenomena. About a decade later Mill wrote the following in his influential System of Logic (): when . . . I speak of the cause of any phenomenon, I do not mean a cause which is not itself a phenomenon; I make no research into the ultimate or ontological cause of anything. To adopt a distinction familiar in the writings of the Scotch metaphysicians, and especially of Reid, the causes with which I concern myself are not efficient, but physical causes. They are causes in that sense alone, in which one physical fact is said to be the cause of another. Of the efficient causes of phenomena, or whether any such causes exist at all, I am not called upon to give an opinion.95

The calling into question of the concept of efficient cause and the crisis of teleological notions, on the one hand, and the redefinition of nature as subjected to universal rules suffering no exception, on the other, had two consequences for the human sciences and for political thought. First, the idea of a stable human nature became increasingly questioned.96 91

Wilson, “From limits to laws,” . Ibid., . On the same topic, see P.M. Heimann, “Voluntarism and immanence: Conceptions of nature in eighteenth-century thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (April–June ). 93 On this point, see Turner, “Cause,” –. 94 All quotes from Auguste Comte, “Discours d’ ouverture du cours de philosophie positive,” Revue encyclopédique  (November ), . 95 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, vol. VII of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto-London: University of Toronto PressRoutledge & Kegan Paul, ), . 96 I return to this question in more detail in the next Chapter. 92



chapter one

As a consequence, the notion that the best political orders are those closest to (human) nature lost ground. Second, the new understanding of causality was put to use in analyses of the social world. As Patrick Riley has argued, it was now widely believed that the notion of the will was less essential to account for human action than previously assumed. While the voluntary “assent of individuals” was, with a few notable exceptions such as Hume and (in part) Montesquieu, taken as a “standard of political legitimacy”97 during most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, By the time one reaches a writer like Nietzsche, the idea of will as a moral agency is no longer even respectable: the will, Nietzsche insists in the Twilight of the Idols, is the invention of priests who want to make men feel guilty, and to depend on them for absolution. And when one arrives at Freud, the idea of the will as a faculty of the mind disappears altogether[.]98

Examples of this change in emphasis can be found in a remarkable number of authors of the time. Very significantly for us, these authors often suggested that the transformations they advocated in the representation of collective life also implied that the political should lose its centrality and become subordinate to the social. Social action could now be seen as directly determined (i.e., without the mediation of individual consciousness) by general causes, exogenous to the action itself, and exerting their force upon all individuals inhabiting a given territory, thus rendering them similar or even identical. The interrogation on the nature of social causality is a central element of the language of the social and I will have the occasion, in this volume, to come back several times to it. In what follows, I offer only some general indications and cursorily list some of these general social causes, ranked by decreasing order of strength. The strongest of such possible causes, and one especially simple to imagine, is, of course, race. The old discourse on inherited traits was at the time taken up, revived, and adapted to the interrogations of the time,99 among others the interrogation on the relations between the social and the political. The racial thinker Arthur de Gobineau (–), like Comte a figure of the human sciences of the mid-nineteenth-century, understood society as a homogeneous totality of individuals, rendered 97 Patrick Riley, “How coherent is the social contract tradition?” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (October–December ), . 98 Ibid., . 99 Cf. Ivan Hannaford, Race. The History of an Idea in the West (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, ).

the collective will: from the political to the social



identical by the action of inherited factors. In his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (–) he wrote: By the term society, I understand a union of men actuated by similar ideas, and possessed of the same general instincts. This association need by no means be perfect in a political sense, but must be complete from a social point of view.100

This quote suggests that even societies with weak or non-existent political institutions could achieve unity and be seen as complete, i.e., adequate as such, and not in need in reform. In other words, the stability of social relations, and not the perfection of political regime, is here a criterion for determining the vigour or degeneracy of nations. Hippolyte Taine (–) was influenced by the determinism of racial thought, but he combined racialism with other classical notions, such as the influence of climatic conditions, to arrive at a general explanatory model. In his influential preface () to the Histoire de la littérature anglaise, Taine proposed a historical method founded on the consideration of three factors: race, milieu, and moment. According to Taine, societies are ruled by the “law of mutual dependencies: a civilisation constitutes a body (fait corps), and its parts hold together in the same way as the parts of an organic body.”101 In this view the denizens of a given territory, rather than being isolated beings, as the contractarian theorisation suggested, are an integral part of a nation fashioned by nature, climate, and history, to which they have to adapt. The nation, as Taine wrote in one of the volumes of his Origins of Contemporary France, is made of men of a particular species, having their peculiar temperament, their special aptitudes, their own inclinations, their religion, their history, all adding up into a mental and moral structure, hereditary and deeply rooted, bequeathed to them by the primitive race . . ..102

Replying to his critics Taine, however, emphasised that race was for him less an absolute cause than a secondary one. He understood race as physical characteristics and mental dispositions initially induced by the 100 Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’ inégalité des races humaines, in Œuvres, vol.  (Paris: Gallimard, ), ; tr. (modified), The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races (Philadephia: J.B. Lippincott, ), . 101 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, vol.  (Paris: Hachette, ), XXXIX–XL. 102 Taine, La Révolution. L’ anarchie, tome premier, vol.  of Les origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, ), –. The translation, slightly altered, is the one proposed by John Durand in Taine, The French Revolution, vol. I: Anarchy, vol.  of The Origins of Contemporary France (Teddington: The Echo Library, ), .



chapter one

need to adapt to given climatic conditions, and which had subsequently become hereditary: race is the “totality (ensemble) of moral and intellectual dispositions . . . formed in times prior to civilisation, when the influence of climate was very strong and the conditions and forms life were the same for all generations.”103 Unlike the one advocated, as he said, by “anthropologists”, Taine stressed that his understanding of race was historical, not naturalistic. The debates in which Taine was caught concerning the identification of the general cause determining social life accompanied the entire period of emergence of the human sciences. I will have several occasions, in the next chapters, of showing how the racial paradigm was criticised and how, eventually, the very idea of a determination of society by natural causes was fundamentally relativised. The causal model, however, did not completely disappear. More often than not, it was transformed into a model of explanation that accounted for human phenomena by reference to historical and social factors (as opposed to natural or political ones). Of course, a variety of shades existed between these two positions. For instance, Alfred Fouillée (–), whose eclectic thinking was not entirely foreign to the racial idea,104 emphasised around  that society was primarily the cumulative result of historical experiences. While the development of nations is undoubtedly influenced by racial factors, it would be “wrong” to assume that it is fully determined by them. In the vocabulary of Fouillée, “sociological determinism” is stronger than racial causation: A Frenchman, for instance, can be understood only as member of the system of sensibilities and volitions which make up the French nation and turn him, from the generic man he was, into a Frenchman. From this really derive, not races, but national types: the French type, considered sociologically, is not more the Italian or Spanish type than the English or German type, whatever the underlying races. To put it briefly, each people involves what we have elsewhere called a “sociological determinism”, i.e. a collection of sentiments and ideas produced by the action of the sentiments of all on each and of each on all. . . . The result is, in our opinion, a system of collective leading ideas (idées-forces) which, in the last analysis, constitute a national consciousness, the soul of a people.105

103 From a letter to Chevrillon, cited in Pascale Seys, Hippolyte Taine et l’ avènement du naturalisme. Un intellectuel sous le Second Empire (Paris: L’ Harmattan, ), –. 104 Cf. Noiriel, Les origines républicaines, –. 105 Alfred Fouillée, Esquisse psychologique des peuples européens (Paris: Alcan, ), XVIII–XIX.

the collective will: from the political to the social



On the other hand, some sociologists of the late nineteenth century wrote unambiguously that racial features did not play any role at all in shaping social life. For instance, the organicist sociologist René Worms (–) emphasised that society was “highly homogeneous”, since its members all shared very similar mental dispositions despite their performance of markedly different functions. This homogeneity, however, was described as resulting from organic integration and not from inherited traits: Society, for its part, is characterised by similarities which are independent of descent. Society is the totality of beings whose works cooperate, who live under the same laws and the same leaders, and who have in common customs, traditions and ideas which are more important than those by which they differ from one another and than those by which they resemble foreign societies. . . . Each of these societies is, in sum, very homogeneous. There can thus be social unity, without there being racial unity.106

As a further example, one must mention the programme of Emile Durkheim’s sociological school, which rested on the axiom of an independent society vis-à-vis individual consciousness. Society, for the Durkheimians, was not merely an aggregation of individuals. Rather, social forms determined their actions and behaviour. Such premises led Durkheim to develop a strong notion of the social; strong enough indeed, to suggest that social causality trumped natural causality, in the form or racial or climatic influences.107 The discussion of these views will be integral part of several of my next chapters. For time being, I turn to the political use that could be made of these various notions of the social as a cause determining human action. “Determined by Its Character and Past”: Taine’s Traditionalist Arguments As shown by the examples of Burke and de Maistre a number of authors, already at the time of the French Revolution, argued against the voluntarist conception of individual action, so widespread in eighteenth-

106

René Worms, Organisme et société (Paris: Giard & Brière, ), –. On Durkheim’s critique of racial discourse, see Laurent Mucchielli, La découverte du social: Naisance de la sociologie en France (–) (Paris: La découverte, ); also Mucchielli, “Sociologie versus anthropologie raciale. L’ engagement des sociologues durkheimiens dans le contexte fin de siècle (–),” Gradhiva  (). 107



chapter one

century France, and adopted instead a theory of national cohesion as a natural phenomenon. This enabled the diffusion of a new theory of politics as a search for the institutions best adapted to a fixed collective character. In the nineteenth-century, many traditionalist political thinkers went down the path charted by the counter-revolutionaries. The “traditionalists” were primarily those who condemned any linkage between politics, on the one hand, and these cornerstones of the democratic ideal, collective deliberation and decision-taking, on the other. They favoured, instead, the conservation of “traditional political and religious forms, even when they could not be intellectually justified, because they are taken to be the legitimate expression and the spontaneous revelation of the true needs of society.”108 The traditionalists essentially believed that social unity necessarily exists prior to the establishment or exercise of political authority. Unity is thus a pre-existing condition, rather than a consequence of a pure attribution of the will (Hobbes, Sieyes), or than the result of a political moment of mediation between individual wills (Rousseau). Individuals, within a collective, do not need to be made similar or identical, since they are necessarily and essentially so. Unity is here understood not as a political union, but as social cohesion. As de Maistre had done, the thinkers of the social could take up the democratic rhetoric according to which institutions, in the last instance, must rest on the preferences and needs, or even the will, of the nation. On the other hand, they also emptied what was truly democratic in this view by denying, on the basis of their redefinition of the nation, that a direct consultation was needed to identify the preferences of the nation. Arthur de Gobineau, for instance, wrote that the law usually reflects the instincts and needs of the people, even if the latter cannot participate in its making nor explicitly manifest its support for it: [the] people have obviously calculated their institutions to accord with their instincts and needs . . . in any autonomous country, the law may be said to emanate from the people; not because the people always have the

108 André Lalande, entry “Traditionalisme,” in Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, vol.  (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), . For a discussion of traditionalism see Eric Gasparini, La pensée politique d’ Hippolyte Taine: entre traditionalisme et libéralisme (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires d’ Aix-Marseille, ), esp. –.

the collective will: from the political to the social



faculty of promulgating it directly, but because, to be a good law, it must be moulded on the people’s views and be what the people, if they were well informed, would have imagined.109

Taine, on his part, explained that individuals typically do not possess political opinions beyond the spontaneous inclinations which race and history have ingrained in them, so that the democratic theory which makes political organisation depend on a mediation between individual preferences is unconvincing, and perhaps dangerous: he argued that, however combined, the opinion of millions of ignorant people can never yield a sound political decision (in an almost untranslatable sentence, he stated that “dix millions d’ ignorances ne font pas un savoir”).110 A political constitution engendering a stable order is not, in his mind, the product of individual actions and decisions, but the necessary consequence of a collective nature: “The social and political mold, into which a nation may enter and remain, is not subject to its will, but determined by its character and its past.”111 Taine was convinced that while a knowledge of national character and history is essential for successful political action, the citizens themselves cannot arrive at such knowledge. Instead, it is accessible only to the specialist in the interpretation of things past, namely the historian—if not exclusively the professional historian strictly speaking, at least an elite possessing a formal education and historical notions. For instance, Taine wrote: “if I should some day undertake to form a political opinion, it would be only after having studied France.”112 Taine’s position concerning the foundation of political authority, as well as concerning the exact institutional translation of the political premises I have just described, must be for the most part recomposed by interpreting his observations on the events of the history of France in The Origins of Contemporary France, his major and most influential work. Further interesting elements can be gathered from the notes the author jotted down as he was working on the Origins, which have been

109

Gobineau, Essai, . Taine, L’ Ancien Régime, tome premier, vol.  of Les origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, ), II; tr., The Ancien Regime, vol.  of The Origins of Contemporary France (Teddington: The Echo Library: ), . John Durand’s translation uses the periphrase “the combined ignorance of ten millions is not the equivalent of one man’s wisdom.” 111 Ibid., IV; tr., . 112 Ibid., V; tr., . 110



chapter one

preserved and a selection of which have been published posthumously. These notes suggest that one of Taine’s central concerns was precisely the re-interpretation of the classical theory of political authorisation. In a section of these notes with the title “On universal suffrage and the national will”, Taine insisted on the importance of distinguishing between two types of association, the artificial and the natural. The first one rests on the conscious and explicit adhesion of its members, an adhesion which Taine called “volition of the st kind” (volonté du er état), while the other depends on “deep, intimate tendencies or desires” (“volition of the nd kind”).113 According to Taine, who was writing here explicitly against “Rousseau’s Social Contract and against the Declaration of the Rights of Man”,114 the state belongs to the second category of “natural” associations. As such, it should not be grounded on the arbitrary will of individual members: this would indeed entail the risk, as Taine noted in another fragment, to create an “unstable social state” comparable to the one which prevailed during the French Revolution. (This major event of French history, argued Taine, emerged from a combination of a “hasty, badly done, a-priorist science” with the “passions of the masses”.115) In the natural kind of association, not only “involvement does not need to be expressed by a vote, suffrage or writing”—it “happens tacitly”116—but also the “majority of the persons who belong to it can have vis-à-vis [the association] only volitions of the nd kind”: in other words, a mere sentiment of belonging, deprived of rationality. According to Taine, it is the task of a “minority” or “sometimes even one single individual”117 to know the national will, the character of a people, and to take the apposite decisions on the basis of this knowledge.118 However—and one needs to emphasise the importance of this point— the will of the minority, contrary to Hobbes, cannot take any form. There indeed exists a “regulative principle” which limits what can legitimately be decided by those in charge of political affairs:

113 Taine, L’ historien (–), vol.  of Sa vie et sa correspondance (Paris: Hachette, ), . 114 Ibid., . 115 Ibid., . 116 Ibid., . 117 Ibid., . 118 Ibid.

the collective will: from the political to the social



The regulative principle is de facto that this minority or this individual are obliged by the nature of the situation to have volitions of the st kind which are in conformity with the volitions of the nd kind, which are those of the majority.119

Taine, in sum, proposed to rethink the notion of popular sovereignty. On the one hand, he kept the idea that the legitimacy of a political regime derives from its correspondence to the will of the nation. On the other hand, however, by hardening the very concept of nation (a nation is not merely the “generality of its citizens” but a homogeneous entity characterised by the pre-existing social cohesion of its members), he envisaged that a restricted group of individuals may be assigned the task of grasping the nature of this will and of translating it into political decisions. What I have just described seems to have been only one of the tendencies in Taine’s thought. His elitist convictions could suggest him several other institutional forms. For instance, Taine eventually decided, without enthusiasm, to support the Third Republic, hoping to contribute to transform it into an elitist and aristocratic republic.120 Perhaps in the same way that Rousseau had adapted his theory of sovereignty in order to apply it to concrete cases (such as Poland or Corsica), Taine declared in  to be favourable to universal suffrage. He made clear, however, that one should introduce a form of indirect election and guarantee an almost total independence of the representatives, making voting into a simple mechanism of authorisation.121 A Sociology for the Republic In the preceding sections, I have discussed how the rise of the language of the social during the nineteenth century had an impact on political thinking. Thinkers and scholars made use of the new notion of society as a specific level of reality, as a bounded totality firmly anchored in its past, to rephrase classical political arguments and re-define political concepts. A stronger notion of society, for instance, allowed for a new notion of 119

Ibid. On this point, see Gasparini, La pensée politique de Taine, –. One can also read Alan Pitt, “The irrationalist liberalism of Hippolyte Taine,” The Historical Journal , no.  (), –. 121 Cf. Hippolyte Taine, Du suffrage universel et de la manière de voter (Paris: Hachette, ). 120



chapter one

representation: representation as the search, not for the common good or for overlapping interests, but for the cultural preferences shared by the members of society. Similarly, as we shall see in the next Chapter, a new understanding of what nations are, and how they relate to one another, could easily translate into different decisions concerning war and peace, international treatises, or colonial expansion. I have discussed thus far only the political use of the concept of society by conservative scholars. However, similar arguments can also be found in the work of social and political thinkers closer to the republican ideal. In order to demonstrate this, I now move to a description of some aspects of the development of the theories of political authority during the Third Republic. My suggestion will be that the understanding of politics that many republican scholars adopted in late-nineteenth-century France can be interpreted, in historical perspective, as an attempt to supersede (in the Hegelian sense of Aufheben: to synthesise and overcome at the same time) the thought of both Sieyes and of the traditionalists. Republican thought in the last decades of the nineteenth century in France displays several characteristics. Firstly, the advocates of the republican regime which was established after the definitive defeat against the German enemy in  could not follow Rousseau’s rejection of representation. This has to do with the long critique of political Rousseauism which took place during the whole nineteenth-century, especially among liberals.122 But it also has to do with the circumstances of the time: the chaos and violence which, in the view of mainstream political thinkers, had characterised the experience of the Paris Commune had demonstrated the risks that were inherent to the direct government by the people. Therefore, the institutions of the Third Republic needed to be built in opposition to this idea and remain strictly representative. Secondly, the classical theory of the social contract which had prevailed among the revolutionaries could not be adopted unmodified either. Owing to its individualist and contractarian origins, it left too little space for a sufficiently solid and sufficiently “social” concept of the nation. The preference for a more substantial concept of the social can be accounted for in various ways. One must mention, to begin with, the general change of intellectual context—including the diffusion of new concepts of nature and causality, described above. Moreover, the task of republicans in  was not to revolutionise an arbitrary order, but to establish and preserve 122 Rousseau was one of the main targets of Benjamin Constant, for instance in his Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements (Genève: Droz, ).

the collective will: from the political to the social



a just one. They were therefore especially interested by questions such as the development of habits, the preservation of discipline, or the construction of mass loyalty—all primarily social phenomena. At the same time—thirdly—the notions of society or nation promoted by conservatives and traditionalists, while sociologically and historically more plausible, and therefore perhaps preferable to the one promoted by the actors of the French Revolution, rested on too strong naturalistic and deterministic, even sometimes racialist, premises, which many republicans would have found problematic to say the least. The task which the republican theoreticians of national sovereignty set for themselves thus consisted in developing a new theory of the national, which would be at the same time more substantial than the one inherited from the Revolution and still relatively free from the naturalistic bias.123 The social and political thinkers supportive of the Third Republic, in order to successfully defend the regime, needed to offer arguments for three especially emblematic and central elements of the French republican imagination: first, obviously, the republican form itself; second, a strong notion of the representative institution as the locus of an independent rationality that should remain insulated from the contingencies of public opinion; third, the most potent symbol of the Revolution, the flagship of the revolutionary inheritance, the so-called “Principles of ”: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Although universally recognised as valid by Republicans, the third element proved very difficult to justify theoretically. For instance Adhémar Esmein, a legal theorist particularly influential in the early decades of the Third Republic to whom I return below, believed that the language of natural jurisprudence, which had exerted “an almost universal influence 123 For a recent description of the characteristics of French republicanism along similar lines, see Laurent Dobuzinskis, “Defenders of liberal individualism, republican virtues and solidarity: The forgotten intellectual founding fathers of the French Third Republic,” European Journal of Political Theory , no.  (), esp. –. For further general presentations and discussions of the main features of the political thought of the Third Republic, see Claude Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée francaise (–) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ); Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century French Republican Political Thought (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, ); Claude Nicolet, L’ idée républicaine en France. Essai d’ histoire critique (Paris: Gallimard, ); Noiriel, Les origines républicaines de Vichy; Jean-Fabien Spitz, Le moment républicain en France (Paris: Gallimard, ). See also Jean Terrier, “The idea of a Republican tradition. Reflections on the debate concerning the intellectual foundations of the French Third Republic,” Journal of Political Ideologies , no.  (October ), for a fuller treatment of the topic I am discussing in this section.



chapter one

in the eighteenth century”,124 now needed to be abandoned, because it rested on individualistic assumptions which had been proved wrong by the development of the human sciences, especially history and sociology. Esmein’s abandonment of natural right theory, as well as his rejection of the state-of-nature hypothesis,125 barred him from using one of the traditional arguments in favour of the Declaration (namely, that these rights can be understood as the rights individuals have in the state of nature).126 Without a philosophical foundation, however, these rights were mere “declaration of principles”127 with no legal bearing, and, in particular, no constitutional validity. Esmein recognised the need for guaranteeing the fundamental liberties of citizens in some form, and was especially concerned that in the absence of a definite notion of individual rights, the representatives could become an oppressive minority and pass laws detrimental to the interests of ordinary citizens.128 He thus insisted that “another foundation has to be found for these rights.”129 “French conscience” provided this other foundation.130 Esmein argued that it was unlikely that the representatives should limit fundamental liberties, insofar as the very idea of fundamental rights (the requirement to respect the equal dignity of all),131 was deeply embedded in the worldview of each and every citizen. The “Declaration of the Rights of Man”, he wrote, had “conquered the souls” (pénétré les esprits) of the French and become part of a set of “common axioms” in the political life of the nation.132 The principles of , he insisted, “seem to belong forever to the heritage of the French people” (un patrimoine définitivement acquis au peuple français).133 The guarantee of fundamental rights in France, argued Esmein, took the form of a “moral restriction or obliga-

124

Adhémar Esmein, Eléments de droit constitutionnel (Paris: Larose et Forcel, ),

. 125

Ibid., –. Cf. Lucien Jaume, “Problématique générale des droits,” in Les Déclarations des droits de l’ homme. (Du Débat – au Préambule de ), edited by Lucien Jaume (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ), . 127 Esmein, Eléments, . 128 Ibid., . 129 Ibid., . 130 Ibid., . 131 Ibid., . For a recent reflection on the relation between human dignity and human rights, cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Das Konzept der Menschenwürde und die realistische Utopie der Menschenrechte,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie , no.  (). 132 Esmein, Eléments, . 133 Ibid., . 126

the collective will: from the political to the social



tion imposed upon the legislative power”.134 This, Esmein added, was by no means typical of France. In England, there was no formal, constitutional definition of fundamental rights either. But there, like in France, their “best guarantee . . . is to be found in customs, in the spirit of the nation [esprit national]” (and maybe, Esmein added, in the existence of two distinct legislative chambers).135 According to Léon Duguit (–), another important lawyer of the Third Republic influenced by sociology, Esmein’s theory did not go far enough. In order to demonstrate that the “Rights of Man” are legally valid because they are part of French “conscience”, one needs a consistent theory of legal norms as deriving from collective consciousness. It is precisely a theory of this kind that Duguit developed, rejecting both natural right theory and legal positivism. Against his positivist colleagues, he rejected the notion that laws are nothing more than rules established by the state, and affirmed instead that there are laws “without” and “above” the state itself.136 While such a statement may seem to be preparing an argument about the existence of natural rights, this was not what Duguit was driving at. He considered any “metaphysical”137 belief in “natural, inalienable and imprescriptible subjective rights”138 to be both theoretically and practically wrong. Natural rights theories were often premised on indemonstrable assumptions (such as the divine origin of rights, purportedly revealed to humankind by a supreme being).139 He further argued that from a practical point of view it was unrealistic and vain to believe in rights that could not be easily enforced by the state—and this, he suggested pessimistically, was often the case of natural rights.140 Duguit believed that there was only one way to conceive of a legal rule (règle de droit) that was neither simply a product of the state, nor an attribute innate to all human beings, nor a divine dictate. One could indeed conceive of legal norms as extensions of shared moral convictions. Any general consensus in society about the rightness (or the wrongness) 134

Ibid., . Ibid. 136 Léon Duguit, Leçons de droit public général faites à l’ Université égyptienne pendant les mois de Janvier, Février et Mars  (Paris: Boccard, ). 137 Ibid., . 138 Ibid., . 139 Ibid., . 140 Ibid., –. See also Duguit, Les transformations du droit public (Paris: Armand Colin, ), chapters , . 135



chapter one

of an action generates a moral rule. When this moral rule is assimilated into a formal body of established and enforceable rules, law appears: “a moral rule (une règle de moeurs) becomes a legal rule (une règle de droit) when the idea that it is legitimate that this rule be socially sanctioned becomes part of the general consciousness of the individuals who compose a nation.”141 In spite of his rejection of natural rights, Duguit praised the “Rights of Man” of  for their powerful declaration that the power of the state had to be limited.142 Other republican scholars, around the same years, adopted views similar to those developed by Esmein and Duguit, arguing that the “Rights of Man” were valid because they were part of France’s tradition, because they were a collective ideal of the French. For instance, Alfred Fouillée suggested that in drafting the “Declaration” “the philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century” had merely reformulated and systematised “what was already part of the national spirit, so that the intellectuals and the people share in the honour of having founded the new law (droit nouveau).”143 In others words, the “Rights of Man” were the expression of a collective character, as opposed to a universal philosophical truth. This appears in the following quote: the French doctrine which establishes right on [the basis of] moral freedom is not only the doctrine of a man, but that of a people . . .; it has too deep roots in the character and philosophy of the nation, and it has had too much influence on the development of civic or political institutions, not only in France, but also in Europe as a whole, for us to abandon it without deep examination and without having tried . . . to render it more solid.144

Similarly Emile Durkheim, in a review article published in , wrote that, even though they had been refuted as “theoretical truths”, “the principles of  persist as social facts, as an expression of the state of 141 Leçons, . See also Les transformations, : “At a certain point the notion of the obligatory character of certain rules penetrates so generally and profoundly the consciousness of the members of a society that any law that formulates them immediately meets a unanimous approbation and their obligatory character appears to all in the utmost evidence.” On this notion, see Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizers of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 142 Leçons, , , ; Les transformations, ; see also Duguit’s La théorie générale de l’ Etat (suite et fin) vol.  of Traité de droit constitutionnel (Paris: Fontemoing, ), , and section  more generally. 143 Alfred Fouillée, L’ idée moderne du droit en Allemagne, en Angleterre et en France (Paris: Hachette, ), . 144 Ibid., .

the collective will: from the political to the social



mind of a given time and society.”145 The notion was further developed by Célestin Bouglé (–), a sociologist close to the Durkheimian school. Writing in the context of the Dreyfus Affair,146 Bouglé used traditionalist arguments to suggest that Dreyfus had to be released if the French wanted to stay true to what France fundamentally was: It is precisely because we constantly have in our minds and hearts the tradition [of France], her function, her mission, that we will do . . . everything that lies within our powers to obtain the revision of the trial of this unfortunate Jew [Dreyfus]. We go as far as saying that our opponents seem to us, in their struggle to prevent this revision, to be trying to imprison and strangle the French tradition together with Dreyfus himself.147

Bouglé went on to make clear that the central element of the French tradition were the “Rights of Man” themselves: “You are asking, where is France? Our answer is: read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and let its spirit penetrate you[r soul]. To represent, to defend, to save this very spirit: that, I say, is our specific mission, that is the French tradition.”148 Traditionalists arguments were mobilised by the republican thinkers of the time to justify, not only the “Rights of Man”, but the republican regime as well. Alfred Fouillée, of one the scholars who popularised the concept of “social science” towards the end of the nineteenth century, sought like Esmein, Duguit, Durkheim and Bouglé to help in the consolidation of the Republic. His contribution took the form of a sociological theory specifically geared to demonstrate that the republican regime was the best one in view of both French political traditions and the specificity of the historical context. As we shall see in mode detail in Chapters  and , many sociologists around  took modernity to be characterised, in any country, by the advent of individuality. The historical tendency to an always more 145

Emile Durkheim, “Les principes de  et la sociologie,” in La science sociale et l’ action (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . In Leçons de sociologie, Durkheim more pessimistically noted that the Declaration was not as diffused in collective consciousness as it could be. Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France-Quadrige, ), ; tr., Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), . 146 On the role of the Durkheimians in the Dreyfus Affair see Steven Lukes, Durkheim. His Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), –. 147 Célestin Bouglé, “La tradition nationale,” in Pour la démocratie française. Conférences populaires (Paris: Edouard Cornély, n. d. []), . 148 Ibid., .



chapter one

widespread division of social labour had triggered the industrial revolution and forced individuals to specialise more and more. This had created larger, more heterogeneous, and more fragmented societies. In them, differentiated individuals adopt a variety of world views and preferences, which replace the old overarching collective consciousness. According to Emile Durkheim, this tendency towards individualisation is accompanied by a growing respect for the specific worth of each individual,149 a respect which makes up the societal background for the emergence of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” itself. More generally, given the supreme worth of individuals, the state has to subordinate itself to this value. This explains the development of the rule of law and political representation, which protects individual and provides them with a share of national sovereignty. The sociologists, thus, detected an elective affinity between modernity, individualisation, individual rights and the rule of law. They believed that deep political-institutional change would occur in Europe as whole, as the political side of a mostly social and economic modernisation. In the particular case of France such processes would further consolidate the republic, even though modernity itself, while connected to the rule of law, is not obligatorily republican in the sense of non-monarchical. The dilemma between (constitutional) monarchy and the republic, in modern times, can only be solved by looking at the specific political traditions of each country. For instance, Fouillée argued that the rule of law clearly existed in Great Britain, even though the nation showed no sign of a growing acceptance of republican principles. To understand this, he turned to an analysis of the historical experience of Britain and of the collective national character of its inhabitants. Fouillée argued that “the King of England represents a really traditional institution; it is preserved on the basis of its utility, and out of loyalty towards a family whose services to the fatherland do not need to be demonstrated”.150 By contrast, Fouillée wrote that in France, “traditional monarchy is lacking a tradition” and that “republican institutions” are “the natural outcome of our history”.151 In other words:

149 Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ); tr., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, ); Durkheim, “L’ individualisme et les intellectuels,” in La science sociale et l’ action, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ). 150 Fouillée, La démocratie politique et sociale en France (Paris: Alcan, ), . 151 Ibid., –.

the collective will: from the political to the social



It is first and foremost in France that an idealism resting on the notion of social justice has developed, which demands the simultaneous progress of individuals and the state; it is, first and foremost, in France that European democracy has developed, and that it has obtained the only form of government which stands in harmony with its principles, the republican form.152

Fouillée, in short, considered the Third Republic to owe its legitimacy to historical and social processes. On the one hand the republic, as a regime based on the rule of law, satisfies the requirements of a modern, individualised and industrialised country, which needs clear rules of protection for its citizens. On the other hand, the republic is further justified by its correspondence with the deep political preferences of the French. The argumentation Fouillée offered for the “Rights of Man” and the republican regime, in other words, had nothing to do with natural rights or social contract theory. Instead, it rested on two sets of arguments: first, a sociological argument concerning the capacity of the republic to meet the social requirements and expectations in a modern age; and second: a traditionalist, and almost Burkean, argument that political institutions are valid not because they correspond to universal principles of justice, but because they are the expression of a national tradition. Two Languages, Hybridised: Esmein on National Sovereignty In the last section of this Chapter, I discuss one of the most influential lawyers of the Third Republic, Adhémar Esmein (–), focusing especially on his treatise of constitutional law (), one of the standard treatments on this topic at the time.153 As we saw above, Esmein defended the values of the Revolution, especially human rights, but also national sovereignty and the principles of equality. He also argued in favour of the republican regime, thus contributing to defend the Third Republic against its critics. Esmein found a large amount of inspiration in the political thought of the French Revolution, and in particular in the work of Sieyes. On the other hand, his notions of “nation” and “society” differed markedly from those held by most revolutionaries about a century earlier. 152

Ibid., –. On him and legal thought during this period, see Alain Laquièze, “Etat de droit e sovranità nazionale in Francia,” in Lo Stato di diritto. Storia, teoria, critica, edited by Pietro Costa, Danilo Zolo and Emilio Santoro (Milan: Feltrinelli, ). 153



chapter one

For instance Sieyes, as we saw, denied that citizens and politicians should merely copy or preserve the institutions of the past. By contrast, Esmein gave more importance to the idea that the nation was a historical entity, with a development of its own which should not be ignored in political action. Esmein started by rejecting the theory of popular sovereignty, which he identified with the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and which he saw as characterised by the central notion that each individual is the bearer of a share of sovereignty,154 in such a way that sovereignty in general can only be exerted in the presence of the entire citizenry. To this conception, Esmein opposed the idea of national sovereignty, according to which sovereignty belongs to the nation as a whole, “as distinct from the individuals themselves, and comprising the development of successive generations.”155 For Esmein, since sovereignty is the “indivisible and inalienable attribute of the nation itself,”156 suffrage must be understood not as an expression of sovereignty, and as a way to declare individual preferences, but as a “social function.”157 In an election, the citizens who cast their ballot act “in reality, not in their own name, but, rather, in the name of the nation of which they are the representatives.”158 In any other case, suggested Esmein, a form of tyranny may arise—the tyranny of living citizens over those dead and those yet to be born, i.e. a tyranny of the citizens over the nation as a transhistorical phenomenon.159 Next to this original argument against popular sovereignty, Esmein made use of the classical idea that the citizens lacked the time and the skills to be able to exercise their share of sovereignty:

154

Esmein, Eléments, . Ibid., . One may compare Esmein’s conception with the one defended by Carré de Malberg, one of his followers. He wrote that sovereignty “resides indivisibly in the entire nation, and not divisibly in the person, nor in any group of nationals.” Carré de Malberg, Contribution à la théorie générale de l’ Etat, spécialement d’ après les données fournies par le Droit constitutionnel français,  vol. (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, ), here vol. , . 156 Esmein, Eléments, . 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid. 159 See on this point Carré de Malberg’s clarifications in Contribution, vol. , –: “the national collectivity does not consist only of the current and transitory generation of national citizens (nationaux), it is rather a successive and enduring being comprising the set (série) of current and future national generations.” 155

the collective will: from the political to the social



The great majority of citizens, very capable of choosing their representatives on the basis of their known opinions and thus to orient the legislation and the government, is incapable of apprehending (apprécier) the laws or law projects that may be presented to them. For this they lack, as Siéyès [sic] used to say, two necessary elements: the education required to understand such projects, and the leisure needed to study them.160

The logical, and in no way original, consequence of such premises is the theory of representation itself. The ultimate bearer of sovereignty, the nation, cannot exercise it directly: since it is “not a real person, but a collectivity of individuals, [it] cannot in itself have a will.”161 On the other hand, however, as we have just seen, it is unthinkable that the citizens should speak directly in the name of the nation (as the notion of popular sovereignty would require). In such a framework, it is necessary to establish a representative system according to which specialised individuals will be responsible for interpreting, in full independence, the national will. On these various points, Esmein was emphatically close to Sieyes. However, there was an important difference between them, which can be understood against the background of the major transformations that had occurred in the intellectual context during those hundred years, transformations of which the rise of the language of the social was a significant component. Contrary to his predecessor, Esmein was armed with a stronger concept of nation as a compact social entity, or even as a living organism. He tried—and in part succeeded—to remain faithful to the classical republican tradition, but he could not fully escape the language of his time and the connotations that wide-ranging semantic changes had now added to such concepts as “nation” or “society”. For instance, in a revealing formulation in which the political stands in opposition to social, and volition to necessity, he argued that the very formation of a nation is a successive phenomenon, the product of a very long natural evolution whose laws sociology and history strive to discover, and in which the conscious will of successive generations, and even more so the formal conventions between men, play a very small role.162

This definition, strictly speaking, does not constitute an organicism. And yet, what we may call the “organicist temptation” seems to be present in Esmein’s reflection. This is what the following quotes suggests: 160 161 162

Esmein, Eléments, . Ibid., . Ibid., .



chapter one Sociology and history show . . . that the formation and development of a nation are not an artificial creation, but a natural phenomenon, whose conditions are race, milieu and historical circumstances. Each nation develops according to an evolution which is specific to itself and which endows it with a structure, a political organism and a peculiar genius, like an animal successively creates its organs and its intelligence. Moreover, each nation so constituted really has a life of its own, distinct from the added lives of the individuals who compose it, in which the activity and the thought of past generations is combined with those of the present one, and in which the destiny of future generations is prepared.163

However, we can speak only of a “temptation” here, since Esmein’s position was ambiguous. On the one hand, he approvingly mentioned the new notions of nation and society. On the other hand he emphasised, against traditionalist thinkers, that such notions should not lead us to assume that social change through political action is impossible or undesirable. They merely indicated that we should pay a special attention, in acting politically, to extant social relations. In particular, a historically and sociologically solid concept of society invites us, not to avoid reforms altogether, but to slow down their pace: But if things are such, doesn’t the organisation—which is the natural product of the nation so understood—impose itself to the individual wills of the citizens? Isn’t the sovereignty constituted by historical evolution the legitimate one? Undoubtedly, this point of view imposes itself to a certain extent: such considerations must dictate to men a great prudence in [undertaking] the political reforms they want to implement; history demonstrates that the modification of institutions is only useful and enduring when transitions are sufficiently soft (ménagées) and when the new form already exists in nuce in the preceding one.164

Even as the weight of the language of the social and the influence of his intellectual context were pushing towards different conceptions (as the above quote indicates), Esmein was struggling to stay close to the legalist and voluntarist republican tradition. He wrote that “the laws of history do not create right [le droit] any more than the laws of gravitation or of the attraction of bodies. Right [le droit] is the child of liberty, not of fatality”.165 Esmein’s ambiguities are a good illustration of an encounter between two constituted languages. While re-working the conceptions of Sieyes, 163 164 165

Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., .

the collective will: from the political to the social



whose general orientation he shared, Esmein, significantly, made use of images, formulations and arguments initially developed by traditionalist thinkers, or more generally by the theoreticians of the social. The constitutional lawyer even explicitly claimed to have proposed “an application to the theory of national sovereignty” of the notion that “human and political societies are natural formations and necessary organisms which develop in accordance with laws that are in part unavoidable (fatales)”.166 For Esmein, this notion had the advantage, in comparison to the construction proposed by Sieyes, of a more concrete and solid concept of the nation. Moreover, it enabled him to demonstrate how, in spite of the strict separation between the representatives and the represented, the decisions of the former were fundamentally connected to the preferences of the latter. Esmein was thus solving two important problems of republican thinking during his time, both of which were taking the form of a threat. On the one hand, the threat of traditionalists, who could easily turn into opponents of the republican regime—Esmein’s response was to concede that the nation was indeed more than the “generality of the citizens”. On the other hand, the threat posed by the critics of republican elitism, such as the advocates of the Paris Commune and the socialists more generally, who were especially indignant of the narrow concept of representation heralded by republican thinkers. To them, Esmein retorted that the representative mechanism, as he understood it, would yield the very same result that the critics of representation were arguing for: a correspondence between the decisions of the legislature and the actual will of the nation. In this chapter, I have discussed the impact of the rise of the social on the political reflection concerning the collective will, decisions-making, and sovereignty. As we saw, the language of the social found two kinds of translation in the political reflection of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it played an important role in the political thought of the traditionalists, who emphasised the weight of the past and the immutability of collective characters. On the other hand, the language of the social could also be articulated with a defence of the republic—a theme to which I shall return several times in the remainder of this volume. In Chapter , I discuss another prominent question of political theory, namely the question of the boundaries of political collectivities and of the

166

Ibid., .



chapter one

relations between existing polities. We will see that in this reflection, too, the development of the language of the social transformed political thought to a considerable extent.

chapter two NATIONS AND THEIR ADVERSARIES AS A THEME OF SOCIAL THOUGHT In his Theory of the Partisan (),1 Carl Schmitt (–), the German constitutional lawyer, pursued an idea he had begun to mull over thirty years earlier in his Concept of the Political ().2 It concerned the question of enmity as a political phenomenon. In the new context of the post-war era,3 he further developed his ideas on the transformation of the nature of interstate relations in the course of the twentieth century. According to Schmitt, the historical period dominated by Jus Publicum Europaeum, extending from the end of the Middle Ages to around , was characterised by a form of equilibrium between states.4 Such equilibrium, however, should not be understood as merely resulting from an equality of European states in military power. More fundamentally, this period was marked by specific discourses on what states were and had to be. Concerning the question of interstate conflicts (and therefore of the enmity of nations), Schmitt noted that they typically took a “regular” form. During the Jus Publicum Europaeum era states conducted warfare using regular armies, and recognised one another as adversaries of equal (moral) worth (justus hostis). With the two world wars and the wars of liberation in colonised territories, this way of practising war ceased to be the dominant modality of military conflict. War now took place not only amongst states, but 1 Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen. Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ); tr., “Theory of the Partisan,” Telos  (). 2 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ); tr., The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). 3 A new context also from a personal point of view since Schmitt, a former member of the National-Socialist Party, was excluded from the German university system and became an intellectual pariah. On Schmitt’s relations with the Nazi regime, cf. Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt. A Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). 4 This theory is developed especially in Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ); tr., The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, ).



chapter two

also between states and more informal combatants, such as partisans or guerilla fighters. A further indicator of this evolution is the appearance of the notion of international police operations. A third one is the transformation of the figure of the enemy. In the Theory of the Partisan, Schmitt spoke of an “absolutisation” of the enemy. He argued that in contemporary wars, conflicts are often not primarily about things, but about principles: their goals are determined by a political ideology, or some kind of overarching world-view. An ideology, according to Schmitt, is a closed system of explanation of the world that promotes an absolute notion of the political opposition between friend and enemy. In such a context, the enemy is not an adversary fighting for goods equally coveted by both parties (such as a territory). It becomes instead absolute, an enemy of humankind, an existential menace, a species to eradicate.5 What is the plausibility of Schmitt’s interpretative scheme of the emergence of a new figure of the enemy? In this chapter, I take up Schmitt’s suggestion that it is also at the level of ideas that such transformations must be grasped. More precisely, I discuss aspects of the history of the conceptions concerning the singularity and adversity of nations in social and political thought. This chapter’s goal can obviously not be to propose a general treatment of the development of the concepts of nation and enmity in France. It outlines a history of the representations concerning the kind of enmity that may arise between nations. Specifically, it proposes, by way of a consideration of a few historical examples, a theoretical analysis of the conditions of possibility of the view that other nations are, or can easily become, enemies in an absolute sense. In the continuity of my conceptual reflection on the “political” and the “social”, I investigate how new notions of society fed into nineteenth-century reflections on nations and their adversaries. The focus on society as a self-contained entity, the belief in the stability of customs, the frequent reduction of morality to mores, could not fail to have an impact on the way in which nationality was conceptualised.

5 For a recent discussion of Schmitt’s thought after  (especially from the point of view of the usefulness of the Schmittian categories for an analysis of contemporary armed conflicts), see Martti Koskenniemi, “International law as political theology: How to read Nomos der Erde?” Constellations , no.  ().

nations and their adversaries



National Singularity and the Community of Nations: Montesquieu, Encyclopédie, Mme de Staël In Chapter , I have pitted the eighteenth-century “language of the political” against the nineteenth-century “language of the social”, with a view to present and spell out some major aspects of the concept of the “social”. In so doing I have been forced to privilege only one dimension of the reflection on society and politics before , thus giving a one-sided depiction of eighteenth-century thought. To complexify this depiction, one could follow a suggestion made by Keith Michael Baker. He distinguishes between three main political languages or discourses in prerevolutionary France: the discourse of justice, that of reason, and that of will.6 In the last of these three, which I have discussed at the beginning of the previous chapter, “social order is defined . . . in terms of will, liberty, contingency, choice, participation”.7 By contrast, the two other discourses emphasise concreteness, locality, and prudence, seeing as main sources of the social order either “prescription, tradition, community”8 or a rational and humane administration.9 An example of an influential discourse on politics and society during the Enlightenment which avoided to put an exclusive emphasis on “will” and “choice” is that of Montesquieu (–) and his followers. In his famous Spirit of the Laws (), whose publication caused a stir in Europe as a whole,10 Montesquieu proposed a theory of the singularity of nations. He conceived of them as a mixture of typical psychological traits (collective personality or “character”, i.e. internal, mental dispositions); national habits (i.e., forms of behaviour); and specific political institutions. He referred to the singularity of nations as “general spirit”.11 He also used, although less frequently, the expression “character of the nation”,12

6

Keith Michael Baker, “On the problem of the ideological origins of the French Revolution,” in Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, ). 7 Ibid., . 8 Ibid., . 9 Ibid., . 10 Cf. Silvia Sebastiani, I limiti del progresso. Razza e genere nell’Illuminismo scozzese (Bologna: Il Mulino, ), ch. –. 11 Montesquieu, De l’ Esprit des lois, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, ),  (XIX, ); tr., The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 12 Ibid.,  (XIX, ); tr., .



chapter two

which I discuss in more detail in the next chapter. In a more contemporary vocabulary which would have been foreign to Montesquieu, one could say that the singularity of each nation for him takes the form of shared psychological characteristics, common practices, and collective representations, on the basis of which corresponding legal and political arrangements are built. In order to be stable, laws and political institutions should match the habits of the population living under them: the government most in conformity with nature is the one whose particular arrangement best relates to the disposition of the people for whom it is established . . . the political and civil laws of each nation . . . should be so appropriate to the people for whom they are made that it is very unlikely that the laws of one nation can suit another.13

In his account for the existence of collective characters, Montesquieu made use of the climatic theory the Ancients had originally developed. According to this tradition of social analysis, which extends from Hippocrates and Aristotle to Jean Bodin and beyond,14 geographic conditions shape manners—for instance giving birth to either hot, passionate temperaments or cold, moderate ones, which are especially suited to liberty. Obviously, the existence of a correspondence between the natural environment and the forms of human life can be understood in very different ways. In the previous chapter, we have seen for instance the deterministic use that Hippolyte Taine made of the idea that climate influences social life. By contrast, Montesquieu made clear that climate was only one of the explanatory factors of life in common. He wrote that “[m]any things govern men: climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores, and manners.”15 In particular, Montesquieu emphasised the capacity of political action to influence customs, even though he also believed that any modification of custom should be undertaken with caution.16

13

Ibid.,  (I, ); tr., . On this topic, see Manfred Beller, “Johann Gottfried Herders Völkerbilder und die Tradition der Klimatheorie,” in Eingebildete Nationalcharaktere. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur literarischen Imagologie (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, ). 15 Montesquieu, Esprit des lois,  (XIX, ); tr., . 16 “[W]hen a prince wants to make great changes in his nation, he must reform by laws what is established by laws and change by manners what is established by manners, and it is a very bad policy to change by laws what should be changed by manners.” Ibid.,  (XIX, ); tr., . 14

nations and their adversaries



Concerning the question of the conflict between nations, Montesquieu seemed to adopt a utilitarian stance at the beginning of the Spirit of the Laws: The right of nations is by nature founded on the principle that the various nations should do to one another in times of peace the most good possible, and in times of war the least ill possible, without harming their true interests.17

However, as he made clear later in the book, he worked with the premise that there exists a human society of some kind, whose values transcends those established by local arrangements. He observed that “[o]ffensive force is regulated by the right of nations, which is the political law of the nations considered in their relation with each other.”18 When a people is conquered, the rights of the conqueror are limited by several laws, such as the law of nature and the “law of natural enlightenment (lumière naturelle), which wants us to do to others what we would want to have done to us”.19 These were all fairly classical statements: the idea of jus gentium had Ancient, especially Stoic, origins,20 the notion of lumen naturale was medieval,21 and both were widely endorsed in modernity, together with their consequence that the idea of an international morality did make sense. For instance, the author of the Encyclopédie entry on “Société”, clearly influenced by the teachings of one the most influential writers on legal and political matters at the time, Samuel Pufendorf, argued that some of the most important moral norms derived from the supreme value of sociability.22 All humans have a need for one another: this is why they have set up organisations of mutual help, from the 17 Ibid., – (I, III); tr., . This passage, in a diferent translation, is cited in Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizers of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . From there I also borrow the qualification “utilitarian”. 18 Ibid.,  (X, ); tr., . 19 Ibid.,  (X, ); tr., . 20 Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic cosmopolitanism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy , no.  (). 21 Lumen naturale, in medieval theology, referred to a form of knowledge “implanted in the human mind, as the innate ideas were, and was thus a stock of thoughts known by all men ‘by nature’.” George Boas, “Nature”, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. , edited by Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner, ), . See also Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. 22 Anon., “Société,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol.  (Si-Subu), edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’ Alembert (Lausanne-Berne: Sociétés typographiques, ), . What is distinctly Pufendorfian here is the suggestion that sociability is not an innate natural instinct. Living in



chapter two

family to the state, and all the way up to “human society”.23 From the requirements of sociability, one could infer that “the sentiment of hatred and animosity is vicious in itself, and contrary to the public good, and condemned by natural law.”24 Even violence or aggression entitles to selfdefence, but not to gratuitous vengeance or absolute hatred: even though one has the right, towards enemies, to refrain from acts of benevolence, it is never allowed to completely erase its principle: in the same way that necessity only authorises us to use force against an aggressor, the same necessity must be the rule and the measure of the tort we are entitled to do to him, and we must always be ready to make friendship with him, as soon as he has done justice and that we have nothing more to fear from him.25

More original, although in no way entirely isolated,26 was Montesquieu’s judgement on colonial expansion. He recommended that in such circumstances we should, as a matter of principle, recognise as humans the inhabitants of all territories (a principle, obviously, which had not always been adopted by the colonisers of the past) and make use of lumière naturelle in considering the interests of the parties involved. This attitude may even inspire a concern for the improvement of the nations conquered. Montesquieu deplored the cruelties inflicted and the opportunities lost during the conquest of Mexico: A conquest can destroy harmful prejudices, and, if I dare speak in this way, can put a nation under a better presiding genius. What good could the Spanish not have done to the Mexicans? They had a gentle religion to give them; they brought them a raging superstition. They could have set the slaves free, and they made freemen slaves. They could have made clear to them that human sacrifice was an abuse; instead they exterminated them. I would never finish if I wanted to tell all the good things they did not do, and all the evil ones they did.27 society is something that human beings must do to compensate for the intrinsic weakness of their physical and mental constitution: sociability, in other words, has ultimately an instrumental value. See Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (Book I, ch. ). On Pufendorf ’s influence on the contributors to the Encyclopédie, especially Diderot, see Daniel Roche, “Encyclopedias and the diffusion of knowledge,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. 23 “Société,” in Encyclopédie, . 24 Ibid., . 25 Ibid. Emphasis mine, JT. 26 See on this point Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). 27 Montesquieu, De l’ Esprit des Lois,  (X, ); tr., .

nations and their adversaries



Although his position now sounds somewhat patronising, Montesquieu’s assumption of a community of all nations, seen from the perspective of Jus Publicum Europaeum, is interesting. In this era, according to Schmitt, regulated wars existed in practice only between constituted states. In wars of colonial expansion, by contrast, no existing jurisprudence or principle or habit was taken to exist which should limit military action. Consequently, colonial wars could easily turn into total wars and even wars of extermination.28 It is to prevent such dangers that Montesquieu was arguing that politics at the global level should take into account universal principles of morality. The theme of the singularity of nations figures very prominently in the work of Germaine de Staël (–). A basic premise upon which her publications, such as The Influence of Literature Upon Society () or On Germany (–),29 were based, is that in works of art or literary and philosophical texts, there is a relation between their content and the context in which they have been produced. Moreover, de Staël argued that the relevant context to consider in such inquiries was, specifically, the national context. De Staël was among the first, thus, to propose a history of literature and philosophy on the basis of an analysis of the character of nations. Her point was that cultural productions are direct expressions of character: “national character influences literature; literature and philosophy, religion, and through the whole one may come to a knowledge of the parts.”30 In viewing the intellectual and artistic life of Germany or France, one could hardly fail to see, she suggested, that there were broad characteristics shared by most philosophical and literary works. This observation enabled de Staël to speak of “English philosophy”, as opposed to “French” or “German” philosophy.31 In these expressions, the emphasis is clearly put on the respective proper names. In other words, de Staël was not interested in philosophy in France, England or Germany, but in what was French, English and German in these various philosophies. De Staël believed that the influence of a variety of factors explained the existence of “national philosophies”. Like Montesquieu, she drew 28 On this point, see the remarks in Sankar Muthu, “Enlightenment anti-imperialism,” Social Research , no.  (Winter ), esp. –. Reprinted as the Conclusion in Muthu, Enlightenment. 29 Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ). Germaine de Staël, De l’ Allemagne,  vol. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ). 30 De l’ Allemagne, vol. , . 31 Ibid., vol. , ch. II, III, V.



chapter two

attention to the impact of climatic conditions. For instance, warm countries typically have practical, concrete, non-speculative philosophies. This is because they are distracted from metaphysical speculation by the intensity of social life and the beauty of lush nature. The rigour of cold climates, on the contrary, force individuals to spend more time alone or in their families. Here meditation and introspection replace social life, which in turn gives birth to abstract, speculative and systematic forms of philosophical reflection.32 A disciple of Montesquieu, de Staël did not fail to underline that climate was not the only factor shaping social life. According to her, governments and religion also had to be taken into account when trying to explain the content and style of literary and philosophical works. She affirmed that “[p]olitical institutions alone can form the character of a nation.”33 An interesting dimension of her reflection in this respect is her theory of intellectual influence across nations. For instance, Greece and Rome, she argued, despite significant similarities in the prevailing climatic conditions, developed quite different types of philosophy. While Greek philosophers are famous for highly intellectual speculation and abstract reasoning, Roman thinkers, on the contrary, tended to elaborate more practical philosophies that were of direct use in daily conduct. According to de Staël, this phenomenon, which the theory of climate did not explain, could be understood only if one properly measured the remarkable influence of Eastern metaphysics upon Greek thought.34 Another example of international influence presented by de Staël was that of English philosophy in France. In the time of Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche, France was concerned, intellectually speaking, with metaphysical problems. During the eighteenth century, on the contrary, empiricism, utilitarianism, and materialism made clear progress, as the work of authors such as d’ Holbach, Helvetius, and Diderot demonstrated. According to de Staël, this was due to the influence of English thinkers upon French philosophy.35 This last example in particular shows that “national philosophies”, for this author, are not immutable entities. They can change over time, influenced by the circulation of ideas on an international scale.

32 33 34 35

Ibid., ; De la littérature, . De l’ Allemagne, vol. , . Ibid., vol. , –. Ibid., vol. , –.

nations and their adversaries



Mme de Staël, despite her insistence on the diversity of nations, still believed that “all true principles are absolute.”36 On the basis of such principles one could evaluate the legitimacy of governments: “individuals are virtuous when they sacrifice their personal interest to the general interest; yet governments are in their turn individuals who must turn away from personal advantage in favour of the law of duty”.37 She thus posited the existence of a kind of international morality. The social and political thought of Montesquieu and Mme de Staël was strongly invested in the question of the singularity of nations. However, among the characteristic assumptions accompanying their reflection, one cannot fail to observe that their emphasis on the peculiarity of nations was often counterbalanced by several further considerations. To begin with, there was an explicit theorising of the transformability of national characters. Moreover, even in the case of a conflict, nations were seen as bound by a “common measure” such as natural law or human nature—a point Montesquieu emphasised. According to this view nations, however diverse, should be considered in terms of their belonging in an international community. Lastly (and this is really a consequence of the two previous elements), the mutual influence of nations was not excluded. All this, I argue, makes it difficult for strong notions of hereditary or absolute enmity to emerge and take hold. Enmity, far from being a visceral, unavoidable, and permanent emotion, is the result of specific circumstances that are bound to disappear. According to Peter Mandler, the attitude adopted by Montesquieu, de Staël, or the authors of the Encyclopédie was typical for the Enlightenment as a whole, which was constitutively inhabited by a tendency to cosmopolitanism: For most Enlightenment thinkers—optimistic, progressive and humane— the aim was to identify those desirable traits embedded by nature in all humankind and to consider what forces were conducive to their establishment and development. Cosmopolitan and committed to change, they did not emphasize fixity or rootedness. Even where climate, geography, language and folk traditions had demonstrably made for local differences, they counseled the wise legislator to select out only those particularities that were compatible with civilization . . . and to transcend all others.38

36

Ibid., vol. , . Ibid. 38 Peter Mandler, The English National Character from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), . 37



chapter two

In spite of Mandler’s confident affirmations, there is a certain amount of debate concerning the extent to which the eighteenth century as a whole can reasonably be described as “cosmopolitan”. In a relatively recent assessment, Colin Kidd observes that the consensus among scholars is that such a characterisation does, at least to an extent, make sense. However, one should not lose from sight that less openly cosmopolitan or universalistic positions constituted an important “dialect” of the eighteenth-century language of politics.39 Rousseau is a case in point. Without entirely breaking with cosmopolitanism, he gave more importance than Montesquieu and de Staël to the theme of the adversity of nations. Politics and National Characters: Rousseau and de Maistre The social and political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was influenced by that of Montesquieu. Like him he had a special interest in the singularity of nations. Like him, too, he adopted the view that the respect of a people for its laws could be strengthened if political institutions rested both on well-understood interest and on deeper mental dispositions, such as habits or religious sentiment. In his discussion of the various kinds of laws at the end of Book II of the Social Contract, he declared “the most important of all” to be the one “which is graven not in marble or bronze, but in the hearts of the citizens.”40 Rousseau specified that he was speaking of “mores, customs, and, above all, of opinion.”41 These elements made up a distinctive system unique to the nation, which, borrowing from Montesquieu’s vocabulary, he called “national physiognomy”,42 “general spirit of the nation”,43 or “national 39

Cf. Colin Kidd, “Constitutions and character in the eighteenth-century British world,” in From Republican Polity to National Community. Reconsiderations of Enlightenment Political Thought, edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation [Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century :], ). 40 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social; ou principes du droit politique, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, ), ; tr., On the Social Contract, in Political Writings, edited by Frederick Watkins (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), . 41 Ibid. (tr. modified). 42 Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , ; tr., Considerations on the Government of Poland and its Proposed Reformation, in Political Writings, . 43 Projet de constitution pour la Corse, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , ; tr., Constitutional Project for Corsica, in Political Writings, .

nations and their adversaries



character”.44 Rousseau considered the existence of a harmony and unity of mores to be so essential that national character, he claimed, should be invented from scratch if absent: “each people has, or ought to have, a national character; if it did not, we should have to start by giving it one.”45 Such a creation is possible because habits and customs, in Rousseau’s understanding, are not immutable. In particular, he believed that they could be transformed by the action of government. In his reflection on the Government of Poland, Rousseau affirmed that it is “national institutions which shape the genius, the character, the tastes and the manners of a people, which give it an individuality of its own”.46 According to Pauline Kra, Rousseau’s contribution to eighteenth-century thought on the subject was the notion that national character was not only a historical result, but also a reality that can and should be created. Not only an appropriate form of government can be devised for a particular society, but also a specific national character may be developed for a particular form of government.47

Despite the inspiration he found in Montesquieu, Rousseau gave significantly more importance than him to the fact that the singularity of nations emerges in the experience of difference or rivalry with others. In the case of Poland, the people needed to acquire a sense of its worth and of the value of its institutions. Therefore, the reform of the country had to start by “giving the Poles a great opinion of themselves and their fatherland”, with a view to bring “patriotism and its attendant virtues to the 44

Ibid., –; tr., . Ibid., ; tr., . 46 Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, ; tr., . 47 Pauline Kra, “The concept of national character in th century France,” Cromohs  (), –. Available online: http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/_/kra.html (accessed August , ). This is seconded by Michel Launay’s analysis in Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain politique (–) (Genève-Paris: Slatkine, ), –. He argues that Rousseau, progressively ridding himself from Montesquieu’s influence, became more and more convinced of the capacity of governments to change society, and even to transform human nature itself. Rousseau wrote: “Men in general are not this or that, they are that which they are made to be.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La nouvelle Héloïse, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond [Paris: Gallimard, ], ; cited in Launay, ). The Social Contract, as a work written over many years, probably entails more than one position on this matter (the notion that human nature can be transformed is expressed in a famous passage in Book I, chap. VIII: “The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a remarkable change”, etc. Contract social, ; tr., ). On the ambiguity, in Rousseau, as to whether “mores prefigure or are prefigured by ideal legislation”, see Jeffrey A. Smith, “Nature, nation-building, and the seasons of justice in Rousseau’s political thought,” The Review of Politics , no.  (Winter ). The quotation above is on p. . 45



chapter two

highest possible degree of intensity.”48 According to Rousseau, the civic education of the people, and especially the transmission of a collective memory emphasising the glorious historical moments of the nation, had to be given a central role. For instance, he recommended that the era of the “Confederation of Bar” (an insurrection of a section of the Polish aristocracy against Russia, in ), be engraved “in sacred letters on every Polish heart”.49 Monuments and regular celebrations should bring the greatness of the nation constantly to the consciousness of citizens. However, even while affirming that national characters were forged in the experiences of enmity and adversity, Rousseau also underlined that it would not be useful to cultivate national hatred: I should not wish . . . that any invectives against the Russians, or even any mention of them, be permitted at such solemnities; it would be doing them too much honour. This silence, the memory of their barbarity, and the eulogy of those who resisted them, will say all that needs to be said about them: you must despise them too much to hate them.50

I take this quote to mean that the enemy of the nation, according to Rousseau, may remain abstract. It may remain, in other words, a general threat to the existence of the nation, without a specific shape. Nations must define themselves not so much against the barbarian, the hereditary enemy; they should define themselves against barbarism itself. Another revealing element for us is Rousseau’s scepticism with regard to cosmopolitan ideals.51 In his summary of the thought of Abbé de Saint Pierre, the author of a Plan for Perpetual Peace (), Rousseau seconded this author’s conviction that the price to pay for internal pacification, through the passage from the state of nature to the civil state, was the risk of more terrible wars between nations.52 The Abbé, in Rousseau’s rendering, deplored the lack of unity in Europe: he believed (as Rousseau also did) that the continent at the time was not, in any strong sense, a community of nations, a “society of Peoples”.53 Of course, there were things that Europeans shared, but their permanent conflicts showed that 48

Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, ; tr., . Ibid.; tr., . 50 Ibid. 51 On Rousseau and international relations, see Stanley Hoffmann, “Rousseau on war and peace,” The American Political Science Review , no.  (); Patrick Riley, “Rousseau as a theorist of national and international federalism,” Publius , no.  (). 52 Rousseau, “Extrait du projet de perpétuelle de Monsieur l’ abbé de Saint Pierre,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. , . 53 Ibid., –. 49

nations and their adversaries



between them “the social bond (liaison sociale)” was still of an “imperfect” kind.54 Thus, the establishment of peace on the basis of a “brotherhood of European peoples”55 was heavily compromised. The main difference between Rousseau and Abbé de Saint-Pierre was that the latter still hoped that a “political Body”56 may emerge on the continent if the proper political steps were taken. If not on ties of affection or feelings of brotherhood, at least this entity could rest on a convergence of interest. By contrast, Rousseau did not think that even that minimal international political form was likely to appear. In Hobbesian fashion, he did not envisage that binding rules could be implemented at the international level, which is always necessarily a state of nature, and thus a war of all against all. Rousseau’s only hope seems to have been that peace may be preserved thanks to the growing isolation and autarky that properly constituted nations (i.e., nations organised after the principles of the Social Contract) willingly choose for themselves, as a way of maintaining their sovereignty. According to Stanley Hoffmann, Rousseau envisaged that at most loose confederations are possible; by contrast, social contracts at the interstate level, not to mention at the global level, are not only impossible but also undesirable, since all large states have the tendency to put at the risk the freedom of their citizens.57 What is interesting in Rousseau’s reflection is that it entails no postulate concerning the existence of moral principles valid across nations, mentioned for instance by Montesquieu or de Staël. The main source of moral value, for Rousseau, is the sovereign state, and consequently the very notion of an international morality recedes in the background. As we shall see, many thinkers during the nineteenth century developed the notion that morality is always confined to single nations. A statement of this idea can already be found in the work of one the arch-opponents of Rousseau, Joseph de Maistre. In the previous chapter, I already introduced his strong, deterministic theory of national characters. It is noteworthy that he developed, on these premises, a belief in the impossibility of peaceful exchanges between nations. In contrast to the cosmopolitanism which had characterised, at least in part, the eighteenth century, de Maistre affirmed that national characters are naturally incompatible. Nations have “visible 54 55 56 57

Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Hoffmann, “Rousseau on war and peace,” –.



chapter two

boundaries”58 (bornes visibles) delineating a closed space, within which national life is entirely confined. De Maistre was, of course, aware of the connections between nations, even if often in the form of conquest. However, he explained that what appears in such cases is a “hybrid nation”59 and offered a revealing interpretation of such a phenomenon. When nations “hybridise”, one of two things may happen. Either no national principle has the upper hand and a bastard nation emerges, characterised by a “certain moral and political mediocrity.”60 This is because “several national principles thrown in the same pot harm one another”.61 Or one national principle wins over and the foreign elements are assimilated into the very substance of the dominant nation. This brings about a new nation of “pure race”62 (race franche), a free nation again capable of greatness. De Maistre’s notion of an essential incompatibility of national souls explains why he identified war as one of the most permanent features of human history: “If you go back to the birth of nations, if you come down to our own day, if you examine peoples in all possible conditions from the state of barbarism to the most advanced civilization, you always find war.”63 Increasingly Distinct Nations in a Social Age: Michelet An important landmark in the history of the reflection on the nation in France was Le peuple by Jules Michelet (–), published in . Michelet’s aim was to draw the portrait of France, to understand and describe its unity, and to show the collective actions of the nation in history. The view of nations as spiritual principles capable of agency was a constant of Michelet’s thought. In , he had published a short text entitled Introduction to Universal History, in which he proposed a philosophy of history based on the notion of a progress of free-

58

Joseph de Maistre, Etude sur la souveraineté (Oxford: Pergamon Press/The French Revolution Research Collection—Les Archives de la Révolution Française,  [microform]), . 59 Ibid., . 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 De Maistre, Considérations sur la France in Ecrits sur la Révolution (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., Considerations on France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

nations and their adversaries



dom.64 From the beginning of humanity to Michelet’s days, the most prominent nations in each age had achieved a better control of nature and a less fatalistic perception of the world than its predecessor: the “spirit” (esprit) dispelled the religion of India and Egypt to make room for the metaphysics of Greece and then for Roman public law. In this process, the most prominent nation typically assimilated those which were located farther from the spirit. This, for instance, had been the case in Rome, which unified Europe, annihilated Carthage, and conquered the Near East.65 Rome’s economy, however, rested on slavery,66 and only Christianity established the principle of liberty for all, i.e. equality.67 The main question for Michelet, however, was to determine which one of the European nations had best embodied liberty in modern history, and which one would represent its cause in the future: “How, in Europe, was the work of liberating humankind accomplished? In what proportion each of these political persons we call states—France and Italy, England and Germany—have contributed to it?”68 Michelet argued that France was best qualified to carry the torch of liberty and equality. Unlike its neighbours, it had managed to merge its different races into a perfect unity, and its capacity for political action was strengthened by the centralised nature of its institutions and the combative character of its inhabitants.69 France was able to import foreign ideas when they were of value, but its main tendency was to “impose its personality upon the vanquished, not because it is its own, but as the model (type) of the good and the beautiful.”70 Especially since , France was in the best position to represent the principles of unity and of liberty for all, beyond privileges and hierarchies. This marriage of liberty with equality is what Michelet called the “génie social” or the “instinct social” of France.71 Michelet predicted the beginning of a “social” age, an age of order, synthesis and unity, culminating in the emergence of a “human society”.72 France was destined to be

64

Jules Michelet, Introduction à l’ histoire universelle, in Œuvres complètes, vol.  (Paris: Flammarion, ). 65 Ibid., . 66 Ibid., . 67 Ibid., . 68 Ibid., –. 69 Ibid. –. 70 Ibid., . 71 Ibid., , . 72 Ibid., .



chapter two

the vanguard of this process. Just as God had given the Verb to the universe, it was France’s prerogative to “explain the Verb of the social world” to other nations.73 In his reflection on universal history, thus, Michelet described the past as a permanent struggle among nations, understood as collective persons. In other words, Michelet promoted a kind of history-writing in which the main agents were nations, as opposed to individuals. This was even more true in a country, like modern France, which had realised social and political unity. In contrast to Rousseau’s “politics is all”, Michelet claimed that in the French revolutionary process “[s]ociety did everything”.74 Not isolated individualities, but the great masses of the people, had been the motor of a revolution “without heroes, without proper names”.75 This insistence on unity as the outcome of historical, impersonal, anonymous processes is also striking in Le peuple, where Michelet, without at all relinquishing the mysticism of the social, forfeited the eschatology of a fusion of nations. In this “social romantic manifesto”76 the people, including its most modest members such as peasants and poor manual workers, embodied the spirit of the nation. In the people, there was a “wealth of sentiment and a goodness of heart very rare in the rich classes.”77 Since the warmth and power of life was located on the bottom rungs of society,78 France stood a chance of bolstering its strength, of becoming invincible, on the condition that the nation was built on a union between the lower and the higher classes cemented by the principles of love, friendship, and brotherhood. According to Michelet, this process of unification amounted to the creation of a collective person with a distinctive soul.79 Geographic conditions had already shaped this national personality: “national characters are not the product of our whim, but are so deeply grounded in the influence of climate and food, and in the natural productions of a country that they may change somewhat, but never completely disappear.”80 The people, far from being the result of a political construction, 73

Ibid., . Ibid., . 75 Ibid., . 76 Arthur Mitzman, “Michelet and social romanticism: Religion, revolution, nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (), . 77 Michelet, Le peuple (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ), . 78 Ibid., –. 79 Ibid., . 80 Ibid. 74

nations and their adversaries



was the result of a long historical experience, descending “by a legitimate generation from the depths of the ages.”81 Yet the nation’s personality, this “natural genius”, should be further “deepened”82 by creating a great social concord in which class divisions, ethnic identities, and local peculiarities would be canceled. Harmony should reign also at the international level, but now Michelet described this harmony not as a fusion, but as the development, in each nation, of a particular soul. Harmony would be the outcome of diversity, since the “more a nation possesses its own genius . . . the less it needs to oppose it by war to the one of other peoples.”83 Michelet hoped for international peace, but in Le peuple he suggested that this ultimate stage in the development of nationalities had not been yet reached. This is the reason why he described France as surrounded by enemies: “Climb a mountain high enough, look around in all four directions: you will see only enemies.”84 As national souls became more and more distinct, communication between them was rendered increasingly difficult. Michelet noted for instance that the English, the German and the French all used the term “liberty”, but understood its meaning in markedly different ways: this word has “as many meanings as there are nations”.85 He warned thus against imitating other countries, especially England, which he called the “Anti-France.”86 He affirmed that “the progress of history is that these two peoples should not lose their qualities in an indistinct mixture.”87 Michelet eventually noted that he had abandoned “the humanitarian dream of philosophy which hopes to save the individual by canceling the citizen, denying nations, and repelling the patrie”.88 Instead of philosophy, Michelet proposed a patriotic religion, which should revive and perhaps eventually replace an insufficiently national Christianity: France should become a religion, and its unity, a communion.89 Michelet, thus, like Rousseau, emphasised struggle and enmity as an integral part of the relations between nations. He even grew more 81

Ibid., . Ibid., . 83 Ibid., . 84 Ibid., . 85 Ibid., . 86 Ibid., . 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., . 89 Ibid., –. On this theme generally (Michelet is not discussed), see Michael C. Behrent, “The mystical body of society: Religion and association in nineteenth-century French political thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (). 82



chapter two

and more sceptical concerning the possibility of establishing a political community of nations. This scepticism was shared by many later authors, some of whom also developed a thicker and more systematic social theory of the adversity of nations. “A Spiritual Principle”: The Nation According to Renan Another prominent author in the history of the concept of nation in France is, of course, Ernest Renan. However, I will discuss his famous reflection on “What is a nation?” only in a second moment, and start by presenting some of his earlier texts. Between Renan and Michelet the new human sciences, those inspired by the positivist notion that the model to follow was the one offered by natural science, had made further inroads into France’s intellectual landscape.90 In Michelet the term “organism” appears on occasion, but overall the influence of biological reasoning remains limited; similarly, even though he did de-emphasise individual action, he had no use for strictly causal models of historical analysis of the kind proposed for instance by Hippolyte Taine. In Renan, we can observe how the influence of biology, or of natural science more generally, produced a strange mixture of naturalism and idealism. In an influential text which was published in , “The constitutional monarchy in France”, he presented his concept of society as a “large body”, an “immense organism accomplishing divine tasks”, a “single intellectual and moral whole”91 composed of naturally unequal individuals. Society is established, “not by man, but by nature itself.”92 It acquires its identity by way of an opposition with other societies. In a text he published in , during the Franco-Prussian war, he wrote that “[a] nation usually becomes conscious of itself only under the pressure of a foreign one. . . . The self, to use the language of philosophy, always creates itself in opposition to other selves.”93 For instance, it is the growing strength of France which caused Germany to wake up from its national slumber, in the same way that the rivalry between England and France had contributed to con90 On this point, see John I. Brooks, The Eclectic Legacy. Academic Philosophy and the Human Sciences in Nineteenth-Century France (Newark–London: University of Delaware Press–Associated University Press, ). 91 Ernest Renan, “La monarchie constitutionnelle en France,” in La réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy, ), . 92 Ibid. 93 “La guerre entre la France et l’ Allemagne”, in La réforme intellectuelle, .

nations and their adversaries



stitute these two nations.94 France and Germany were therefore paradoxically tied by their adversity: their identity was determined by their mutual opposition, by their way of being the enemy of each other. Renan affirmed that he knew, of course, that France had Germanic origins, but he believed that the nation had applied itself since the Middle Ages to an effort of “de-germanisation”: The France of the Middle Ages is a Germanic construction, built by a Germanic military aristocracy with Gallo-Roman materials.95 The centurylong labour of France has consisted in ridding itself from all elements which had been brought by the Germanic invasion, until to the Revolution which has been the last of these efforts.96

Renan was particularly saddened by the developments of the relations between Germany and France because he had initially hoped that the two nations would mutually enrich each other. As he explicitly emphasised, however, the war itself deeply modified his opinion on this point.97 Renan’s views on international relations did not consist only in affirming that there is no identity without difference, insofar as being able to distinguish a thing also means being able to grasp it as distinct from its environment. That would have merely been a logical point. Rather, 94 Consider the following quote, in ibid.: “France existed at the time of Joan of Arc and Charles VII; however, it is under the weight of the English domination that the word ‘France’ takes on its peculiar meaning (accent). . . . France in the same way made Germany a nation.” 95 The allusion is to the Germanic tribe of the Franks, who conquered a territory inhabited by romanised Celts in the early Middle Ages. The notion that France was a composite of victorious Franks and defeated Gauls is a topos of French historiography, which has been analysed, among others, by Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, – (London: Penguin, ). Sieyes, for instance, introduced in What is the Third Estate? the anti-aristocratic argument that the French nobles had no legitimacy because, as descendants of the Franks, they had acquired their power by force, not by law. Renan suggested that the Franks and the Gauls progressively merged into an indissoluble cultural unit in which, in de Maistre’s terminology, the dominant “national principle” had been the indigenous and not the foreign one. Such an argument enabled him to defend both France’s national identity and the existing social hierarchy (while Sieyes had suggested instead that one would have to pick one of the two). For a contemporary view on the difficulty of applying the category of “tribe” to the motley assemblage of political groupings which operated at the time of the so-called “Barbarian Invasions”, see Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). 96 Renan, “La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France,” in La réforme intellectuelle, . 97 Cf. “Préface” to La réforme intellectuelle. On this point, see Claude Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée francaise (–) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), –.



chapter two

he wanted to stress the fact that a nation usually constitutes itself in the military and spiritual struggle with other nations. More generally, he believed that the conflict between individuals and peoples was one of the conditions of historical progress. Since “man sustains himself only by way of effort and struggle”, he wrote, “the fear of conquest” is a “necessary sting”.98 If the planet as a whole became “a large, peaceful Roman empire without any external enemy,” he feared, “morality and intelligence would be most at risk.”99 And yet Renan was obviously well aware that such a decided insistence on the principle of nationality could produce dangerous outcomes, especially an increase of the likeliness of war: The principle of independent nationalities is not such as to rid humankind from the plague (fléau) of war. On the contrary, I have always feared that the principle of nationality, which is taking the place of the tranquil paternal symbol of legitimacy,100 may cause the struggle between peoples to turn into an extermination between races, and the temperate and civil character of the small political and dynastic wars of the past to disappear from international law.101

In order to prevent such developments from happening, Renan pleaded in his text on “The War between Germany and France” for the creation of a “European federation above all nationalities”.102 And yet, by Renan’s own logic, this supranational entity would itself have to establish its identity by distancing itself from other comparable civilisations. In effect, in his reflections on the best way to restore the moral and political standing of France after its defeat against Germany, entitled “The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France” (), Renan argued that the colonial expansion should be further pursued: the submission of China (a people of manual workers) and of Africa (a continent of peasants), would enable Europeans to acquire an aristocratic identity of “masters and soldiers”103—i.e., a shared feeling of superiority vis-à-vis the rest of the world, upon a which a strong moral unity of the continent, beyond class hatred and national adversity, could be built. 98

“La réforme intellectuelle,” . Ibid. 100 “Légitimité”—this word clearly indicates that the reference is here to the traditional monarchical regime. 101 “La guerre,” . There is a striking similarity between the transformation Renan is describing here and the one Carl Schmitt saw happening in the twentieth century. 102 Ibid. 103 “La réforme intellectuelle,” . 99

nations and their adversaries



Renan believed that civilisations, like nations, are founded on “deep similarities of spirit”,104 accompanied by a closure vis-à-vis other cultural entities. He viewed the Indo-Europeans, on the one hand, and the Semites, on the other, as the two “great races”105 which had dominated history. He described how, according to him, these two peoples are “like two beings of different species, without a thought or feeling in common (n’ ayant rien de commun dans la manière de penser et de sentir)”.106 He knew that these two civilising forces were in contact, and observed for instance that the Semitic genius in matters of religion had caused the Indo-European soul to become more sensitive than it had been to the manifestations of the sacred. However, Renan underlined that the Europeans, “in adopting the Semitic religion”, had “deeply transformed” it, to the point that Christianity should be regarded as a purely European product (“Le christianisme . . . est en réalité notre œuvre”).107 In other words, such religious transfers must be seen as examples of appropriation and assimilation, as opposed to exchange or influence.108 After the crisis of –, Renan’s thought evolved and became more liberal,109 to the point that he eventually decided to abandon his preference for the constitutional monarchy and support the republican regime.110 For instance, in a conference delivered in , he took again position on the relation between the Semitic and Indo-European civilisations, but this time he expressed his regrets that Judaism and Christianity had undergone a process of separation leading to prejudice and misunderstanding.111 Around the same years, in , he delivered his famous lecture entitled “What is a Nation?”, which is usually taken to be 104 De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’ histoire de la civilisation (Paris: Michel Lévy, ), . 105 Ibid., . 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid., . 108 In stark contrast to Renan, Rémi Brague has recently proposed a description of Europe as the syncretic continent par excellence. According to this author, the faculty of transforming itself by adopting that which is most remarkable in neighbouring civilisations (Hebraic, Greek, Roman, Arabic) is a recurrent characteristic of European history. Rémi Brague, Europe, la voie romaine (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, ). 109 This change has been commented upon by many authors, including Digeon, La crise allemande, ; Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire. – (Paris: GallimardFolio, ), XXV–XXVI; Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres. La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Seuil-Points, ), –. 110 Digeon, La crise allemande, –. 111 Renan, “Identité originelle et séparation graduelle du judaïsme et christianisme,” in Discours et conférences (Paris: Calmann Lévy, ).



chapter two

one of the manifestos of the civic-liberal conception of the nation (which determines who are the nation’s citizens on the basis of their willingness to belong), as opposed to the ethnic-conservative one (which uses objective criteria such as culture or descent).112 In this text, Renan in particular modified his earlier views on the incompatibility of the souls of nations. In “La monarchie constitutionnelle”, he had defined patrie as an “ensemble of prejudices and fixed ideas that [the rest of] humankind could not accept.”113 He wrote now, instead, that “above French culture, German culture, Italian culture, there is the culture of humankind”,114 and even affirmed that “reason, justice, truth and beauty . . . are the same for all”.115 While such shifts of emphasis in Renan’s thinking are undeniable, one should avoid overestimating the amount of change. Especially his reflection on the concept of nation is more ambiguous than often suggested.116 Renan distinguished between several visions of the national and dismissed most of them: objective criteria such as race, language, religion, would not do: “races” are in most cases mixed;117 languages and religions can coexist in the same nation, as demonstrated by the case of Switzerland.118 Even a more subjective principle such as interest could not be used, since the nation was more than an association for common defense or for the exploitation of resources: “[t]here is in nationality a dimension of feeling; it is body and soul at the same time.”119 The same critique (that of underestimating the strength of the national bond) would apply to the pure, arbitrary will to belong, which is often interpreted as being 112

The literature on the topic of the many possible understandings of “nation” is immense. Compelling recent contributions to the subject include Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); Dominique Schnapper, Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, ); Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History. Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover: Brandeis University Press—University Press of New England, ). 113 Renan, “La monarchie constitutionnelle,” . 114 “Qu’ est-ce qu’ une nation?,” in Discours et conférences, . 115 Ibid., . 116 This sceptical reading has been proposed for instance by Bernard Yack, “The myth of the civic nation,” Critical Review , no.  () and by Gérard Noiriel, who goes as far as saying that “Renan also defended an organicist model of the nation. The only difference is that inheritance is here not defined in biological, but in historical terms.” Cf. Les origines républicaines de Vichy (Paris: Hachette, ), . 117 Renan, “Qu’ est-ce qu’ une nation?,” – and passim. 118 Ibid., , . 119 Ibid., .

nations and their adversaries



what Renan meant with his ever-cited “plebiscite of everyday”.120 Instead, Renan suggested that what is important in the national phenomenon is a sentiment, a feeling of belonging to a larger whole, a kind of solidarity: echoing Michelet’s vocabulary, social and mystical at the same time, he described the nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle”.121 This indeed constitutes a form of adhesion or consent, but one not based on rational considerations (of a normative or of a self-interested kind). Rather, it stems from a shared image of what the nation went through in its history, from the existence of a collective (and highly selective) memory; and from a desire to perpetuate this community in the future: “[t]o have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together and be willing to do more in the future, these are the essential conditions to being a people.”122 As this last quote indicates, Renan believed that both a common will and a common culture (in the form of collective recollections) were necessary to produce and maintain a nation. His definition, thus, contained elements of both the “objectivist” and the “voluntaristic” perspectives on the national phenomenon.123 In my own terminology Renan, and this in a manner similar to Adhémar Esmein, mixed the language of the social with the classical language of politics. Especially telling in this respect is his understanding of a “people”: on the one hand, Renan’s “people” is a concrete, historical entity, and thus very different from that abstract collectivity brought into being by a pure act of representation described in Hobbes’s Leviathan; but on the other hand, the people is a political union, it has a common will and as such, it is capable of projecting itself into the future. A Racial Theory of National Characters: Gustave Le Bon I now turn to a further example of the development of the reflection on the singularity and adversity of nations in the nineteenth century, that of Gustave Le Bon (–). He was a medical doctor who turned to the social sciences, strongly influenced by Social-Darwinism and racial 120

Ibid., . Ibid., . 122 Ibid., . 123 On this point, see Jean-Marc Ferry, “Face à la question européenne, quelle intégration postnationale?” Critique internationale  (April ), –; Todorov, Nous et les autres, –. 121



chapter two

thought.124 He spent his entire professional life outside of the French university system, and thus his academic career, institutionally speaking, was a blatant failure. Nevertheless, his contribution to social thought is particularly remarkable from the point of view of its impressive range and wide reception—including in the general public.125 He is remembered today especially for a volume on crowd psychology, published in ,126 that quickly became an international best-seller and was widely discussed in the subsequent decades, including by authors such as Max Weber or Sigmund Freud.127 Le Bon’s work, who sometimes presented himself as a follower of Taine, can be read as an attempt to develop a racial theory of the collective character of nations. In his book entitled The Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples (Lois psychologiques de l’ évolution des peuples, ), Le Bon defined national character as an “aggregate of psychological elements observable in all individuals of a race.”128 This definition suggests that the social is strongly homogeneous: however, Le Bon of course did not believe that all individuals are absolutely identical in a given social setting. His point was that there is in each society a “very small number of fundamental ideas”,129 eminently stable and specific, which are shared by all individuals. According to Le Bon, each nation constitutes a race, but a race which is “historical”, as opposed to “natural”: the difference is that the former is the result of a merging of diverse populations into a single homogeneous entity, or of a progressive separation of a given population from the ethnic group it originally belonged to.130 However, in spite of his claim to take into account the historical nature of the social, Le Bon emphasised that after their initial consolidation nations have an almost immutable character: 124 On Le Bon, see Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, ). 125 Ibid., . 126 Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des foules (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ). 127 Max Weber, Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), ), ; tr., Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, ), . Freud published in  a whole book on Le Bon, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse/Die Zukunft einer Illusion (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, ); tr., Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: Norton, ). 128 Le Bon, Lois psychologiques de l’ évolution des peuples (Paris: Alcan, ), . 129 Ibid., . To give merely one example, Le Bon mentioned the tendency of all French citizens to favour an “absorption of the individual by the state”. Ibid., . 130 Ibid., Book I, ch. I and V.

nations and their adversaries



Ideas may have an actual action upon the soul of peoples only after they have travelled, at the end of a very slow elaboration, from the mobile regions of thought to this stable and unconscious region of sentiment where the motives of our action are forged. At this point they turn into elements of character and can influence conduct.131

Le Bon took national character to be of fundamental importance: social life in its various aspects, he emphasised, could only be explained by reference to this primary explanatory principle. Each people, he wrote, possesses a “mental constitution as fixed as its anatomical characteristics (caractères), from which its sentiments, its thinking, its institutions, its beliefs and its arts derive.”132 Lastly, Le Bon argued that national characters are not only distinct from one another, but also that they are incommensurable: “the qualities of character cannot be transmitted”.133 Because of this lack of compatibility between collective psychological traits nations cannot understand each other and thus tend to see one another as potential enemies: “[t]he perennial struggles between races have as their origin, primarily, the incompatibility of their characters.”134 On the one hand limited exchanges, according to Le Bon, could be tolerated, as long as they give nations enough time to fully assimilate the elements which have been borrowed, and to transform them as needed: The [amount of] things borrowed may often seem considerable, because names indeed change briskly; but in reality it is always minimal. With the passing of centuries, thanks to the slow labour of generations and to repeated additions, the element which had been borrowed ends up being very different from the element which was originally replaced.135

However Le Bon believed, on the other hand, that larger, more intense exchanges or a more intimate contact between nations would represent for them a clear danger. For instance, “[t]he presence of foreigners, even in small numbers, is enough to transform136 the soul of a people. It undermines its aptitude to defend the characters of its race, the monuments of its history, the work of its ancestors.”137

131 132 133 134 135 136 137

Ibid., –. Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –. “Altérer”, i.e. transform and denature at the same time. Ibid., .



chapter two

Thus Le Bon, like de Maistre, adopted the view that any intense contact between nations represents an existential threat. Indeed, if, when nations interact, their personality is altered and their identity dissolved, their very existence, or at least their persistence as what they really are, is put into question. Any relation with others turns into a menace, and any nation becomes the enemy of all others. In other words, the assumption of an unavoidable enmity of nations has something to do with a specific theory of the soul of peoples, of the character of nations. The more an author considers national character to be immutable and unanimously shared (i.e, the more the nation is taken to be compact not only at any given moment but also through time), the stronger will be the tendency to assume that the beliefs and values that nations hold are incommensurable and mutually incompatible. Societies and Nations As Totalities: Emile Durkheim There is, in the work of Emile Durkheim (–), an especially rich historical and philosophical reflection on what constitutes human beings and on how they relate to one another. Like Hippolyte Taine or Gustave Le Bon, Durkheim started from a disenchanted notion of nature: in his work, there is little room for a view concerning its “moral authority”. Moreover, even though this fact has not often been commented upon,138 Durkheim was critical of the traditional concept of human nature. In his lectures on the development of schooling and pedagogy in France (delivered in –), he argued that the teaching of history in the new education system of the Republic was especially fundamental. The particular benefit of an exposure to historical knowledge was that it would show, better than any other science, how diverse and changing human beings are. In other words, history is a tool to dispel the belief in a stable human nature, which had been integral part of the old “humanist” teaching: It is assumed that there exists a unique and immutable human nature, which had been given to man since the beginning of man. . . . However, there is no assertion which more obviously contradicts the teachings of

138 Marcel Gauchet, however, recently observed that Durkheim was among the first to explicitly challenge the usual conceptions attached to the concept of human nature. Cf. Aux origines de la démocratie II. La crise du libéralisme (Paris: Gallimard, ), .

nations and their adversaries



history. Far from being invariable, it [human nature] is endlessly made, unmade, remade; far from being one, it is infinitely diverse, in time as well as in space.139

Durkheim’s argument was that that even if human nature did exist, it was transformable. However, timelessness and immutability are part of the classical definition of human nature, as Isaiah Berlin has argued: to have a specific nature is to pursue certain specific goals imposed on it or built into it by God or an impersonal nature of things, and that to pursue these goal is alone what makes men human; . . . [moreover] these goals, and the corresponding interests and values . . ., cannot possibly conflict with one another—indeed, . . . they must form a harmonious whole.140

Therefore, Durkheim’s description of human nature as unstable and changing may be taken to amount to an outright, though implicit, rejection of the notion itself. At any rate, Durkheim was convinced that “some lessons of the highest importance” could be derived from “the observation of the diversity, of the infinite variability of human nature.”141 His hope was that the diffusion throughout society of a different view of what humans are could liberate individuals from the weight of tradition and remove many obstacles to progress. This is because, he argued, one of the most important limitations to institutional change was the belief that the feelings which are at the basis of our current moral organisation are indestructible, as everlasting as humanity, so that any re-arrangement which would rather deeply modify such feelings easily appear to us as an unrealisable or dangerous utopia.142

Differently from authors like Le Bon Durkheim did not primarily pursue the goal, in his critique of the humanistic notion of human nature, of developing a theory of the incommensurability and incompatibiliy of human cultures. On the contrary, he hoped that an exposure to diversity at school would foster a more tolerant and more open mindset. In front of other societies, the mind is not supposed to be seized by commiseration or pity, nor by a feeling of superiority. It should adopt an attitude, which Durkheim himself showed in his studies of non-European peoples, of 139

Ibid., . Isaiah Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution. A crisis in the history of modern thought,” in The Sense of Reality. Studies in Ideas and their History (London: Chatto & Vindus, ), . 141 Evolution pédagogique, . 142 Ibid., . 140



chapter two

admiration for the complexity of human societies and for the innumerable ways they find to organise life in common.143 Emile Durkheim, sceptical as he was of the idea of a timeless human nature, was also sceptical of many classical ethical theories, especially those connected with the tradition of natural law. He described morality as inherently bound to particular societies: all systems of morals that the various nations (peuples) effectively practise are a function of the social organisation of these nations . . . It is true that in the past this moral diversity was attributed to the ignorance or blindness of men. History has established, however, that except in abnormal cases, each society roughly has the morality it requires[.]144

Durkheim concluded from this that “it is impossible for us to aspire to a morality other than the one which is demanded by our social situation (état social)”.145 Now the risk for Durkheim, like for all other authors discussed above, was of course relativism. He found an elegant solution to this classic challenge by arguing that, while nature is not inherently moral, as some of his predecessors had believed, at least the social itself is such. Morality, Durkheim argued, is characterised by two contrasting elements: on the one hand a feeling of obligation imposed by an (external) authority, on the other a desire to do that which is commanded.146 Morality has an uplifting effect in individuals: it makes them feel that in following obligatory precepts they can resist spontaneous, selfish inclinations and contribute to something greater than themselves (which is of course social life). Similarly, Durkheim identified two central features of society: first, that it is made of rules which constrain individuals to act in a certain way; second, that its members nonetheless feel a strong affection for it, or at least for that which represents it (such as religious or national symbols). This led Durkheim to conclude that society and morality are one and the same thing. Moreover, since he saw the requirements of social life as roughly

143 Durkheim argued for instance that a teaching about non-European societies could be introduced, to avoid the almost exclusive focus on Greco-Roman antiquity which prevailed at the time. He asked rhetorically whether we could “believe that the civilisation of India, so marvellously complex, may have a lesser educative value than that of Rome, that the humanity it represents is but a lesser humanity?” Ibid., . 144 Durkheim, “Détermination du fait moral,” in Sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 145 Ibid., . 146 Ibid., .

nations and their adversaries



similar everywhere, Durkheim assumed that some moral values, such as reciprocity, mutual help and solidarity, are shared by all societies.147 Lastly, Durkheim believed that the mental functions and modes of thought differed from one society to the other. He argued that the fundamental categories of understanding, which Kant had taken to be the same in all reasonable beings, derived from experiences specific to each society.148 For instance, the perception of space, far from being universally the same, is influenced by the way in which society occupies its territory. This suggests that each society develops its own peculiar apprehension of the world, including its own logic and truth-system. Because of this closure of thought, Durkheim suggested that each society sees itself as the whole universe: Since the universe does not exist except in so far as it is thought of, and since it is not completely thought of except by society, it takes place in this latter; it becomes a part of society’s interior life, and therefore it is itself the total genus outside of which nothing exists. The concept of totality is only the abstract form of the concept of society: it is the whole which includes all things, the supreme class which embraces all other classes.149

Because of his description of human nature as a historical product, his view of morality as a social phenomenon, and his notion of the conceptual closure of society, Durkheim could not accept the classical notion of a community of nations, which was dependent on the notion that a “common measure”, independent of social life, existed beyond the national level. As we shall see in Chapter , for him society is the highest level of reality for human beings, and nothing socially valuable or even meaningful can exist beyond it. Everything beyond the boundaries of society is hardly social at all, since it lacks the characteristic elements of society according to Durkheim, especially the capacity to distribute obligations and sanctions, and the ability to induce strong positive emotions.

147

Ibid., –. This is an important theme in Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification—contribution à l’ étude des représentations collectives,” L’ Année sociologique  (– []); tr., “On some primitive forms of classification—contribution to the study of collective representations,” in Primitive Classification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). It also plays a central role Emile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, ); tr., The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, ). 149 Formes élémentaires, ; tr.,  . 148



chapter two

Durkheim thus rejected traditional cosmopolitanism. He declared in , during a debate on pacifism and patriotism, that the impossibility to “dispense with a patrie is abundantly clear from all the evidence: we cannot live outside of an organized society, and the highest organized society that exists is the patrie.”150 Speaking of a universal community of nations, he argued in his Division of Labour in Society (): this ideal is not on the verge of being realised in its entirety. Between the different types of society coexisting on earth there are too many intellectual and moral divergences to be able to live in a spirit of brotherhood in the same society.151

While he acknowledged the existence of growing pacifist sentiments in society, as well as of an ever more vocal advocacy of “human brotherhood”, Durkheim used the arguments above to warn that such aspirations were likely to remain entirely void. For instance, in his Leçons de sociologie (his lectures on politics, delivered between  and ) he asked whether “humanity in its entirety” could be “organized in a society”: Durkheim’s answer was that this idea, if at all practicable, could only be realised “in so distant a future that we can leave it out of our present reckoning.”152 Despite such affirmations, Durkheim did not uncritically endorse the opposed view concerning the necessary enmity of nations. His theory of international relations was a more subtle one.153 His opinion was that nations, far from being immutable entities, could evolve and even be superseded by way of a combination with other societies. He took it to belong to the natural development of social groups that they should combine and merge into larger units: “what is possible is that societies of the same species should come together (s’ agrègent ensemble), and it is indeed in this direction that our society appears to be going.”154 What Durkheim had in mind was the constitution of a European society, the realisation of which was foreshadowed, during his own time, by the 150 Durkheim, “Pacifisme et patriotisme,” in La science sociale et l’ action (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., “Pacifism and Patriotism,” Sociological Inquiry , no.  (), . 151 Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, ), . 152 Durhkeim, Leçons de sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), . 153 For a recent discussion of Durkheim’s views on this topic, see Frédéric Ramel, Les fondateurs oubliés. Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Mauss et les relations internationales (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ). 154 Division, ; tr., .

nations and their adversaries



existence of a “common consciousness . . . in European societies”.155 In other words, if a global society could not easily be envisaged, at least broader social units, for instance of the size of a continent like Europe, could soon become a reality. The crucial point that Durkheim repeatedly emphasised, however, is that the broader social unit in question would itself be a society of exactly the same kind as the nation itself. Durkheim did not envisage,156 in other words, that there could be more than one level of society; that there could be, for instance, a further social level with different functional attributions and a differently binding moral force. Neither did he believe, consequently, that one could speak of national societies as embedded in international communities, larger than nations and of a different nature. For instance international economic cooperation, if sufficiently intense, would automatically lead to the emergence of a new society: We may even affirm that a function, whether of an economic or any other kind, can only be divided up between two societies if these share in some respect in the same common life and, consequently, belong to the same society.157

Speaking of Europe, he similarly asserted that “A confederation of European states, for instance . . . would be like an individual State, having its own personality and its own interests and features (physiognomie).”158 In other words, “once an international society is achieved, it would necessarily take on in turn the characteristic of a patrie, of a soundly organized collectivity.”159 What this sentence really means is that there cannot be an international society, but only a larger society, otherwise displaying all the standard features of nation. Social Philosophy and the Figure of the Enemy In this chapter, I have sought, on the one hand, to describe how the transformations of the concept of the social have invited human scientists and political thinkers to increasingly question the notion that there is a “common measure” valid across nations; and on the other hand, to spell out 155

Ibid., ; tr., . Except possibly towards the end of his career and under the influence of his nephew Marcel Mauss, as I argue in Chapter . 157 Division, ; tr., . 158 Leçons, ; tr., . 159 “Pacifisme,” ; tr., . 156



chapter two

the potential implications of its disappearance. To begin with, as already suggested in Chapter , wide-ranging transformations in the concept of nature itself contributed to the decline of teleological reasoning. Now an immanent “tissue of partial regularities”160 without end or purpose, nature, in Lorraine Daston’s phrase, lost its “moral authority”.161 This means that no moral prescriptions could be derived from an observation of the inner workings of nature. Nature, by definition, is all-pervasive, universal. As a consequence, if its moral authority decline, the notion of a natural, universal morality must decline, too. This sheds light on the fact that the thinkers of the incompatibility of nations often explicitly rejected the possibility of discovering universally valid principles of justice. They denied that the very notion of an international moral law made much sense at all, and tended to reduce morality to sheer collective mores or habits. In his Psychological Laws, Le Bon affirmed for instance that there are no universal criteria that would enable one to judge all governments: “there is no government or institution of which one could say that it is absolutely good or absolutely bad.”162 It is also very telling that Renan, when he relativised his earlier stronger understanding of the adversity of nations, more clearly emphasised the notion that the highest human values are independent from time and place. As mentioned above, any representation of singularity implies a representation of difference: for instance the more national singularity is conceived as closed, the stronger the notion of enmity becomes. This, however, is not an entirely intuitive fact. I have noted above that identity is

160

John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, vol. VII of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto-London: University of Toronto PressRoutledge & Kegan Paul, ), . 161 Lorraine Daston, “I. The morality of natural orders: the Power of Medea. II. Nature’s customs versus nature’s laws,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. , edited by Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, ). 162 Le Bon, Lois psychologiques, . Another racial thinker of the same period, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, was even more explicit when he wrote: “There is neither good nor evil per se, but actions that one is used to regard as good or bad. Not long ago one sincerely yet naively tried to draw a scheme of the absolutely good, of the absolutely right, and of many other things no less abstract and absolute. . . . The diverse definitions of good and evil[, however,] are but the formula of an agreement. . . . Moral ideas are not innate in an absolute way, they are individual ideas which were transmitted by heredity, fixed by selection and which remained dominant in their field by way of a suppression of the individuals who did not share them. Morality is the product of a social selection.” Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Les sélections sociales. Cours de libre de science politique professé à l’ université de Montpellier (–) (Paris: Thorin & Fils, ), –.

nations and their adversaries



always relational, that taking a stance on what one “is” necessarily implies saying something on what one “is not”. Singular identities must be delineated against a background of differences. The striking fact is that this background (differently from Rousseau’s suggestion) is not made of general, abstract human potentialities, but of differences which are perceived as actually existing. In other words, in the same way that we can only concretely, as opposed to abstractly, “be” something, explaining what we “are not” implies depicting an existing something as the “other” from which we differ. More simply put, it seems that there is a tendency to say not just, “I am a generous, not mean-spirited”, but rather “I am a generous, not mean-spirited like Paul is.” In the case of societies, “not having” a given collective character really means “differing from” other concretely existing collectivities. This concrete nature of otherness problematises, but also possibly strengthens, identity, displacing it from the realm of abstract reflection to the realm of desire, i.e. to the realm of the attraction and repulsion exerted by identifiable forms of life. Another “common measure” binding all nations, apart from jus gentium and religion, is human nature. As we saw, Durkheim was very critical of this notion, but his scepticism must be seen as only one manifestation within a more general historical trend: human nature, a notion prominent throughout the history of social and political thought, was increasingly questioned during the nineteenth century. Friedrich Nietzsche (–) launched particularly strong attacks against this idea. In the Genealogy of Morality () he described the emergence and development of consciousness itself, understood as a reflexive grasp of oneself and as moral sensitivity (“conscience”).163 In proposing a history of consciousness, Nietzsche introduced the idea that it was not a permanent and unchangeable feature of human beings, but something that could vary in accordance with the environment in which it evolved. While the traditional notion of human nature was used to unify the human world, both in space and in time, and to separate it from the realm of animals and things, Nietzsche’s re-inscription of the human in the natural pursued the opposite project: the aim was to show that some aspects of the human condition that we take to be timeless are contingent products of evolution caused by specific circumstances. Such critical 163 Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral in Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin–New York: DTV–De Gruyter, ); tr., On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).



chapter two

reflections on a permanent human nature were appropriated by thinkers, such a as Foucault, who recognised Nietzsche as a source of inspiration. In his essay on “Nietzsche, genealogy, history” (), he reflected upon the meaning of the genealogical method, identifying as its aims to place “within a process of development everything considered immortal in man,”164 and more generally to show that the “secret” of things is “that they have no essence.”165 Foucault added that human beings, in the absence of something stable in them—and neither their mind nor their body is such—lack the capacity “for self-recognition or for understanding other men.”166 As Isaiah Berlin suggested, one of the main components of the notion of human nature is the belief that all human beings are in some respect identical with regard to their most fundamental needs, instincts, or subjective preferences, so that at least some goals are seen as desirable by all humans. This is true of “negative” anthropologies, which emphasise the tendency of humans to behave selfishly and to engage in conflicts with one another (Machiavelli, Hobbes), as well as of “positive” ones, which take the view that sociability (Hume, Pufendorf) or compassion (Rousseau) are features inherent in all humans. Positive anthropologies can of course more easily submit that from human nature derives the possibility of a harmonious social life. But even negative anthropologies, which do not make this hypothesis, admit like positive ones that the existence of a common human nature at least establishes a basis for mutual comprehension, which is one of the conditions for the existence of a form of communication between groups. To now come back to Carl Schmitt, the present analysis suggests that his reflection on the fact itself of a transformation of the figure of the enemy is correct. This chapter has argued that, as a consequence of the challenge to the notion of a measure common to all nations, adversaries could more easily be “de-humanised” and “absolutised”. However, 164 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’ histoire,” in Dits et écrits, vol. : –  (Paris: Gallimard-Quarto, ), ; tr., “Nietzsche, genealogy, history,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Cornell: Cornell University Press, ), . 165 Ibid., ; tr., . 166 Ibid., ; tr., . Around the same years, Foucault took part in a debate with Noam Chomsky in which he warned that a notion of human nature could be used to justify practices of normalisation and even punishment. Michel Foucault, “Sur la nature humaine: la justice et le pouvoir,” in Dits et écrits, vol. ; tr., Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New York: New Press, ).

nations and their adversaries



it seems that one should locate differently the moment at which this change becomes significant, and give another account for it. The French example indicates that certain transformations can already be felt in the discourse of the counter-revolution, and that they become more prominent as the nineteenth century advances. Second, Schmitt gave a great importance to the modification of political conceptions, and in particular to the phenomenon that Koselleck called the “ideologisation” of social and political concepts.167 In the Theory of the Partisan, at least, Schmitt insisted on the political import of Marxism, or socialism more generally, in diffusing more radical notions of enmity. What this chapter suggests is that transformations in social philosophy—i.e., in the very conceptions of what society is—, and not merely in political doctrines, should be taken into account when trying to explain the rise of the notion of “absolute enmity”. In affirming this, I am adopting a position Eric Voegelin had already presented and defended many decades ago. In his  study on the development of the idea of race he suggested that two parallel phenomena, in modernity, caused a deep transformation of the representation of what nations are, and of the nature of their relations: one was secularisation; the other was what Voegelin called the “closure of groups”. The traditional medieval idea of a corpus mysticum transcending national belongings was progressively substituted with a vision of society as autonomous, heterogeneous, and self-centred. In such a context the citizens of different nations, no longer connected with one another by the “common measure” of religion, progressively became radical strangers, and potentially absolute enemies. The Christian notion of the “kingdom of darkness” was secularised and instrumentalised within the framework of a new political demonology: The empire of darkness which in the spiritualized Christian idea signifies a region of the human soul and its forces, becomes transformed, parallel with the closure of a particular group, into the external empire of the forces which threaten the existence of the particular group.168

It is in such a context that new figures of enmity could emerge, such as that of the hereditary enemy, or that of the absolute enemy. It would be possible to show, as I have done elsewhere, that such re-conceptualisa167 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, ). 168 Eric Voegelin, “The growth of the race idea,” The Review of Politics , no.  (), .



chapter two

tions were not without a certain impact upon political life: the notion of an incommensurability of nations, together with its corollary of a natural adversity between them, was the framework within which a large number of intellectuals made sense of the First World War.169 As I suggested in the introduction to this volume, the language of the social is often criticised for what may be called its “methodological nationalism”:170 due to its assumption that societies are closed entities, it typically fails to consider cross-border phenomena such as international exchange, cultural transfers, migrations, or diasporic movements. This failure can also be observed in the reflection of Emile Durkheim, even though his work, because of its complexity and more progressive orientation, towers above the contribution of the other authors discussed in this chapter. Durkheim’s recognition of only one societal level (the nation-state), and his insistence on boundedness as an important feature of social life, rendered his position on international phenomena comparable to that of other promoters of the language of the social. Daniel Chernilo is certainly right to emphasize that the notion of national boundedness played a crucial role in the history of the human sciences. It may even be described as the default or dominant view among sociologists, anthropologists, and historians during the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. However, already early on in the history of the language of the social, there also were important alternative theorisations. In the next chapter and in Chapter , I will consider the views of Gabriel Tarde, Franz Boas, Max Weber and Marcel Mauss. These authors, all very critical of nationalism, paved the way towards a sociology of international relations; some of them even postulated the existence of an international society—and transcended in this postulation what Taine, Le Bon or even Durkheim would have taken to be a mere oxymoron.

169 Cf. Jean Terrier, “The impact of war on the French human sciences and the image of Germany: –,” in War and Peace: The Role of Science and Art, edited by Soraya Sour and Olivier Remaud (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ). 170 Cf. Daniel Chernilo, “Social theory’s methodological nationalism: Myth and reality,” European Journal of Social Theory , no.  ().

chapter three SEVERING THE LINK TO NATURE: THE RISE OF THE CULTURE CONCEPT IN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE*

I have argued in the previous chapters that the development of a new concept of nature had an impact on the human sciences. Widespread during the Enlightenment was the hypothesis that it made sense to speak of a natural disposition of the individual, of a stable human nature. By contrast, the social was envisaged as an artificial construct resulting, at least in an ideal situation, from the voluntary decisions of natural individuals. During the nineteenth century, many authors inverted this perspective and posited that society, not the individual, was “natural”, although in a different sense: not in the sense of having an inherent purpose, but in the sense that its shape was causally determined by natural events external to the social itself, such as race or geographic conditions. In turn, individuals were artificial, although of course not voluntary, products of the social, in the sense that they were modeled by the action of society itself. A further metaphor, as we saw, was that society could be said to be natural not primarily because it was determined by its environment, but because it could be envisaged as a living organism. Such an organicist metaphor could take at least two different forms. One could, on the one hand, compare society to living beings in general, which often led to a biologistic description of the social as a hierarchical system of elements such as cells, tissues, and organs, all performing distinct functions. Or one could, on the other hand, choose to compare society specifically with the living beings that humans are. This is what I call the “personalist” metaphor. Since a highly developed psychological and intellectual life is the most characteristic feature of humans in comparison to other animals, this metaphor led to an emphasis on mentality and morality as central to social life. As we see, thus, human science very progressively moved away from strong naturalistic assumptions. This is the topic of the present chapter. * My gratitude goes to Nicola Marccuci for his critical observations on an early draft of this chapter.



chapter three

As suggested, the “personalist” metaphor posited that one could legitimately compare societies to individual persons. Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and generally, all the representatives of the classical theory of the social contract, described the state as a person, with a will and psychological characteristics of its own. In Jules Michelet’s Le peuple, the metaphor that nations may be seen as persons is a crucial one, even though its insistence on rootedness and tradition distinguishes this text from the work of Hobbes and Rousseau. Michelet mused that “[f]ar from disappearing, I see nationalities becoming every day more distinct from the point view of their moral character (se caractériser moralement), and turning, from the collections of men they were, into persons.”1 Emile Durkheim also mobilised a personalist imaginary when he affirmed that “we diminish society when we envisage it only as an organised body fulfilling certain vital functions. In this body lives a soul: it is the totality of collective ideals”.2 An especially interesting indicator of the pervasiveness of the personalist imaginary is the use of the expression “national character”. We saw that this expression was used by virtually all authors, ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph de Maistre and Montesquieu to Hippolyte Taine and Gustave Le Bon. In his work on national character in the English context, Peter Mandler defines it as the assumption that “a people forming a given nation have some psychological or cultural characteristics in common that bind them together and separate them from other peoples.”3 It is no exaggeration to say that this expression was the most widely used by scholars, in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, as well as across Europe, when referring to the existence of social commonalities (e.g. collective habits or shared ways of thinking). The scholars in question were well aware of this fact. For instance, the British political thinker and journalist Walter Bagehot noted in a best-selling study influenced by Social-Darwinism on the role of collective struggle for life in the formation of nations (Physics and Politics, ) that “the existence of national character is the greatest commonplace in the world”.4 Moritz Lazarus and H. Steinthal, the two editors of 1

Jules Michelet, Le peuple (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ), . Emile Durkheim, “Jugements de valeur et jugements de réalité,” in Sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . Durkheim’s social theory is discussed at length in the next chapter. 3 Peter Mandler, The English National Character from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), . 4 Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics, vol.  of The Work and Life of Walter Bagehot 2

the rise of the culture concept



a nineteenth-century German scholarly journal dedicated to linguistics and the psychology of peoples, observed that “one speaks very commonly in our times, including among scholars, of ‘national character’ (Volksgeist) and of the different national characters (Volksgeister).”5 This fact is also recognised by all those who have paid closer attention to the history of the notion in recent years.6 The literary historian Joep Leerssen has recently written for instance that “[t]he determination of cultural activity by nationality and national character is such an all-pervasive doxa that it affects and permeates all of nineteenth-century culture and society.”7 In the twentieth century, by contrast, the theories of national character were one of the central targets of those we recognise as the founding fathers of the academic disciplines of sociology and social anthropology (such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss, or Claude Lévi-Strauss). I will show how “culture”, one of the fundamental concepts of contemporary human science, was explicitly promoted as an alternative to the notion of character. In this process, “culture” inherited some of the assumptions of the theories of character.

(London: Longmans, Green, and Co, ), . On Bagehot and national character, see Mandler, The English National Character, –. 5 Moritz Lazarus and H. Steinthal, “Einleitende Gedanken über Völkerpsychologie als Einladung zu einer Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft  (), . In translating “Volksgeist” with “national character” I follow Nathan Rotenstreich, “Volksgeist,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. , edited by Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner, ), . According to this author “Volksgeist” was coined by Hegel to translate Montesquieu’s “general spirit”. See also Steven B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism. Rights in Context (Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, ), –. 6 See, among other contributions: David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, – (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, ed., Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Character (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ); Manfred Beller, Eingebildete Nationalcharaktere. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur literarischen Imagologie (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, ); Philippe Claret, La personnalité collective des nations: Théories anglo-saxonnes et conceptions françaises du caractère national (Bruxelles: Établissements Émile Bruylant, ); Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France. – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Silvia Sebastiani, I limiti del progresso. Razza e genere nell’Illuminismo scozzese (Bologne: Il Mulino, ). 7 Joep Leerssen, “The poetics and anthropology of national character (–),” in Beller and Leerssen, Imagology, .



chapter three “National Character”: Varieties of Understanding

Organicist and “personalist” imaginaries underlie the notion of “national character”. Implicitly or explicitly, society is here viewed as a collective person. Since all persons have a mental life of their own, an idiosyncrasy, comparing societies to persons leads to the belief that each human collectivity possesses a distinctive character, in the psychological sense of this term. It is possible to distinguish between different understandings of the notion of collective personality. In an extreme variant, the assertion is that society is a living being, with a mind of its own. Even though the accusation of believing in such supraindividual beings constitutes a common critical topos in the human sciences, this extreme position was not the most widespread one. Proponents of organicism advised caution when using the comparison. For instance René Worms declared, on the one hand, that the comparison of natural with social organisms did not rely on a “metaphor” and that sociology could disclose “real and objective resemblances”.8 At the same time, he acknowledged that many things differed markedly in natural organisms and societies, so that one should only look for “analogies, and not homologies”.9 Concerning now the even more demanding “personalist” comparison, it was hardly ever used literally, but rather embedded in a framework of metaphors and analogies. In fact, one element in particular made it impossible to state that society literally is a human person: as Herbert Spencer suggested society, unlike persons, is itself composed of persons.10 Second, when it did not mean the “character of the collective person that the nation is”, the notion of national character could still be used to refer to the fact that all members of society have the same mental constitution, i.e. the same feelings, aspirations, ideas, preferences and mode of behaviour. According to this view, there is only one kind of personality type in each society, which may be called “national character”. Bagehot suggested this when he wrote that “national character is but a name for a collection of habits more or less universal”.11 This suggests that the social is homogeneous or even harmonious, a view exemplified 8

René Worms, Organisme et société (Paris: Giard & Brière, ), –. Ibid., . 10 Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology I, vol.  of A System of Synthetic Philosophy (London-Edinbourg: Williams and Norgate, ), –. 11 Bagehot, Physics and Politics, . This formulation is in itself very revealing, insofar as it identifies the national with the universal. However, Bagehot also noted that in modern industrial societies national character becomes less uniform. Ibid., . 9

the rise of the culture concept



in the reflections of Lazarus and Steinthal. They envisaged the nation primarily as a moral or spiritual entity and thus considered race, like Michelet, to be a negligible phenomenon. For them peoples do not owe their identity to “determinate objective relationships such as descent or language” but to “the objective vision of the members of the people”.12 They understood Volksgeist (which they also called Nationalgeist and Volkscharakter)13 as that which is “common to all individuals of a people”: most importantly, shared feelings and visions, which form the basis of social “concord (Übereinstimmung) and harmony”.14 Third, the expression “national character” was used to describe a basic set of “characteristic traits” shared by all members of society, who otherwise may well be diverse in their habits and world-views. “Characteristic trait” is an expression used by Germaine de Staël: “one ought to be looking only for a people’s characteristic trait: while others are the effect of a thousand random events, this one is constitutive of its being.”15 In this view, there may be a variety of personality types in society, but they all overlap by having at least one feature in common. This understanding of “national character”, often complemented with an insistence on the probabilistic nature of the social, was the most common one. In his Logic () John Stuart Mill argued that the members of a nation go through the same collective experiences. Since similar experiences generate similar ideas and feelings, each nation develops its own collective character: “every individual is surrounded by circumstances different from those of every other individual; every nation or generation of mankind from every other nation or generation: and none of these differences are without their influence in forming a different type of character”.16 Therefore, even though there are universal laws of the formation of character, no “universal character” of humankind could be said to exist.17 Mill described national character as “the opinions, feelings, and habits of the people”.18 He added that, in all polities, these opinions and feelings 12

Lazarus and Steinthal, “Einleitung,” . Ibid., , . 14 Ibid., . 15 Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ), . 16 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, vol. VIII of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto-London: University of Toronto PressRoutledge & Kegan Paul, ), . 17 Ibid., . 18 Ibid., . 13



chapter three

are shared to the point that one can speak of a “consensus . . . existing among the different parts of the social organism”.19 This consensus manifests itself through common allegiance, mutual recognition and sympathy. Mill, well-known for his passionate defence of freedom of thought,20 did not deny the abundance of varied opinions within society. Rather, he argued that in a well-ordered political society, social sentiments tend to gravitate around a “fixed point”.21 According to Mill, the scientific study of these elements required the foundation of a new science whose object would be national character itself, and which he proposed to call “ethology”.22 This science would represent the pivotal point of the social sciences, since “the laws of national (or collective) character are by far the most important class of sociological laws”.23 Mill suggested, however, that such laws had to be envisaged probabilistically, so that national character was for him only a tendency, or the “average” of various, and possibly opposed, “tendencies”.24 This depiction of national character as a set of fundamental characteristics defining a group is reminiscent of Le Bon’s distinction between primary (unanimously shared and stable) and secondary characteristics (variable and possibly limited to only one sector of society). Even though he scrupulously avoided the use of the expression “national character” (a significant fact to which I return below), Emile Durkheim’s concept of “collective consciousness” bears some resemblance with this notion. In primitive societies, all individuals think and behave the same: the social is homogeneous. By contrast, more complex societies rest on a small number of values and ideas, which their members perceive as sacred. In each individual mind, thus, there are collective values which cohabit with more prosaic and idiosyncratic representations and feelings. 19

Ibid., . See his classical essay from , John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Essays on Politics and Society Part I, vol. XVIII of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto-London: University of Toronto Press-Routledge and Kegan Paul, ). 21 On all these elements, see Mill, System of Logic, –. 22 Ibid., . 23 Ibid., . On Mill and national character, see the cursory notes in Paul Smart, “Mill and nationalism. National character, social progress and the spirit of achievement,” History of European Ideas , no. – (), –, as well as the observations by Mandler, The English National Character, –. 24 Mill, System of Logic, . Mill spoke openly of “the degree of uncertainty which still exists as to the extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and the physical circumstances on which these may be dependent”, but affirmed that such “considerations . . . are of secondary importance when we are considering mankind in the average, or en masse.” Ibid., . 20

the rise of the culture concept



Even though the theories of national character may entail a vision of the social as more or less homogeneous, all such theories tend to stress the importance of internal cohesion, compactness, or even harmony, as opposed to conflict, inequality, or power relations. Lazarus and Steinthal argued that societies begin to decline when factions (Parteien) build up within them: conflict and division (Spaltung), in effect, may exhaust (erschöpfen) and corrupt the social body.25 Another fundamental element of the theories of “national character” is the insistence on the strong differences which exist between nations. I have already discussed this topic at length in Chapter : there I tried to show that the singularity and diversity of nations could be theorised in a variety of ways, but that there always remained a link between the importance given to national identity and the perception of other nations as fundamentally different. Theorists of national character as de Maistre and Le Bon, and to a limited extent Michelet and Renan, tried to demonstrate that contacts between nations are necessarily tainted by misunderstanding, conflict, and even war. Similarly, Lazarus and Steinthal argued that the exchange between societies, although not impossible, presents risks of erosion of national character, and therefore must be practised with measure. For instance, the influence of foreign nations had started to weaken the German character, and the two scholars aimed with their work to contribute to its re-affirmation.26 Thus, following Peter Mandler’s suggestion that national character is a discourse concerning both what “binds together” and what “separates from other peoples”, I argue that the homogeneity of nations,27 on the one hand, and their singularity and distinctiveness, on the other, are the two central questions of the theories of national character. Walter Bagehot formulated these two questions in the following way: “What breaks the human race up into fragments so unlike one another, and yet each in its interior so monotonous?”28 In the process of constituting sociology and social anthropology, the proponents of these disciplines attempted to strengthen their legitimacy by identifying an object, or a method of investigation, which would

25

Lazarus and Steinthal, “Einleitung,” . Ibid., . 27 This idea of homogeneity, in turn, entails two elements: a temporal (the nation remains identical to itself in history), and a spatial one (all members of the nation are similarly- or even identically minded). 28 Bagehot, Physics and Politics, . 26



chapter three

belong to these sciences alone. As a case in point, Emile Durkheim’s intellectual efforts can be interpreted as kind of a declaration of independence of sociology. The object “society”, in the understanding of the members of the Durkheimian school of sociology, was declared to be related to, but still mostly autonomous from, the underlying layers of reality. The hidden target of such an argument was the naturalism of much of nineteenth-century social theory, as well as the perceived economicism of Marxian and liberal thought. In his enterprise, Durkheim was helped by close collaborators such as his nephew Marcel Mauss or Célestin Bouglé: against racialist, nationalist and conservative thinkers they argued that a representative regime and formal equality were inevitable in modern times, owing to more fluid social relations in extant industrial societies.29 Gabriel Tarde, on the other hand, intended to establish sociology as a discipline by declaring everything, including the natural, to be essentially social. In this, his strategy was markedly different from that of Durkheim and his followers who, having proclaimed the social to be independent from the natural, did not need to question the dominant understanding of nature among the scholars of the time. Similar moves to create a non-naturalistic science of the social were made in the same years by many scholars abroad, such as Max Weber in Germany and Franz Boas in the United States. They too worked to sever the link which had attached the human sciences to philosophy and legal studies on the one hand, and to the natural sciences on the other. They developed concepts and methods specifically designed to avoid the naturalistic causalism adopted by many of their predecessors. These scholars, before they could argue in favour of new forms of knowledge in the human sciences, had to take a position on the widely diffused notion of national character. Even though their work was not always fully consistent with their stated intentions, Tarde and Weber criticised the metaphor of the collective person, thereby rejecting the expression “national character” as inappropriate. Boas and Mauss deeply modified some of the central tenets of the social science of their time, but refrained from completely breaking with all aspects of the personalistic imaginary.

29 Célestin Bouglé, Les idées égalitaires. Étude sociologique (Paris: Alcan, ); Célestin Bouglé, La démocratie devant la science. Études critiques sur l’ hérédité, la concurrence et la différenciation (Paris: Alcan, ). Mauss is discussed at full length in Chapter .

the rise of the culture concept



“A Continuous Fermentation”: The Social Ontology of Gabriel Tarde In recent years, Gabriel Tarde (–) has become an object of renewed attention, in large part due to the writings of the prominent sociologist Bruno Latour.30 Before that, Tarde was primarily remembered as the main opponent of Emile Durkheim in the last decade of the nineteenth century.31 In part, as we shall see, their disagreement concerned the usefulness of the idea of collective personality. In his famous book, The Laws of Imitation (Les lois de l’ imitation, ), Tarde offered an analysis of the processes constituting social life. He said that the regularities that could be observed in social life resulted from imitation, which he presented in this work as the most important phenomenon of social life. Tarde, however, understood imitation as something stronger and broader than the usual sense suggested.32 He distinguished between different types of imitative action. First, he wrote of a spontaneous and unreflective, “extra-logical” form of imitation of the movements made or of the words spoken by other individuals. Second, Tarde described forms of imitation in which reflection and decision play a more important role. He mentioned for instance the case of individuals confronted with different contradictory examples, which thus cannot be all simultaneously imitated: the individual in such cases must make conscious choices.33 Third, in the preface to the second edition of The Laws of Imitation (), Tarde evoked “counter-imitation”,34 namely the tendency to do the contrary of that which others do. This addition seems to reflect the fact that, in these years, Tarde increasingly emphasised that imitation is only one of the

30

Bruno Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social,” in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, edited by Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, ); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-networktheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Bruno Latour, “Einleitung,” in Gabriel Tarde, Monadologie und Soziologie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, ). 31 On this conflict, see Laurent Mucchielli, La découverte du social. Naissance de la sociologie en France (–) (Paris: La découverte, ), –. 32 Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’ imitation (Paris: Kimé, ), ch. ; tr., The Laws of Imitation (New York: Henry Holt, ). 33 Logical causes “operate whenever an individual prefers a given innovation to others because he thinks it is more useful or more true than others, that is, more in accord than they are with the aims or principles that have already found a place in his mind.” Tarde, Lois de l’ imitation, ; tr., . 34 Ibid., XII; tr., XVII.



chapter three

great tendencies of human action, while other tendencies such as invention and opposition are equally important to take into account.35 Although this dimension was in his thought perhaps less central than it was for Vilfredo Pareto or Max Weber around the same years, Tarde was trying, like these other scholars, to develop a systematic theory of social action.36 His aim was to pave the way for a social theory which, in contrast with Durkheim’s sociology,37 would proceed upwards from bottom to top, from the parts to the whole, from the individual to the social.38 However, this did not make him an individualist in the classical sense, since Tarde deeply modified the notion of personality which had been elaborated by traditional philosophy. Against notions such as rationality, autonomy, or self-control, which all belonged to the traditional understanding of the person,39 Tarde developed a notion of consciousness as a site of tension where contradictory desires, tendencies and images coexist. At the beginning, infants are a “chaos of heterogeneous sensations and impulsions which conflict and clash (qui se pressent et se heurtent)”.40 As they grow older, individuals learn to master the initial chaos, but it is never in their power to fully do so. A “peaceful but far-reaching revolution in the realm of sociology”, Tarde argued, would consist in recognising as the “really fundamental social opposition” the “internal battle” that takes place “in the bosom of the social individual himself ” between contradictory desires, especially between the desire for the new and the inclination for the old, between the urge to innovate and the will to preserve.41

35 Gabriel Tarde, La logique sociale (Paris, Alcan: ), ch. “Les lois de l’ invention”. Gabriel Tarde, L’ opposition universelle. Essai d’ une théorie des contraires (Paris: Alcan, ). 36 His volume on Social Logic is especially telling in this respect. In it, he proposed a classification of social actions according to two criteria: logical correspondence of means and ends; proportion or disproportion between the energy consumed and the actual desire for the goal. Cf. Tarde, Logique sociale, –. 37 Durkheim had explicity argued that any analysis of social facts should start from society, from the collective, the contextual, and not from the singular and individual. Emile Durkheim, “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives,” in Sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 38 Cf. Tarde, Les lois sociales. Esquisse d’ une sociologie (Paris: Alcan, ), ; tr., Social Laws. An Outline of Sociology (London: MacMillan, ), . 39 I discuss the notion of person and its use in the language of the social in the Epilogue to this volume. 40 Logique sociale, . 41 Lois sociales, ; tr., –.

the rise of the culture concept



On such premises, Tarde criticised some notions and theories which were prevalent in the social thought of his time. Against rationalism, he dethroned judgement, reducing it to a special form of “belief ” to which one gives a particular “credence” (croyance) on the basis of its widespread presence in society, i.e. on the basis of its capacity to be held by many people simultaneously “without contradiction”.42 Since “the law of historical events and of the connexion between them has been searched in vain”,43 he proposed to reject strong notions of historical causality. He was sceptical of naturalistic determinism including organicism and racialist anthropology.44 Lastly, he took issue with the collective psychology of his time, which relied on the belief that societies should be seen as persons writ large.45 From time to time, Tarde deployed terms such as “national spirit”, “national type”, or “national tradition”, acknowledging local specificities of habits and world-views. In the part of his Social Logic dedicated to social statics, he proposed his own definition of collective character, distinguishing between three strata of social and individual life: ) opinion and taste, which he described as heterogeneous and always in motion; ) tradition and custom, which he saw as coherent and stable; and lastly ) “genius and character, either national, or individual” which he defined as a “tight web of principles and motives more or less unconscious and unmovable (incommutables)”.46 As we see, thus, Tarde proposed his own theory of collective characters and agreed with his predecessors that they are characterised by stability and by an ability to determine individual action. At the same time, however, Tarde emphasised that there were other principles at work in social life. He suggested that society 42

Logique sociale, –, . Logique sociale, . On this point, see Bruno Karsenti, “Présentation,” in Tarde, Lois de l’ imitation, XXI. 44 On Tarde’s critique of organicism, see Daniela Barberis, “In search of an object: organicist sociology and the reality of society in Fin-de-Siècle France,” History of the Human Sciences  (), –. However, one should not overlook the fact that Tarde, because of his vitalism, did not see the biological and the social as fundamentally separate realms. Despite his rejection of the personalistic metaphor Tarde made use on occasion of a certain biological imaginary. In Logique sociale, for instance, he proposed a comparison between society and the brain. On Tarde’s vitalism, see Eric Alliez, “Différence et répétition de Gabriel Tarde,” Multitudes  (). 45 On the diffusion of collective psychology at the time, see Pierre Favre, Naissances de la science politique en France (–) (Paris: Fayard, ), –; Michel Kail and Geneviève Vermès (eds.), La psychologie des peuples et ses dérives (Paris: Centre national de documentation pédagogique, ); Mucchielli, Découverte du social, –. 46 Logique sociale, . 43



chapter three

entails multiple temporalities. Even though change occurs even in the least mobile regions, some things, according to him, can only change at a slow pace. More generally, in his discussion of social dynamics, Tarde tried to show that two contradictory tendencies are always present in society: on the one hand, the search for equilibrium, and on the other hand, a “desire to maximise” (voeu du maximum),47 i.e., a desire to see forces multiply and diversify. For this reason, society can never completely “freeze into a stationary order”.48 Identities, constantly redefined in the process of social interaction itself, are always only provisional. “[T]he rock of tradition”, for instance, is “constantly eroded by the excess (débordement) of Opinion”.49 While collective psychology posited that stability is the primary characteristic of social arrangements, Tarde nuanced this notion. In a second step, he interrogated the assumption of homogeneity. Widespread analogies between society and living beings had promoted a view of society as compact and tightly organised. Tarde argued, by contrast, that social entities (individuals as well as nations), are “a chaos of tendencies . . . which in part contradict each other, in part converge, in part are juxtaposed and remain indifferent to one another”.50 He developed a new social ontology in his Monadology and Sociology (), in which he affirmed that “diversity, not unity, is at the heart of things.”51 He rejected the belief that society had a consciousness, a mind of its own and described this notion of a supraindividual being as intellectually unacceptable: The expression collective psychology or social psychology is often understood in a chimerical sense, which it is fundamental to dismiss. It consists in conceiving of a collective spirit, a social consciousness, a we, which supposedly exists outside of individual minds and above them.52

Tarde argued against the notion of collective genius, which—silently invoking the patron saint of all scientific revolutions, Francis Bacon— he described as yet another of these “metaphysical idols”.53 In contrast to organicist and holistic models of explanation, Tarde suggested that the reasons behind social phenomena were to be sought in the combinations 47

Ibid., . Ibid., . 49 Tarde, L’ opinion et la foule (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 50 Logique sociale, . 51 Tarde, “Monadologie et sociologie,” in Essais et mélanges sociologiques (Lyon-Paris: Storck-Masson, ), . 52 L’ opinion et la foule, . 53 Lois sociales, ; tr., . 48

the rise of the culture concept



of individual actions. The “collective genius” is only a “convenient label” describing a “composite” of individual talents.54 The collective character is an effect, not a cause, a “function” and not a “factor”,55 of individual thought and action. He derided the tendency to explain social life through the idea of collective personality, to envisage all social phenomena, from grammar to political institutions, as a mere reflection of a single underlying principle: These embodiments of collective character, appearing under the guise of metaphysical entities or idols, were endowed with a fictitious personal identity, which was, however, rather indefinite. Certain predispositions, supposed to be invincible, for some particular grammatical types, religious conceptions, or governmental forms, were freely attributed to them.56

Tarde’s third step was to criticise collective psychology for implying an inherent incompatibility of national characters, a fundamental enmity of peoples. He wrote that the notion of an intrinsic originality or distinctiveness of each national spirit described something more imagined than real. Speaking of “national spirits”, he wrote against the assumption of an “insuperable repugnance to borrowing conceptions or institutions from certain of their rivals.”57 Tarde believed, in contrast, in the openness of societies rather than in their closure. He suggested that, as societies evolve, the “indeterminacy of their actual borders, their mutual and continuous penetration” increase, in such a way that their “own personality” becomes “less clearcut and discontinuous . . . more and more internationalised”.58 Like individual persons, each society is crisscrossed by contradictory fluxes, many of which have their source, not in the society itself, but outside of it: the “state of continuous fermentation in the bosom of every society” is due to “the examples borrowed and exchanged with neighboring societies to their great mutual profit.”59 Tarde concluded that a society on a world-scale, like the one Comte had envisaged, may eventually come about: different human races, which are quite different in this respect from other living species, are collaborators as well as competitors; . . . they are called upon . . . to aid each other in the age-long achievement of a common social 54

Ibid., ; tr., . Ibid., ; tr., —using a different terminology: “The impersonal character is thus the product rather than the producer of the infinitely numerous individual characters.” 56 Ibid., ; tr., –. 57 Ibid., ; tr., . 58 Logique sociale, IX. 59 Lois sociales, ; tr., . 55



chapter three work, of a great final society whose unity will be the fruit of their very diversity.60

Tarde built his social theory upon a new conception of individual consciousness that rested on a general theory of being, a social ontology that he laid out in Monadology and Sociology. If sociologists, around , tried to establish the legitimacy of sociology by claiming a portion of reality solely for sociological pursuits, Tarde believed that reality as a whole had to be studied sociologically: “everything is a society, . . . any phenomenon is a social phenomenon.”61 He argued that all sciences follow the same path: they decompose their object in ever smaller particles (cells in biology, atoms and molecules in physics and chemistry).62 The problem that all sciences confront is that of the merger of smaller bodies into larger entities. Against both the mechanicist presuppositions underlying traditional atomism and the notion that nature is endowed with an overall purpose, Tarde argued that this merging does not occur either randomly or by virtue of a general, universal law.63 Rather, it is the orientation, the internal tendency, of each particle which is fundamental: each particle, according to Tarde, strives for the “assimilation and domination”,64 for the “possession”65 of the particles which surround it (since this striving is present in all, Tarde suggested that particles end up mutually possessing each other). His belief that identity is provisional was based on precisely such premises. Durkheim had argued that composite entities were of a higher level of reality than their parts, and that they determined at least in part the activity of each component. By contrast, Tarde rejected the theory of emergence and maintained that composite entities are merely the sum of their parts.66 But how could Tarde explain, in this case, that compounds have recognisable identities, a mode of being belonging to them alone? Tarde acknowledged that assimilation into a larger entity transforms the component parts. However, it is not so much the imposition of the larger entity, per se, but rather the influence exerted by other elements which causes the transformation. Identity should be understood in terms of the hegemonic diffusion of the properties of one element to other ones— 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Lois de l’ imitation, XVI–XVII; tr. (modified), XXI. “Monadologie,” . Ibid., –. Ibid., –, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –.

the rise of the culture concept



not in the political sense of a command or violent imposition,67 but in the social sense of a chain of imitation connecting all particles.68 For instance Tarde explained the consciousness and personality of individuals in terms of the “ruling monads”, the “chief elements of the brain”.69 Since Tarde’s ontology implies that all particles are in a dynamic relation (of imitation or opposition), the hegemony of a particle, i.e. the identity of beings and objects, is intrinsically provisional: “monads . . . can possess one another in thousands of different ways, and each of them has the desire to know news ways to possess its peers. Hence, their transformations.”70 As the title of his essay indicates, Tarde found inspiration in Leibniz, who in his Monadology () had described a world made of infinitely small spiritual entities in perpetual communication with one another. In contrast to Leibniz, however, Tarde did not postulate a universal harmony, and instead of communication stressed the conflicts and tensions which exist between all kinds of particles: material, biological or social. Durkheim had affirmed the greatness of sociology by declaring its object independent from natural determinations, by viewing it as a purely moral and mental entity. He maintained the classical notion of the specificity of humans in nature by suggesting that they live in a sphere of their own which is their creation, the result of their labour in history, the expression of their powers. By contrast, Tarde de-emphasised society in order to privilege, on the one hand, individuals (especially their faculties of invention and adaptation), and on the other hand the very principle of the social, understood as a faculty of combination and aggregation. Instead of pitting the natural against the social, as Durkheim did, Tarde saw them as two faces of the same coin.71 His ontology was a monist one: in Spinozist fashion he argued that everything belonged to the same plane of reality, that everything was immanent to everything. He thus abandoned the notion of transcendence, paradoxically so dear to the militant secularist Durkheim. In spite of this, however, Tarde’s way was different from that of earlier naturalist thinkers such as Taine, for whom the abandonment of transcendence was accompanied by a reduction of things to a plane of simpler, less grandiose reality. Tarde, by contrast, did not believe that

67 68 69 70 71

Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –.



chapter three

one could be reduced to being part of nature, since nature itself is an infinitely complex and changing reality, a “river of diversity which astonishes us”.72 The problem of the relationship of the social to the natural, as we saw in Chapter , had been a topic of inquiry for human scientists throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century: Tarde’s vitalistic ontology represented one of the most original and ambitious attempts at solving precisely this problem. “No Such Thing As a Collective Personality”: Max Weber’s Nominalist Sociology Trained as a lawyer in the last decades of nineteenth-century Germany, Max Weber (–) progressively turned to economics, history and sociology. His reason for doing so, according to William Outhwaite, was to put an end to the inconsiderate use of collective concepts that plagued the social thought of his time.73 Among many other collective concepts, Weber took issue with the notion of “national character”, as well as other terms of the human sciences of his time such as “nation”, “race” or “ethnicity”. In , Weber published a critical reflection on an important figure of the “historical school” in economics, Wilhelm Roscher (–). According to Weber, Roscher distinguished between a “philosophical” and a “historical” approach to social reality. The first one looked for the universal laws of phenomena, while the goal of the second one was to grasp events and objects in their particularity. Roscher sought to combine these two perspectives. He found inspiration in the work of the scholars of the German “historical school”, such as Friedrich Carl von Savigny or Leopold von Ranke. These scholars criticised the abstract “ ‘atomistic’ understanding of the nation”74 which had prevailed during the Enlightenment and described the nation instead as a “real being of a metaphysical nature”.75 The task of the human sciences was to understand the specific character of this being, to describe the cultural orientation of a whole people. Volksgeist (national spirit), Volksseele (national soul) or 72 Ibid., . This perspective has been taken up by Bruno Latour: “Far from being ‘lowered down’, ‘objectified humans’ will be elevated to the levels of ants, chimps, chips and particles! To be treated like things . . . is not to be ‘reduced’ to mere matters of fact, but allowed to live a life as multifarious as matters of concern.” Reassembling the Social, . 73 William Outhwaite, The Future of Society (Malden-Oxford: Blackwell, ), , . 74 Max Weber, “I. Roschers ‘historische Methode’,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck-UTB, ), . 75 Ibid.

the rise of the culture concept



Volkscharakter (national character) were the terms this school used to refer to the collective identity of nations. Weber believed that the specific risk of this approach was to “hypostasise” society76 by depicting it as an integrated whole in which each phenomenon was a particular expression of the same collective mentality. Since it was Roscher’s goal to bring together philosophical and historical approaches, he tried to combine the historical school’s emphasis on the local and the particular with a search for the general laws ruling social phenomena. He came up with the idea that nations, as collective individuals, all follow the same path of development: they are born, grow older, and eventually die.77 Weber dismissed this view as too abstract and verging on the mystical. Even its heuristic value is poor, insofar as it detracts from the crucial question of the always specific and historical causes of human development and social transformation,78 which are phenomena of “infinite complexity”.79 In order to account for such dimensions, Weber proposed instead to analyse national identity as the effect of social phenomena, as the “result of countless cultural interventions (Einwirkungen)”, rather than as their cause.80 In discussing puritanism in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (–), Weber quoted from the end of Milton’s Paradise Lost. He evoked the banning of Adam and Eve from Eden and the mission God gave them to inhabit the world and to transform it. Weber’s goal was to illustrate the importance attributed by puritans to worldly activity. He then explicitly warned against any interpretation of this passage as an expression of an “English character”, allegedly marked, as a common description of the English would suggest, by “independence, orderliness, domesticity, industry and activity”.81 Weber wrote that any use of the concept of “national character” (Volkscharakter) to account for social phenomena was a mere “confession of ignorance” (das Bekenntnis des Nicht-wissens).82 76

Ibid., . Ibid., . 78 Ibid., –. 79 Ibid., . 80 Ibid. 81 Mandler, The English National Character, . 82 Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck/UTB, ), ; tr., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, ), . On this see point, Sung Ho Kim, “Max Weber’s liberal nationalism,” History of Political Thought , no.  (), –. 77



chapter three

According to Weber, the approach in terms of “national character” was problematic on several counts. To begin with, it wrongly took the social to be “homogeneous” (einheitlich).83 Weber believed, in contrast, that even a cursory look at historical reality would show the irreconcilability of values and the political opposition of groups to be the most stringent phenomena of social life. For instance, Weber suggested that, in a given nation, the individuals belonging to different classes or occupations end up being markedly different in their political conceptions, religious beliefs, or lifestyle. At the same time, there is often a greater similarity between individuals of different nationalities but of the same class—for instance, English and German merchants—than between individuals of the same nation but of different classes.84 Second, the theories of “national character” were, like Roscher’s approach, methodologically flawed. They posited a metaphysical entity as the cause of all social phenomena, instead of offering a detailed historical description of the succession and combination of such phenomena. The comparative analysis of political developments and religious movements, not the description of fixed character types, is required to explain the historical peculiarities of the English and the Germans.85 In his discussion of “ethnic community relations” in Economy and Society,86 Weber expressed a similar distrust of characterological and raciological explanations. He rejected the objectivist understanding of “race membership”87—defined as the alleged possession of “common inherited and inheritable traits that actually derive from common descent”88—by arguing that race is sociologically relevant only when it is “subjectively perceived to be a common trait”.89 However, it is not race itself which produces this perception. The conviction of belonging to a distinct racial type rather emerges from social processes. Weber explained that there is a connection between the geographic proximity of social actors and the political need to act collectively. Potential 83

Protestantische Ethik, ; tr. (modified), . Ibid.; tr., . 85 Ibid. 86 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck, ), –; tr., Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Los Angeles-Berkeley: University of California Press, ), – . 87 Ibid., ; tr., . The German original is stronger: Rassenzugehörigkeit, literally “racial belonging”. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 84

the rise of the culture concept



social groups sharing a portion of territory acquire an identity through their experience of an opposition with neighbouring groups, an opposition which requires collective political action.90 The feeling of “race belonging” emerges when the members of the other group look as if they belonged to a different type (auffällig Andersgeartet).91 Visible characteristics (mostly, but not exclusively, bodily characteristics such as skin colour) are used as markers of difference to classify individuals into groups. In what Weber suggested was mere superstition these groups, in turn, are believed to be homogeneous: all in the sudden all its members, regardless of their actual conduct, are despised (or alternatively admired) on the mere basis of their group belonging. In short, the racialisation of difference, according to Weber, is an instrument in social and political conflicts. It serve the purpose of drawing an unbridgeable demarcation between groups. The argument of the “objectivity” of difference, in turn, legitimises unequal access rights to scarce material goods, or to ideal resources such as prestige and honour. Weber gave an example of this dynamic in a brief analysis of racial relations in the United States,92 where the permanence of race results from an effort of poor whites to maintain a clear distinction between racial types, with a view to exclude Blacks from accessing economically and socially privileged positions. This is a typical strategy to achieve what Weber called the “monopolisation of social power and honor”.93 According to Weber “nation”, like “ethnicity”, rests on the “vague” representation of common descent.94 A nation, far from being a really existing social entity, belongs to the sphere of values:95 it is a belief (Glaube), a sentiment (Nationalgefühl).96 While possibly confirmed by objective 90

This notion of a definition of identity in and through struggle is reminiscent of the position of Renan, described in the previous chapter. However, unlike Renan (and like Marx), Weber maintained that not just nations and civilisations, but all social groupings acquire an identity in this way. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., ; tr., . 93 Ibid., ; tr., . 94 Ibid., ; tr., . The classical treatment of Weber’s understanding of nation and nationalism, which in my view exaggerates the centrality of the nation for Weber, is Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, – (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). For a corrective, see Kim, “Max Weber’s liberal nationalism.” See also Zenonas Norkus, “Max Weber on nations and nationalism: political economy before political sociology,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie , no.  (). 95 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ; not included in the translation. 96 Ibid., ; tr., .



chapter three

commonalities of language and culture, such beliefs and sentiments do not stem from them. But exactly what kind of sentiment is nationalism? Weber explained that it is a strong feeling of pride to belong to a powerful political community: Hence, the concept seems to refer—if it refers at all to a uniform phenomenon—to a specific kind of pathos which is linked to the idea of a powerful political community of people who share a common language, or religion, or common customs, or political memories; such a state may already exist or it may be desired.97

According to Weber, nation and ethnicity are strong and widely diffused beliefs because of their capacity to offer a sense of community, of a collectivity to identify with. However, Weber did not seem to think that identification and belonging, by themselves, are primary psychological needs. He thus searched for another explanation of the desire to belong and concluded that national or ethnic sentiments are “intimately connected to the prestige interests” of individual members.98 As a rule, national and ethnic groups are large and politically powerful, and thus inspire respect, perhaps even awe. The individuals claiming to belong to them expect to be treated with the same respect and awe. In other words, the belief that one belongs to a national or ethnic community produces a sense of social honour: “The sense of ethnic honor is a specific honor of the masses (Massenehre), for it is accessible to anybody who belongs to the subjectively believed community of descent”.99 Morever, as we saw, one of the advantages of ethnic and national identification is that it may secure automatic, i.e. effortless, access to social status and material resources. Weber’s conclusions were unambiguous: “nation” and “ethnicity” should be used as sociological concepts with caution, if at all.100 That social solidarity originated in common descent could never be observed historically. Sociological analysis demonstrated, instead, that solidarity resulted from diverse factors: for instance, the familiarity emerging from repeated local encounters, or the recollection of collective experiences, or—most of all—the existence of a shared political project. In his critical treatment of the concepts of ethnicity and nationality, Max Weber was faithful to the strict methodological individualism he defended in 97

Ibid., ; tr., . Ibid., . 99 Ibid., ; tr., . 100 Weber dismissed them as “fully unusable for any really exact inquiry” and as concepts which “dissolve if we try to define our terms exactly.” Ibid., ; tr., . 98

the rise of the culture concept



his writings on the theory of science and in the introductory sections of his major sociological work, Economy and Society. Weber is famous for his nominalist conviction that all collective entities (Gebilde)—e.g. “party”, “state” or “nation”—are representations or categories of thought. While the use of such concepts cannot be avoided, social scientists need to bear in mind that the “reality” they refer to must be decomposed, and analysed as a result of the actions of individual persons: For the subjective interpretation of action in sociological work these collectivities [such as states, associations, business corporations, foundations] must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action. . . . for sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality which “acts”.101

In this methodological statement, Weber explicitly targeted the presociological naturalisms—in particular nineteenth-century organicism —which had characterised, at least in part, social thought until his time. These naturalisms had missed the specificity of organised human life. Because they saw the social from the standpoint of totality (the “social organism”, the “state”, the “nation”) and not from the standpoint of interindividual relations, and because they had a notion of causality directly imported from the natural sciences, they had overlooked the dimension of meaning. They thus attempted to explain social life causally or functionally, instead of interpreting it.102 They also favoured an analysis of general and recurring phenomena, thereby neglecting the peculiarity of historical events, which could be significant despite occurring only once. Weber undermined the very foundations of the notions of collective personality, including national character. As we saw in previous chapters, one of the peculiarities of nineteenth-century theories of national character was that they could be used in political arguments. More specifically, the rhetoric of character was used to bolster support for political institutions on the basis that they better corresponded to national habits. In his later political writings,103 Weber attacked this political use of 101

Ibid., ; tr., –. Ibid., ; tr., . 103 In contrast to his earlier texts, for instance the inaugural lecture he delivered at the university of Freiburg in , in which his thinking was still under the influence of a form of Social-Darwinism. On this, see Jean Terrier and Peter Wagner, “Declining deliberation: civil society, community, organized modernity,” in Languages of Civil Society, edited by Peter Wagner (Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, ), –. Also Sandro 102



chapter three

character. During the First World War, he wrote several articles advocating the transformation of Germany into a full-fledged parliamentary regime. He believed that such a transformation would allow for a more efficient selection of political leaders and for a tighter collective control over the government and the administration. In order to make his point, Weber needed to argue against the widespread belief that political institutions are determined by the character of the nation, or by existing cultural traditions. He criticised vigorously those he ironically called the Literaten (“littérateurs”, “men of letters”) for their misguided argument that the German temperament was incompatible with the parliamentary regime: “it is neither the case that parliamentary rule is alien to German history, nor that any of the systems opposed to parliamentary rule is uniquely peculiar to Germany”.104 He was hereby criticising those who were ready to trade authenticity and tradition for political and economic efficacy, and thus endangered the international standing of Germany. And he concluded with a striking formulation: “The Fatherland is not a mummy lying in the graves of our ancestors. Rather, it shall and must live as the land of our descendants.”105 Exchange and Flux: Cultural Forms According to Franz Boas The empirical work of Franz Boas (–), one the most influential anthropologist of the twentieth century in the United States, was principally dedicated to analysing the social life of Northern American Indians. His reports on his fieldwork among the Kwakiutl, famous for their practice of potlatch, inspired Marcel Mauss to write his famous essay on the gift, to which I come back later in this volume.106 But Boas was also the author of theoretical and methodological essays which contributed decisively to the demise of racial anthropology and to the establishment of the cultural paradigm within the discipline.107 Mezzadra, “Il giovane Max Weber, il diritto di fuga dei migranti tedeschi e gli stomaci polacchi,” in Il diritto di fuga. Migrazione, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (Verona: Ombre corte, ); Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, –. 104 Weber, “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland. Zur politischen Kritik des Beamtentums und Parteiwesens,” in Gesammelte politische Schriften (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck, ), ; tr., “Parliament and Government in Germany under a new political order,” in Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 105 Ibid., ; tr., . 106 Cf. Marie Mauzé, “Les Kwagul et le potlatch. Éléments pour une réévaluation,” L’ Homme , , no.  (). 107 George W. Stocking, “Ideas and institutions in American anthropology: thoughts

the rise of the culture concept



Like Weber and Durkheim, Boas fought the influence, in the social sciences, of three kinds of approaches which he believed were intellectually and politically problematic. First, Boas underlined that a “modern view” of society needs to start from the notion that individuals are embedded in social “interrelations” which, at least in part, condition behaviour.108 Since “situations [are] so persistently and early impressed upon us” our “social behavior” is indeed often “automatic” and “organically determined”.109 Boas contrasted this view with the classical “assumption that the individual exists in vacuo”110 and that mental activities develop independently from the environment they are part of. Second, Boas criticised the philosophy of history, as well as its pendant in the scientific realm, evolutionism. In the anthropology of Boas’s time, it was widely assumed that history moves forward through distinct stages towards a superior state of culture or civilisation. Here culture and civilisation were temporal rather than spatial concepts. They were used in opposition, not to nature (as we might have it today), but to savagery or barbarism.111 There was no place in such a conceptual framework for the idea of “cultures” or “civilisations” in the plural, since these concepts were used to describe human unity, and not human diversity.112 As Boas observed, [t]he evolutionary point of view presupposes that the course of historical changes in the cultural life of mankind follows definite laws which are applicable everywhere, and which bring it about that cultural development is, in its main lines, the same among all races and all peoples.113

This developmental path through history could be variously seen as imposed by divine providence, as mechanically resulting from the progressive accumulation of knowledge (as Condorcet suggested), or, in Hegelian fashion, as the manifestation of the logical progress of the spirit in history. Boas strongly rejected all these notions: “the history of human civilization does not appear to us as determined entirely by psychological

towards a history of the interwar years,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), –. 108 Franz Boas, “Some problems of methodology in the social sciences,” in Race, Language and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), . 109 Ibid., . 110 Ibid., . 111 George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, ), . 112 Ibid., –. 113 Boas, “The methods of ethnology,” in Race, Language and Culture, .



chapter three

necessity that leads to a uniform evolution the world over.”114 There is no “general evolutionary scheme” nor “inner causes which bring about similarities of development in remote parts of the globe.”115 The third kind of approach rejected by Boas was naturalism in its various guises. Boas rejected the climatological approach, according to which social life is a function of “geographical conditions”.116 Without denying that the environment needed to be taken into account in cultural analysis, he insisted that “geographical conditions become operative only when cultural conditions make their utilization important”.117 Boas’s most vehement attack, however, was the one he launched against this other form of naturalism, racialism. Race, Boas explained, is a “group of people that have certain bodily and perhaps also mental characteristics in common.”118 In other words, scientific racialism is a theory of the determination of individual and collective character by an inherited biological structure. The belief in the link between psychology and physiology was widespread at the time, to the point that Boas saw himself facing a number of studies on racial character that claimed scientific status. He referred to the “enormous amount of literature dealing with mental characteristics of race” and explained how this literature described “blond North-Europeans, South Italians, Negroes, Indians, Chinese . . . as though their mental characteristics were biologically determined.”119 Boas deployed a series of carefully crafted arguments against racial thought and mobilised to this end the whole apparatus of the social sciences of his time, from historiography to anthropometrical measurements to demographic data. His strategy was to offer a criticism of racialism from within, i.e., to refute it by turning its own method against itself.120 He looked at intelligence tests and observed that the lower results

114

Ibid., . Ibid., . 116 “Some problems,” . 117 Ibid., . 118 Boas, “Race and progress,” in Race, Language and Culture, . 119 Ibid., . 120 There has been recently, among anthropologists, a heated debate to assess whether Boas was right to claim he had statistically disproved racial science. See, among other articles: Clarence C. Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard, “Boas’s Changes in Bodily Form: The immigrant study, cranial plasticity, and Boas’s physical anthropology,” American Anthropologist , no.  (); Corey S. Sparks, Richard L. Jantz, “Changing times, changing faces: Franz Boas’s immigrant study in modern perspective,” American Anthropologist , no.  (). On a related topic, Laurière describes Boas’s direct involvement against National-Socialist racial science: Christine Laurière, 115

the rise of the culture concept



obtained by the members of certain countries disappeared if one controlled for the degree of urbanisation.121 He aimed at empirically proving, against the reigning racial assumption that bodily characteristics were transmitted without modification, that the anthropometrical measurements (such as the cephalic index or the width of the face) of the immigrants to the United States were different from those of their descendants.122 He emphasised that intermingling did not result “in a progeny less vigorous”, and that “[b]iological degeneracy” on the contrary, was rather to be found “in small districts of intense inbreeding.”123 Boas came to the conclusion that “[e]thnological evidence is all in favor of the assumption that hereditary racial traits are unimportant as compared to cultural conditions.”124 In other words, Boas could not believe “that any convincing proof has ever been given of a direct relation between race and culture.”125 What all these naturalistic approaches have in common is what we may call causalism—i.e., the belief that the task of any science, including human science, consists in discovering a small number of laws which determine mechanically the position and shape of objects. Against this nomothetic approach, Boas took the social sciences, the “Geisteswissenschaften”, to be “historical sciences”126 whose primary concern should always be for the local, the contextual. Consequently, these sciences should refrain from trying to mimic the natural sciences, especially in their propensity to search for universal laws. Boas noted that “attempts to reduce all social phenomena to a closed system of laws applicable to every society and explaining its structure and history do not seem a promising undertaking.”127 The de-naturalization of the social amounts to the rejection of the idea that one can identify a natural cause (such as climate or race) which works towards the homogenisation of the conduct of the individual members of a given collectivity. However, an anti-naturalistic

“L’ anthropologie et le politique, les prémisses: les relations entre Franz Boas et Paul Rivet (–),” L’ Homme – (). 121 “Race and progress,” –. 122 Boas, “Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants,” in Race, Language and Culture. 123 “Race and progress,” . 124 Ibid., . 125 “Some problems,” . 126 Ibid., . 127 Ibid.



chapter three

approach is not necessarily averse to the notion that the social may display a high degree of unity (even though it typically tends to interpret it, as we shall see, as an always resistible historical tendency). Boas, as a matter of fact, did not avoid the expression “national character”. As we saw, this notion typically entailed three assumptions: first, the members of any society share a stable set of psychological characteristics; second, these characteristics are transmitted from one generation to the next, so that they can be said to be roughly stable over time; and third, these shared characteristics make each society not only distinct from neighbouring societies, but even to a large extent, incompatible with them. Boas seems to have endorsed the first of these assumptions. He declared that “each population has a certain character that is expressed in its behavior, so that there is a geographical distribution of types of behavior.”128 He also spoke of the “characteristic mental behavior” displayed by every people.129 On the other hand, however, he distanced himself from the two other dimensions of the notion of national character. His sensitivity to history led him to believe that no culture was permanent, in the sense that it could reproduce itself through time without change. Modifiability was for him a constitutive part of social life: As soon as these methods [of cultural analysis] are applied, primitive society loses the appearance of absolute stability which is conveyed to the student who sees a certain people only at a certain given time. All cultural forms rather appear in a constant state of flux and subject to fundamental modifications.130

Similarly, Boas refused to conceive of societies as fundamentally closed entities. He subscribed to the so-called “diffusionist” frame of explanation: For anthropologists, it meant that instead of analysing the presence of similar institutions or techniques in different cultures as a proof that the human mind functions everywhere according to uniform laws (as evolutionists would think), they should see it as a sign either of migration or of direct borrowing.131 Boas observed that new ideas and social forms are often introduced into societies by individuals originally foreign to the group. This is an important factor of cultural change:

128 129 130 131

“Race and progress”, . Boas, “Race and character,” in Race, Language and Culture, . “The methods of ethnology,” . Boas, “Evolution or diffusion,” in Race, Language and Culture.

the rise of the culture concept



In earlier times the carrying away of women after raids, adoptions of foreigners, or similar phenomena must have been a fruitful source of introduction of foreign ideas . . . The introduction of new ideas must by no means be considered as resulting purely mechanically in additions to the cultural pattern, but also as an important stimulus to new inner developments.132

In his critique of racialism, Boas addressed the propensity of humans to meet and mix regardless of cultural boundaries. He conceived of societies as relatively open to intersocial contact. This was the opposite of an emphasis on closure and incommensurability. As I will show in a later chapter, these points were taken up and further developed by another prominent anthropologist, influenced by Boas: Marcel Mauss. Society and “Conscience Collective”: Durkheim on Society and Morality In early twentieth-century human science, several authors launched an attack against the theories of “national character”, rejecting the assumptions of homogeneity, stability and incommensurability it typically entailed. Because of its naturalistic and sometimes racialist connotations, they often proposed to abandon the term “character” itself. Weber went so far as to suggest that we should dodge the concept of “nation” as well. Emile Durkheim, too, avoided the use of the expression “national character”. Given its diffusion in the human sciences of the time, this can only mean that Durkheim saw seriously flaws in the theories underlying the notion of character. Like Weber and Boas, Durkheim, as we saw, fought the naturalism and the reductionism of the human sciences of his time by declaring the social a moral realm mostly free from the influence of climate or race. Durkheim also rejected the psychological explanations which attempted to account for social events and institutions by reference to intrinsic tendencies built in all humans. While he took social cohesion to be an allimportant feature of life in common, he argued that in advanced societies only a few fundamental values, such as the supreme worth of individual life, are shared. The members of society are, otherwise, relatively free to pursue their own good in their own way: because they are autonomous,

132

Ibid., .



chapter three

they must also be diverse. This was Durkheim’s way of relativising the assumption of social homogeneity. Similarly, Durkheim denied that societies were condemned to remain perpetually the same. In fact, he can count as an important thinker of progress and social change. Although afraid of the moral void that revolutions may create,133 and thus considering a moderate pace of change to be more sustainable, he explicitly theorised, as I show in detail in the next chapter, the passage from one social form to the next. Durkheim believed that any wide-ranging social transformation, such as secularisation, urbanisation or industrialisation, may trigger feelings of uncertainty and disorientation at the individual level, possibly resulting in a social crisis. However, he considered sociology to be a science capable of offering solutions to such malaise.134 Durkheim put his hope above all, on the one hand, in intermediary institutions symbolising society and conveying its binding moral force; on the other, in education, which he thought could spread a sounder feeling of the interdependence of all individuals and a vision of the importance of discipline, cohesion, and respect in social life.135 Concerning lastly the question of international relations, Durkheim adopted a complex position, as we saw in the previous chapter. He lacked a strong theory of social relations across national boundaries and viewed societies as self-contained and self-centred. However, he did not exclude the possibility of their merger into broader entities. At any rate, he did not believe in the incompatibility of national cultures, despite addressing this topic in some of his writings.136 Durkheim’s main assumptions, thus, differed on many points at least from the most extreme among the theories of national character. In spite of this, however, there are few areas of overlap. First, Durkheim remained faithful to the notion of collective personality. As a matter of fact, as I suggest in the next chapter, he is one of the most systematic and rigorous

133

Cf. Emile Durkheim, “Internationalisme et lutte des classes,” in La science sociale et l’ action (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ). 134 This theme is especially apparent in Durkheim, “Cours de science sociale. Leçon d’ ouverture,” in La science sociale et l’ action. 135 Durkheim, L’ éducation morale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ); Durkheim, L’ évolution pédagogique en France,  vol. (Paris: Alcan, ). 136 Most prominently in his war pamphlet against Germany. I have analysed this text in Jean Terrier, “The impact of war on the French human sciences and the image of Germany: –,” in War and Peace: The Role of Science and Art, edited by Soraya Sour and Olivier Remaud (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ).

the rise of the culture concept



thinkers of this notion in the history of social theory. Second, Durkheim, like the theorists of character, emphasised internal social cohesion and solidarity instead of conflict and power. In this, Durkheim differed from Tarde and Weber. These scholars emphasised that social arrangements result from interindividual, social and political conflicts, so that they must be seen more as unstable compromises that as expressions of an internal harmony. Even while sharing some notions with the theory of character Durkheim, as already mentioned, rejected the expression itself.137 When speaking of common values and beliefs, typical modes of thought, traditional institutional forms, and the like, Durkheim often suggested that they were the manifestation of “conscience collective”. This expression bore a fortuitous ambiguity with which Durkheim could play, as he did with the ambiguity of the term “moral”.138 “Conscience” has the double meaning of consciousness and moral conscience. Sociology, the science of “conscience collective”, was thus also a moral science. Moreover, the expression “conscience collective” was helpful for Durkheim, insofar as it enabled him to retain the personalist metaphor which was present in the notion of character, while getting rid of its naturalistic connotations. “Character” could easily be understood as the manifestation of deeplyseated tendencies similar to natural instincts. Conscience, instead, suggested that there was a clear dimension of reflexivity and morality in collective life. The choice of the term amounted to a declaration that society, far from being based on mere instincts, was the embodiment of abstract principles with an ethical value. From the point of view of a history of concepts in the human sciences, “collective consciousness” did not have the success that Durkheim may 137 There are, though, a few exceptional occurrences. For instance, Durkheim wrote at the end of the Division of Labour: “every people forms regarding this alleged type of humanity a personal conception that derives from its personal temperament. Each one represents it in its own image. Even the moralist who believes he is able, by the power of thought, to withdraw himself from he influence of surrounding ideas, cannot succeed in doing so. For he is entirely permeated by them, and whatever he does, it is they that he discovers once more at the conclusion of his deductions. This is why every nation has a school of moral philosophy that is in harmony with its character.” Emile Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Presses universitaires de France-Quadrige, ), ; tr., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, ), . It is worth noting that Durkheim, while usually avoiding “national character”, commonly used expressions such as “national genius” or “national spirit”. 138 In French, “moral” means at the same time “related to mœurs”, i.e. customs or mores, and “consistent with the principles of morality”. On this point, see Romani, National Character, .



chapter three

have hoped for. Unlike “collective representations”, another term he proposed to refer to the shared ideas and ideals which make up social life, it was not adopted by enough scholars to become a common term in social thought. By contrast, yet another term, also introduced in these years, was successful in replacing the expression of “national character”, as well as related ones such as “national genius” or “collective spirit”. It was the term “culture”, which in the first half of the twentieth century was promoted to play a central role in the human sciences by prominent scholars such as Weber, Boas, Mauss, and later Lévi-Strauss. An Object for the Human Sciences: The Rise of the Culture Concept In nineteenth century France, the term “culture” was connected to evolutionism. As suggested above, “culture” was predominantly used, during the nineteenth century, to describe a moment or a stage in historical development. As a term, culture had an important rival, namely “civilisation”. Both terms were often used as synonyms, and they both referred to a set of characteristics of societies that have reached a higher stage of development. In The Future of Science (L’ avenir de la science, written in ), Ernest Renan argued that the aim of political action was ultimately to realise the highest possible human culture, i.e. the most perfect religion, through science, philosophy, art, in a word through all the means in our possession to reach the ideal that belong to the nature of man.139

Culture and civilisation, in other words, had a meaning rather similar to “modernity” today: already in nineteenth-century writings, “modern” and “civilisation” were often used together.140 In contrast to such connotations, the contemporary view of culture, according to the historian of anthropology George W. Stocking, is made of three elements: completeness (cultures are complete in themselves and can by definition not be defective), plurality (the human world is made

139 Ernest Renan, L’ avenir de la science (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ), , cited in Jörg Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol.  (Verw-Z), edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cota, ), . 140 For example, Auguste Comte, in his widely read text from  Discours de l’ esprit positif (Paris: Société positiviste, ), repeatedly used the phrase “civilisation moderne”.

the rise of the culture concept



of many cultural entities), and universality (all social phenomena have a cultural dimension and all human beings are equally cultured).141 The founders of the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology as we understand them today were convinced of important shortcomings in evolutionism, and more generally in any progressive philosophy of history. Before they could use the terms “culture” or “civilisation” for their purposes, they had to rid them of some of their usual connotations. In an illustration of Stocking’s third principle, Max Weber argued that we all are “cultural beings” (Kulturmenschen).142 He was among those who redefined the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) as sciences of culture (Kulturwissenschaften).143 The object of the study of human beings in society, Weber argued, are indeed “human cultural institutions and cultural processes”.144 On the other hand, however, Weber did not give a clear-cut definition of what he meant by culture. He certainly did not mean by this a meaningful totality. Rather, culture was for him a “standpoint” (Standpunkt),145 an individual capacity to consider certain things as having a value. Thus when Weber spoke of “cultural phenomena” or “cultural processes” (in his work the term “culture” is typically used in such adjectival forms), he was referring to the fact that such phenomena and processes have a meaning and represent a value for individuals, as opposed to being mere manifestations of the pursuit of material interests. A further fact to consider is that “culture” is not presented as one of the fundamental concepts of sociological reasoning at the beginning of Economy and Society.146 This section contained a definition of “meaning”, “social action”, “social relation”, and “power”, but no definition of “culture” nor, for that matter, of “society”. Concerning the term “society”, Weber suggested in the same section that we should replace it with the twin neologisms Vergemeinschaftung (roughly, “communalisation”) and Vergesellschaftung (roughly, “association”).147 The purpose of such 141 George W. Stocking, “Franz Boas and the concept of culture in historical perspective,” American Anthropologist , no.  (), . 142 Weber, “Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozial-politischer Erkenntnis,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck-UTB, ), . 143 Cf. Laurence A. Scaff, “Fleeing the Iron Cage: Politics and culture in the thought of Max Weber,” The American Political Science Review , no.  (), –. 144 Weber, “Die Objektivität”, . 145 Ibid., . 146 Weber, “Soziologische Grundbegriffe,” in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, –. 147 Ibid., –.



chapter three

replacement was to emphasise the processual character of social reality. All this suggests that Weber found the concept of “culture” to be useful, but that he was at the same time wary that it could, like all collective concepts, lead inattentive readers to hypostasise the reality it was supposed to describe.148 Similar ambiguities (namely, an intense use of a concept coupled with a certain terminological imprecision) can also be found in Boas’s reflection.149 He too refrained form offering a definition of culture,150 even though his overall position was clear: “culture” had to become the primary object of the human sciences. The “subject-matter” of cultural anthropology, according to Boas, is “the study of the origin and history of cultural forms and of the interrelations between individual mental life and culture.”151 Culture is here understood as a system of relations between the various aspects of social life, which only at first sight seem separate: “[i]nventions, economic life, social structure, art, religion, morals are all interrelated”152 in such a way that any “[c]ulture is integrated”.153 Even though this integration implies that each culture is an entity with a specific identity, it does not mean that cultures are completely closed to the outside or internally deprived of tensions. As we saw, for Boas cultures are capable of change, especially under the influence of other cultures: “each cultural group has its own unique history, dependent partly upon the peculiar inner development of the social group, and partly upon the foreign influences to which it has been subjected.”154 During Marcel Mauss’s lifetime, the meaning of culture as habits and social representations common to the individuals of a specific group had not yet appeared France. Mauss was one of the first to use this term in this anthropological sense, even though he had recourse to it only spar-

148

On this point, see the observations in Hans-Peter Müller, Max Weber: Eine Einführung in sein Werk (Cologne: Böhlau/UTB, ), , . 149 As Reinhart Koselleck observed, however, the ambiguity of meaning is actually for concepts a sign of success: “Social and political concepts possess a substantial claim to generality and always have many meanings . . . A word presents potentialities for meaning; a concept unites within itself a plenitude of meaning. Hence, a concept can possess clarity, but must be ambiguous.” Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and social history,” in Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, ), –. 150 On this see Stocking, “Franz Boas.” 151 Boas, “The aims of anthropological research,” in Race, Language and Culture, . 152 Ibid., . 153 Ibid., . 154 Boas, “The methods of ethnology,” .

the rise of the culture concept



ingly. In a text written around  and published posthumously, La nation, which I will discuss at full length in Chapter , he defined the nation as “as a morally and materially integrated society,” displaying a “relative moral, mental, and cultural unity”.155 Interestingly, Mauss suggested that “culture” was for him almost synonymous with the traditional expression “national character”. In the text I have just cited, he offered an alternative definition of the nation as a society whose boundaries correspond to “a race, a civilisation, a language, a morality (morale), in a word a national character.”156 A fragment from , recently published by his biographer, Marcel Fournier, further attests that Mauss took “culture” and “national character” to be terms roughly equivalent in meaning: Let us call all social facts ‘facts of civilisation’. This is obvious: a society is a totality made up of men, of the things they possess, of their representations and of the practices they engage in: techniques, arts, religion, law, etc. The totality of such collective representations and practices constitutes a collective mentality. Like the mentality of individuals it is characterised, in turn, by the proportions and the nature of the various behaviours of which it is capable. We call it, using an inadequate word (mauvais mot): “civilisation”, or an even more inadequate one: kultur, culture. We shall call it its ethology, its character.157

This quote is interesting because it shows that in these years “culture” was not yet fully established as a concept for the human sciences, and that the term still very much felt like an awkward importation from the German language. In the Francopone and Anglophone contexts, it is only in the years – that the term “culture” acquired the centrality it still has today for the human sciences. Several factors can be mentioned here to explain this transformation. First, the changes in the political context must be taken into account. During and after the Second World War, “culture” gained currency since its historical rivals were replete with now problematic connotations. Because of its links to nineteenth-century racialism and nationalism, “national character” posed obvious problems. Similarly, we have good reasons to believe that the other historical rival of “culture”, namely “civilisation”, receded in these same years because it entailed too strong 155 Marcel Mauss, “La nation,” in Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie, vol.  of Œuvres (Paris: Minuit, ), . 156 Ibid., . The existence of two definitions of the nation in the same text pose specific philological problems which I discuss in the next chapter. 157 Mauss, “Fait social et formation du caractère,” Sociologie et sociétés XXXVI,  (), .



chapter three

an idea of linear progress.158 Under post-war conditions, when Europe was in ruins and the colonial world struggled for independence, the idea that Western civilisation could be described as the bearer of historical progress appeared as somewhat mistaken. Against such a background, it is possible to understand why in the late forties the then emergent cultural organism of the United Nations, UNESCO, asked a team of human and natural scientists (including Claude Lévi-Strauss) to draft a position paper on the validity of the concept of race. Their conclusion was that “race” described at best physical differences, and that such differences had no impact on mental and social phenomena. It suggested, further, that other terms such as “ethnic group” and “culture” should be preferred when referring to the fact of human diversity.159 Second, individual contributions played an important role. In , Ruth Benedict published her Patterns of Culture, which was a considerable success, selling , copies in the years following its publication. It is this book that Margaret Mead, in her  preface, described as responsible for the fact that “today the modern world is on such easy terms with the concept of culture, that the words ‘in our culture’ slip from the lips of educated men and women” so easily and naturally.160 In , Bronislaw Malinowski published his influential Scientific Theory of Culture.161 Lastly, Claude Lévi-Strauss published in  his Race et histoire, which in France marked a paradigmatic turning point: it contributed to make the use of racial concepts a taboo in the human sciences, and promoted instead the notion of culture.162

158

Interestingly, the concept of civilisation has experienced a return in recent years, not least due to the impact of Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon and Schuster, ). See my remarks on this text in “Culture et types de l’ action sociale,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales— Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto LX, no.  (). 159 UNESCO, “Statement by experts on race problems,” (Paris: Unesco,  June ), available at www.unesco.org (accessed on August , ). This topic has been studied by many researchers in recent years. See Wiktor Stoczkowski, “Racisme, antiracisme et cosmologie lévi-straussienne. Un essai d’ anthropologie réflexive,” L’ homme , no.  (); Mandler, The English National Character, –; Ivan Hannaford, Race. The History of an Idea in the West (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, ), – . 160 Margaret Mead, “Preface,” in Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), xi. 161 Bronislaw Malinowski, A Sientific Theory of Culture (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, ). 162 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, ); tr., Race and history (Paris: UNESCO, ).

the rise of the culture concept



An interesting aspect of Lévi-Strauss’s reflection of the concept of culture is that he saw it as a replacement for the expression “national character”. In his introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss (), he spoke of the “illusions which still today are attached to the notion . . . of ‘national character’, with all the vicious circles which derive from it.”163 According to Lévi-Strauss, the fundamental error of the theory of character is to envisage the individual psyche as a reflection or an effect of the character of the group, envisaged here as a central social cause.164 However, Lévi-Strauss argued, there is no collective character except in its manifestations in the mind of individuals. In other words, collective beings do not exist.165 Moreover, the connection between the social and the mental is not of a causal nature; it is rather a form of adaptation and “translation”166 of underlying universal anthropological structures. The result of this translation is culture itself, understood as an “ensemble of symbolic systems, among which primarily language, marriage rules, economic relations, art, science, religion are to be found”.167 The emergence of the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology undermined the foundation of the nineteenth-century theories of character. The term “culture” eventually came to replace other collective concepts such as “national character” of “collective spirit”, which had been in use since the eighteenth century. However, at least some aspects of the rhetoric of character did remain present in the new theories of culture. To begin with, the metaphor according to which societies can be seen as persons was still used by the proponents of the culture concept. For instance, Ruth Benedict took the task of anthropology to consist primarily in describing the “collective personality” of each society. As Mead wrote: she [Benedict] developed her own special contribution, her view of human cultures as “personality writ large”, her view that it was possible to see each culture, no matter how small and primitive or how large and complex, as having selected from the great arc of human potentialities certain characteristics and having elaborated them with greater strength and intensity that any single individual could ever do in one lifetime.168 163 Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’ oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), XXIII. 164 Ibid., XVI. 165 Against Ruth Benedict, Lévi-Strauss stressed that “societies are not persons”. Cited in Frédéric Keck, Lévi-Strauss. Une introduction (Paris: Pocket, ), . 166 Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction”, XVI. 167 Ibid., XIX. 168 Mead, “Preface,” XI–XII. On the persistance of notions inherited from the theory



chapter three

This testifies of the remarkable resilience of the personalist imaginary in the human sciences. Despite its extreme complexity, and despite its numerous transformations since , the language of the social persistently continued to have recourse to the metaphor that societies can legitimately be compared to persons. Moreover, this recourse is something that the language of the social shares with other important languages, such as the political language of sovereignty, which as we saw in Chapter  described the state as a collective person. I will return to these problems in the Epilogue to this volume and propose an explanation for the persistence and pervasiveness of the notion of collective personality. Another aspect that the theories of “national character” and those of “culture” have in common is a tendency to emphasise the closure of the entities they scrutinise. For instance, Lévi-Strauss repeatedly described intercultural contact as dangerous, because it undermines the identity of societies. This theme, which was already present in Race et histoire and Tristes Tropiques (), became especially prominent later in his career, culminating in a conference from , “Race and culture”, in which Lévi-Strauss took issue with cosmopolitan and multicultural ideals. He criticised them for overlooking that aesthetic and even spiritual originality requires independence from foreign influence: No doubt we cherish the hope that one day equality ad fraternity will reign among men without impairing their diversity. But if humanity is not to resign itself to becoming a sterile consumer of the values it created in the past and of those alone, capable only of producing hybrid works and clumsy and puerile inventions, it will have to relearn the fact that all true creation implies a certain deafness to outside values, even to the extent of rejecting or denying them.169

It seems that similar assumptions of closure are still part of the very concept of culture even today. For instance, probably the most influential theoretician of culture in post-war social anthropology, Clifford Geertz, has been repeatedly criticised for his failure to theorise international exchange and the circulation of ideas across boundaries, and for his assumption that there exists stable, unitary identities of groups.170 Similarly, the philosopher of multiculturalism Charles Taylor, claiming of national character after the Second World War, see Claret, La personnalité collective. 169 Lévi-Strauss, “Race and culture,” International Social Science Journal XXIII, no.  (), –. 170 For the corresponding references, see my observations on cultural historians in the introduction to this volume.

the rise of the culture concept



to find inspiration in anthropology, defines culture as an entity “which has a language and a set of practices which define specific understandings of personhood, social relations, states of mind/soul, goods and bads, virtues and vices, and the like. These languages are often mutually untranslatable.”171 Statements such as those of Lévi-Strauss or Taylor seem to contrast with the view, held by Gabriel Tarde, that societies are in a situation of perpetual exchange with one another, or even with Franz Boas’s notion that the identity of cultures must often be understood as resulting, at least in part, from foreign influences which potentially enrich them. On the other hand, neither Tarde nor Boas nor, for that matter, Weber, offered a full-fledged theory of the kind of social relations which may develop on an international scale—that is, a theory of intersocial relations. The development of such a theory, as we shall see in Chapter , was one of the intellectual achievements of Marcel Mauss. Before coming to this, however, I wish to turn to the most prominent and complex theorisation of, not international relations, but the social itself, in the history of human sciences in France: I have in mind the work of Emile Durkheim.

171 Charles Taylor, “Modernity and the rise of the public sphere,” in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, ), . Italics mine, JT.

chapter four “IN US, BUT NOT OF US”. THE LOCATION OF SOCIETY ACCORDING TO EMILE DURKHEIM*

In the previous chapter, I have showed that there was a shift, around , in the language of the social. The explanation of social events by reference to non-social, natural factors was increasingly perceived as unsatisfactory. In particular, the nineteenth-century language of the social had made the establishment of sociology and social anthropology more difficult as independent disciplines, since they suggested that the analysis of social events should in part be the task of sciences such as physical anthropology or climatology. Instead, the proponents of the new disciplines tried to give further legitimacy to their disciplines by arguing that they possessed a method of their own and an object which was to a large extent independent from other realms of reality. Another aspect is that by overemphasising the notion of a determination of human action the nineteenth-century language of the social, as we saw in Chapter , posed political problems: specifically, it made social change more difficult to envisage. By contrast, the supporters of the Third Republic, who sought to offer arguments in favour of social and economic reform, were in need of a theory of social transformation. Such developments in the language of the social are probably best exemplified by the work Emile Durkheim, in which the very concepts of “society” and “the social” receive their theoretically most systematic and complex treatment. Durkheim’s Fundamental Question: The Location of Society Durkheim famously noted in his Division of Labour in Society that solidarity—perhaps the most social of all phenomena—did not lend itself to being immediately observed or measured. According to him, * For their extremely enlightening comments on this chapter, I wish to thank Gianfranco Poggi and Susan Stedman Jones.



chapter four social solidarity is a wholly moral phenomenon which by itself is not amenable to exact observation and especially not to measurement. . . . we must therefore substitute for this internal datum, which escapes us, an external one which symbolizes it, and then study the former through the latter.1

Solidarity could only be observed indirectly by viewing the phenomena it produced, which were also its “symbols”. Arguably, the same could be said of society itself, insofar as it is an abstract entity that as such cannot be perceived by our senses:2 society is an “imagined community”3 composed of individuals who, for the most part, never meet in person. This is the reason why, as a scientific object, society seems to have an elusive and mysterious character: it can be represented, but not be directly experienced. Durkheim attempted to demonstrate that society, nonetheless, can be shown to have a logic and stability of its own and that within the framework of a new science it could be studied systematically. This new science, of which Durkheim became one of the most committed proponents, was sociology. While Durkheim’s ideas on society undeniably changed in the course of his career, it remains difficult to identify a clear evolution in his work. Many ideas were first formulated, then abandoned, before being taken up again and re-worked. For reasons that shall appear below we should rather speak, instead of an evolution of Durkheim’s thought, of shifting emphases, new formulations, as well as conceptual and theoretical reelaborations. Nevertheless, in his attempts to define society, Durkheim was always faithful to certain fundamental methodological principles. As early as , in his “Opening Lecture” on sociology, Durkheim averred that sociology is the study of a specific domain of reality that belongs to it alone. Sociology is defined primarily by its relation to an object and by the specificity of the method it uses to study it. This principle led Durkheim to repeatedly address the question of the location of society. If, indeed, society is an object, a thing (“every object of science is a thing”),4 there must be a place it can be said to occupy. This “place”, however, 1 Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, ), . 2 Durkheim, Le suicide. Etude de sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), –; tr., Suicide: A Study in Sociology (London: Routledge, ), . 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, ). 4 Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), XI; tr. (modified), The Rules of Sociological Method: and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), .

the location of society



should not be understood merely in the material sense of a “fragment of space”, but also in the broader one of a “particular order of natural phenomena”,5 a “region” or a “part of reality”6—not all of which exists in space. Analogous to this principle, he maintained that sociologists should always resist the temptation to understand “society” as the mere effect of a cause that is “extra-social”.7 Society should never be taken to be a mere reflection or epiphenomenon, in the realm of social relations, of the deeper action of race, climate, national character, or individual preferences, as that would undermine the sociological project itself by reducing this science to a variant of physical anthropology, climatology, or psychology (collective or individual). Durkheim believed instead that sociology as an independent science was possible both because society occupies a specific level of reality (as suggested above) and because this level is causally independent of other levels. Society can be described, using one of Durkheim’s favourite expressions, as a reality sui generis. Very early on, Durkheim developed a stable concept of society as a thing belonging to an independent order of reality. This notion of society clearly begged further questions, however. Where should one locate this powerful entity that society was supposed to be? From where and how could it exert its effects? And according to which logic could society transform itself? In what follows, I propose to address these questions through the consideration of a term that Durkheim used in his entire work, albeit a term never elevated to the rank of a central sociological category: the “substratum”. This chapter explains how Durkheim understood this term and what role it played in his thinking, which is why its definition will be fully clear only later on. However, one can already suggest at this stage that the substratum, for Durkheim, refers to the constitutive, underlying elements of which something is made.8 In , in his first published article, Durkheim suggested that one of the tasks of sociology was to locate the social substratum. In his review of a book by the German sociologist Albert Schäffle, he wondered how 5

Durkheim, “Cours de science sociale. Leçon d’ ouverture,” in La science sociale et l’ action (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., “Course in sociology. Opening lecture,” in On Institutional Analysis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), . 6 Durkheim, “La sociologie et son domaine scientifique,” in Textes, vol.  (Paris: Minuit, ), . 7 Suicide, Book . 8 Bruno Karsenti, La société en personnes: études durkheimiennes (Paris: Economica, ), .



chapter four

exactly one should understand his notion of “collective consciousness”, which played such an important role in this work. Durkheim asked whether one should see it as a “simple and transcendent being, soaring above society”,9 immediately adding that there was something metaphysical in a notion that posited an “essence deep within things”. Instead, one could conceive of the “collective mind” as a result of the specific combination of various individual minds (an idea to which Durkheim returned several times in his career). According to this view, the “collective mind” is a “composite whose elements are individual minds.” These minds, however, are not “mechanically juxtaposed or closed off from one another”, but always stand in relation to one another through the mediation of a continuous “exchange of symbols”. This, according to Durkheim, effectively gives birth to an “entirely new psychological being”. The national consciousness could thus be understood as a “consciousness of consciousnesses” (une conscience de consciences). Durkheim, however, also maintained that the question remained open as to how the ultimate, “invisible substratum” of this collective spirit could ever be apprehended. He confessed that “this is precisely what human understanding cannot know”, and went on to suggest that finding an answer to this question would require an act of faith. Durkheim, of course, knew that this sleight of hand had not really solved the question. This chapter demonstrates that the initial question of the social substratum continued to preoccupy him throughout his career, during the course of which he proposed various answers to it. The Question of the Material Substratum Let us begin with what Durkheim fairly consistently called the “material substratum” of society: the visible, external, tangible aspect of social life that is easiest to sociologically grasp since it possesses “material forms” which are “immediately perceptible”.10 “Material substratum” in Durkheim’s parlance refers to the “body social”, i.e. to “the social space, together with the population which occupies that space.”11 In a short 9 Durkheim, “Organisation et vie du corps social selon Schaeffle,” in Textes, vol. , ; tr., “Review of Albert Schaeffle, Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers: Erster Band,” in On Institutional Analysis, . All quotes in this paragraph are from the same essay and pages. 10 “La sociologie et son domaine,” . 11 Durkheim and Paul Fauconnet, “Sociologie et sciences sociales,” in Textes, vol. 

the location of society



introduction, in the second issue, to the section of L’ Année sociologique dedicated to social morphology, Durkheim explained that [s]ocial life rests upon a substratum determinate in both size and form. It is made up of the mass of individuals who constitute society, the manner in which they have settled upon the earth, the nature and configuration of those things of all kinds which affect collective relationships.12

Material substratum thus refers to the material constraints limiting and conditioning social life. It also refers to the material dimension of the social organisation of space, including the distribution of objects and bodies within this space. In several of his writings, Durkheim came back to this notion and gave, in the form of examples, more precise indications as to the nature of the material substratum. Three kinds of phenomena can be said to be constitutive of it. First: The “geographic base”13—the territory on which the members of a given society live. This includes “the extension of territory”, the “geographical situation” of society (central or peripheral), as well as the nature of its borders.14 Especially relevant here is the question of the advantages and disadvantages of the territory in the deployment of social activities (quality of the land, availability of natural resources, obstacles such as mountains and rivers, etc.).15 Even though one can imagine that there are specific social uses of such geographical conditions, we are dealing here with phenomena that are not integrally social and cannot count stricto sensu as social facts. Second: the “social base” or the quantitative dimension of social life: Durkheim had in mind here the quantity and density of the population, the spatial disposition of groups on a given territory, the succession of generations, etc.16 Third: the direct material manifestations of social life, including the position of houses and buildings in villages or cities,17 but also roads and other channels of communication such as bridges and railways.18 (Paris: Minuit, ), ; tr.: “Sociology and the social sciences,” in The Rules of Sociological Method, . 12 Durkheim, “Morphologie sociale,” L’ Année sociologique , – (), ; tr., “Social morphology,” in The Rules of sociological method, . 13 “Sociologie et sciences sociales,” ; tr., . 14 “La sociologie et son domaine,” . 15 “Sociologie et sciences sociales,” ; tr., . 16 Cf. “La sociologie et son domaine,”  and “Morphologie,” ; tr., . 17 Règles, –; tr., . Cf also “Morphologie” and “La sociologie et son domaine,” . 18 Règles, ; tr., –.



chapter four

In a first sense, thus, the notion of substratum in Durkheim stands for the material basis of society. The phenomena which constitute the substratum are studied by distinct branches of knowledge, such as demography and geography, which specialise in the exploration of what Durkheim called “social morphology”.19 At the beginning of his career especially, he lay great importance on the material substratum, which, according to him, determined social forms.20 In the Division of Labour, for instance, he explained that the transition from archaic to complex societies (from mechanical to organic solidarity) had been caused by demographic changes: the increasing extension and density of social life. At the same time, however, Durkheim warned against “simplistic theories that reduce the composite to the simple”.21 He claimed that one could have pushed the inquiry further and looked for what had originally caused the morphological changes that he used as a mere point of departure for his study, emphasising that such a search had not been part of his project in this particular book. At any rate, and although he declared to feel somewhat sceptical about this, Durkheim did not completely exclude the possibility of the psychological nature of these original phenomena.22 In the Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim was more clear. In this essay, he recognised “the kind of preponderance we ascribe to the social environment, and more especially to the human environment”,23 but also emphasised that since “a social fact cannot be explained except by another social fact”24 (as opposed to a material one),25 sociology was not a “materialist” enterprise.26

19 As Durkheim unequivocally wrote in the Rules of Sociological Method: “It would undoubtedly be advantageous to reserve the term ‘morphological’ for those social facts which relate to the social substratum”. Règles, ; tr., . 20 Dénes Némedi, “Collective consciousness, morphology, and collective representations: Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge, –,” Sociological Perspectives , no.  (), –. 21 Division, ; tr., . 22 Ibid., ; tr., . On this question see Warren Schmaus, “Explanation and essence in The Rules of Sociological Method and The Division of Labor in Society,” Sociological Perspectives , no.  (), , –. 23 Règles, ; tr., . 24 Ibid., ; tr., . 25 Ibid., ; tr., . Durkheim explained that the elements of the material substratum are crystallisations of earlier social phenomena. For instance, “[t]he type of dwelling imposed upon us is merely the way in which everyone around us and, in part previous generations, have customarily built their houses.” Ibid., ; tr., . 26 Ibid., ; tr., .

the location of society



Later in his career, Durkheim increasingly insisted that the material substratum could not be the sole basis for explaining social facts. In “Sociology and its scientific domain” (“La sociologie et son domaine scientifique”, ), he wrote that “the explanatory analysis of this substratum should not be confused with the explanatory analysis of that which takes place on its surface.”27 In “Value judgements and judgements of reality” (“Jugements de valeur et jugements de réalité”, ), Durkheim, as already suggested in the previous chapter, reflected on his earlier depiction of society as a living body, and reasoned that the social organism, like any organism, possesses not only a material, but also a psychological dimension—it must be inhabited by an active principle, by a soul: “we diminish society when we envisage it only as an organised body fulfilling certain vital functions. In this body lives a soul: it is the totality of collective ideals”.28 This suggests that the most important dimension of social life cannot be the material substratum itself (the body), but rather the psychological aspects of life in common— for instance, the “collective ideals” which are present in the collective consciousness. Lastly, in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (), Durkheim described as “erroneous those theories . . . which seek to derive all social life from its material foundation (either economic or territorial).”29 To sum up, it appears that Durkheim made increasingly explicit that while the material substratum may condition social life, it does not determine it. This idea is rather complex, and it deserves to be explained in more detail. In his review of Labriola’s historical materialism () as well as in “Individual and collective representations” (), Durkheim developed the notion that phenomena are relatively autonomous with regard to their substratum. This idea of relative autonomy, for him, meant three things. First: A phenomenon cannot possibly exist independent of its substratum, which provides it with its constituent parts, the very stuff of which it is made. A thing without a substratum, Durkheim wrote ironically, could only be conceived as “a sort of unrepresentable absolute”: in other words, at least from a scientific perspective, nothing could be taken to be without a substratum. For instance, “either the collective

27

“La sociologie et son domaine,” . Durkheim, “Jugements de valeur et jugements de réalité,” in Sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 29 Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, ), ; tr., The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, ), . 28



chapter four

consciousness floats in vacuum”—an idea which Durkheim thought to be absurd—or “it is related to a substratum on which it consequently depends.”30 Second: The phenomena belonging to the same order of reality have a “life of their own” (vie propre):31 they interact, combine, influence each other, produce new elements,32 and even acquire, through this interaction and combination, properties which cannot be found in the substratum. Durkheim often mentioned the example of compounds such as bronze or water that possess characteristics absent from copper and tin, or from oxygen and hydrogen.33 Third: once in existence, some phenomena “react on the very causes on which they depend”.34 In other words, they have the power to exert influence on their substratum to the point of transforming it. This is obviously not the case with material compounds, but this principle applies to other phenomena, such as, prominently, social ones: Durkheim stressed, for instance, that economic exchanges emerge from a given material substratum, but could also modify it: “[w]e are . . . far from maintaining that the economic factor is only an epiphenomenon: once it exists . . . it can partially modify the very substratum from which its results.”35 Individual and Collective Representations Durkheim, as already suggested, made use of a “personalist” metaphor (an analogy between society and the human person) to argue that one should distinguish between two different substrata of society. On the one hand, society has a body, an existence in space, which is what Durkheim called the material substratum. On the other, a person is evidently more than just a body: the actual substance, the innermost reality, of human persons is the soul. Sociologically speaking, this means that another layer of reality has to exist where society, as a non-material, mental entity,

30 Durkheim, “La conception matérialiste de l’ histoire,” in La science sociale et l’ action (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., “Review of Antonio Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’ histoire,” in On Institutional Analysis, . 31 Durkheim, “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives,” in Sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 32 “La conception matérialiste,” ; tr., . 33 Règles, XIV; tr., . 34 “La conception matérialiste,” ; tr., . 35 Ibid.

the location of society



can borrow its constitutive elements.36 Following a suggestion expressed in the Rules, one can say that the material substratum—the physical individuals and the space they inhabit—is the necessary, but not the sufficient condition of society: a particular kind of mental and moral relation between these individuals has to develop before society can be said to exist.37 In his celebrated work on “Individual and collective representations”, Durkheim extensively addressed the question of the substratum. One can read this text as Durkheim’s response to the classical philosophical puzzle concerning the exact nature of the relation between mental phenomena and the brain. Durkheim’s interest in such a topic was motivated by his hope that its analysis would shed light on the problem of the relations of individuals to society: in both cases, argued Durkheim, the phenomenon that is being considered concerns the relation of a thing to its substratum. Durkheim started by rejecting a doctrine he called “epiphenomenism”, according to which consciousness is a mere reflection of underlying biological processes.38 As an alternative to this doctrine, Durkheim proposed to conceive of mental phenomena, especially representations, as emerging from the organic substratum without being reducible to it. He argued that past perceptions stored in memory (itself a mental, nor merely a physiological phenomenon), can be revived and “brought back to life” when similar shapes or colours or sounds are perceived a second time. This point enabled him to suggest, first, that mental life consists, among other things, of associations between representations; and second, that these associations occur on a specific level in reality that is (relatively) independent from the organic base.39 These were the foundations upon which Durkheim developed his theory of social life and of its relation to other layers of reality. He argued that society emerges from the association of individual minds who constitute its substratum. To begin with, individual representations develop from the direct confrontation with the morphological elements 36 On the existence of two notions of substratum in Durkheim, see Némedi, “Collective consciousness,” . 37 Règles, XIV; tr., . My thanks go to Susan Stedman Jones for drawing my attention to this formulation. 38 “Représentations,” . 39 On this point, see Karsenti, La société en personnes, . These elements do not imply that the association of representations is a conscious activity. As a matter of fact, Durkheim suggested that it is rather an unconscious phenomenon, which operates in accordance with the very logic of representation itself.



chapter four

which constrain collective life, discussed above. But once constituted these representations do not remain isolated. In the case of social life, they enter in association with other representations. Lastly, this phenomenon of association gives birth to new combinations of ideas which spread through society: while it dwells in the collective substratum through which it relates to the rest of the world, collective life does not dwell in it so as to be wholly absorbed by it. . . . the primary material of every social consciousness is in a tight relationship with the number of social elements, the way in which they are grouped and distributed, etc., in short with the nature of the substratum. However, as soon as a first layer of representations has emerged, they become . . . partially autonomous realities which live their own life. They have the power of calling each other, of repelling one another, of constituting syntheses of all kinds which are determined by their natural affinities and not by the state of the environment in which they evolve.40

This explanation of the genesis and transformation of collective representations remains very abstract, and its precise sociological meaning is difficult to determine: how exactly do representations “combine”? How can it be said that this combination occurs independently from individual consciousness? How do they modify individual representations? There is here a series of questions left open, as Durkheim was aware when he wrote that the “laws of collective ideation” were still poorly understood.41 As I will suggest below, part of Durkheim’s later work can be interpreted as an attempt to offer convincing answers to these very questions. But before I come to this, one more point needs to be made. The article on collective representations seems to have provided us with an answer to the question of the location of society, i.e. of its ultimate substratum. Durkheim’s analysis points to the fact that the substratum of society is the mental life of individuals. This is indeed the only location in 40

“Représentations,” –. It is interesting to note that the two meanings of the therm “substratum” are being mobilised here: on the one hand, material substratum (“the social elements, the way in which they are grouped and distributed”); and on the other hand, the very substance of society (alluded to in the sentence on “the collective substratum through which [collective life] is connected to the rest of the world”). 41 Ibid., . I could identity two further occurrences of the expression “collective ideation” in this sense, both in texts of the same period: Durkheim, “De la définition des phénomènes religieux,” L’ Année sociologique , – (), ; and Règles, XVI; tr., —here rendered as “laws of the collective formation of ideas”. In each case, Durkheim underscored his inability to grasp this phenomenon sociologically. I will later suggest that Durkheim, in his later work, presented, without using this term, something that can be taken to be the “rules of collective ideation”.

the location of society



which collective representations can possibly be conceived to rest. And yet, this is not the conclusion which Durkheim himself drew, at least not in a straightforward way. He wrote, instead, that the substratum of society is the “totality of associated individuals.”42 This quote, whose meaning is ambiguous, could be taken to mean that it is the social whole itself which is the bearer of collective representations. In this view, the substratum of society would be the mental life of a supra-individual organism. How did Durkheim come to this formulation, which could be read as postulating the existence of a social being with a life and a mind of its own? In order to understand this, we need to look at the development of Durkheim’s thought in the years preceding the essay I have just discussed. Collective Consciousness and the Externality of Social Facts Durkheim started from a position, most exhaustively explicated in the Division of Labour, according to which the social is located in the consciousness of individuals. In this book, as is well known, Durkheim distinguished between two forms of social cohesion—mechanical and organic solidarity. He described mechanical solidarity as characteristic of traditional, simpler societies, organic solidarity being typical for more advanced, complex societies. The first kind of cohesion exhibits a strong similitude of all individual minds. In small, traditional societies, social functions are little differentiated, so that the living conditions of all are fairly uniform. Because of this, Durkheim believed that mechanical solidarity offers only little space for individual (in the sense of idiosyncratic) representations. All members of society tend to have the same worldviews and aspirations, as well as to engage in the same kind of practices.43 Durkheim summarised this by saying that in these societies collective consciousness, i.e. “[t]he totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society”,44 has a maximal extension,45 thus limiting the development of the consciousness of individuals. The exact opposite is true in advanced societies: a strong population growth and an extended social milieu weaken the social bond, making it less immediate and 42

“Représentations,” . “The similarity of consciousnesses gives rise to legal rules which, under the threat of repressive measures, imposes upon everybody uniform beliefs and practices.” Division, –; tr., . 44 Ibid., ; tr., –. 45 Ibid., ; tr., . 43



chapter four

substantial.46 Collective, uniform practices fade away and collective beliefs lose both their intensity and their specificity, becoming increasingly general and abstract.47 Durkheim described this process as a retraction of collective consciousness and a deployment of the consciousness of individuals. Despite individuals being increasingly diverse in their occupations and practices, as well as in their world-views, something still holds society together: it is, according to Durkheim, the division of labour itself.48 This formulation could mean several things, and Durkheim’s position on this is not fully clear. The division of labour, to begin with, means that diverse individuals take up specialised functions in accordance with their preferences and talents. This boosts economic productivity, and therefore the average wealth of society, and triggers a virtuous circle of growing specialisation, diversification, and collective well-being. The cohesion of modern societies, therefore, is possibly the result of the awareness of the material advantages it produces. Durkheim, however, made it clear that this was an explanation good only for economists. He rejected any attempt to explain social forms by pointing to the immediate benefits accruing to individuals (for instance in terms of personal happiness).49 He noted moreover, in a long discussion on the pathological forms of the division of labour, that interdependence is not equally advantageous for all. As a case in point, Durkheim considered the example of manual workers, whose tasks, in Durkheim’s view, are admittedly far from rewarding and cannot be compensated with the general benefits accruing from the division of labour. This could even exacerbate a form of resentment against society: the division of labour may well have “dispersive effects”.50 For this reason, a mere awareness of the advantages of cooperation is insufficient ground for establishing social cohesion. Rather, advanced Durkheim, solidarity in advanced societies is the product of two elements. On the one hand, and notwithstanding the decreasing intensity and specificity of collective beliefs, at least one value becomes stronger, more widespread, and more precise in modernity: this supreme value is the

46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., Book II, chap. . Ibid., –; tr., –. See also ; tr., . E.g. ibid.: ; tr., –. See also: –; tr., – and ; tr., . Ibid., Book II, chap. . Ibid., ; tr. (modified), .

the location of society



autonomy and dignity of individuals.51 On the other hand, Durkheim suggested that over and above the unanimous belief in an abstract value, the social individual needs to have “vivid”, “concrete”, and immediate “impressions”52 of society, “a very strong feeling of the state of dependence in which he finds himself ”.53 However, Durkheim noted, modern societies are too large and abstract to be directly experienced (for instance in the form of the large gatherings, religious or otherwise, that are typical of smaller communities) and thus often fail to inspire strong feelings of belonging. Such feelings could only be produced by the smaller social entities that, in articulation with one another, make up the society as a whole.54 For instance, the direct, daily experience of cooperation in the economic sphere has the ability to generate an image and awareness of interdependence: The division of labour supposes that the worker, far from remaining bent over his task, does not lose sight of those co-operating with him, but acts upon them and is acted upon by them. He his not therefore a machine who repeats movement the sense of which he does not perceive, but he knows that they are tending in a certain direction, towards a goal that he can conceive of more or less distinctly. He feels that he is of some use. . . . Thenceforth, however specialised, however uniform his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for he knows that his activity has a meaning.55

In the first edition of the Division of Labour, the overall impression is that society is rooted in the consciousness of individuals. In mechanical solidarity, it rests on shared, uniform world-views and beliefs. In modern social arrangements, cohesion derives, depending on the formulation, from the awareness of interdependence, from feelings of solidarity, or from a shared belief concerning the dignity of individuals. At any rate, social order rests on a “spontaneous consensus of the parts”,56 rather than assuming the form of an external obligation imposed on individuals. Durkheim sometimes even suggested that social rules, in modernity, could not directly constrain individual minds: “The rules constituting this morality have no constraining power preventing their being fully examined”.57 51 Ibid., ; tr., : “the collective consciousness is increasingly reduced to the cult of the individual”. 52 Ibid., ; tr., . 53 Ibid., ; tr., . 54 Ibid., ; tr., . 55 Ibid., ; tr., . 56 Ibid., ; tr., . 57 Ibid., ; tr., –.



chapter four

This analysis is confirmed by the use of the word “substratum” in the Division of Labour. The location of society, its ultimate substratum, is identified within the consciousness of the members of the social whole: Whereas individuals acted only because they were urged on by one another, except in cases where their behaviour was determined by physical needs, each one of them becomes a spontaneous source of activity. Individual personalities are formed and become conscious of themselves. Yet this growth in the psychological life of he individual does not weaken that of society, but merely transforms it. It becomes freer and more extensive, and since in the end it has no other substrata that the consciousnesses of individuals, these latter grow, become more complex and incidentally more flexible.58

With his strong emphasis on individual consciousness, Durkheim now risked being misinterpreted, notwithstanding his methodological principles, as asserting that society is an artificial construct resting upon the conscious adhesion of its members. It is perhaps for this reason that Durkheim,59 in the Rules of Sociological Method (–), put a strong emphasis on the notion of constraint, which enabled him to suggest that society, insofar as it poses limits to its members and even determines their minds, is indeed external to individual consciousness. Durkheim now argued that social facts exert authority upon individuals. Manners and beliefs inculcated in the course of education acquire such strength that they can be taken to be independent from the individuals themselves. This independence is especially visible when such precepts turn into automatic habits: From his [the child’s] earliest years we oblige him to eat, drink and sleep at regular hours, and to observe cleanliness, calm and obedience; later we force him to be mindful of others, to respect customs and conventions, and to work, etc. If this constraint in time ceases to be felt it is because it gradually gives rise to habits, to inner tendencies which render it superfluous; but they supplant the constraint only because they are derived from it.60

58

Ibid., ; tr., . Consider also this similar quote: “The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness. Undoubtedly the substratum of this consciousness does not consist of a single organ. By definition it is diffused over society as a whole, but nonetheless possesses specific characteristics that make it a distinctive reality.” Ibid., ; tr., –. 59 The opinion that Durkheim’s insistence on the phenomenon of constraint in Rules can be explained by his desire to offer a corrective to Division is shared by Némedi, “Collective consciousness,” –; and Schmaus, “Explanation and essence”, . 60 Règles, –; tr., –.

the location of society



Apart from habits, social facts also owe their stability and efficacy to the sanctions faced by deviant individuals. These sanctions are either formal (legal rules) or informal (mockery or reprobation).61 With his description of blind habits and sanctions, Durkheim now tried to emphasise the dimension of heterogeneity of the social vis-à-vis individual consciousness: social facts, to quote again a famous passage already reproduced in the Introduction to this volume, “consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.”62 In the Rules, Durkheim claimed that society is an entity sui generis, independent from the consciousness of individuals and external to it. This brought him to understand “conscience collective” not as a mere sociological category abstracted from the observation of collective life, but rather (in organicist fashion) as the consciousness of a collective being. Durkheim wrote that social facts, “not having the individual as their substratum, . . . can have none other than society, either political society in its entirety or one of the partial groups that it includes—religious denominations, political and literary schools, occupational corporations, etc.”63 In the Rules, thus (but also in Suicide), he severed society from individual consciousness so greatly that he needed to posit the existence of a social being, a kind of supraindividual organism. As Durkheim wrote: “By aggregating together, by interpenetrating, by fusing together, individuals give birth to a being, psychical if you will, but one which constitutes a psychical individuality of a new kind.”64 Durkheim seemed to have held this position at least until the preface to the second edition of the Rules of Sociological Method (). In a letter to Célestin Bouglé written in  and cited by Steven Lukes,65 Durkheim confidently re-asserted the same position: If society is something other than the individual it has a different basis (substrat) from the individual, though it could not exist without individuals. That seems to me a truism. It is not in any one individual that society is to be found, but in all the individuals associated in a determinate manner. It is not, therefore, by analysing the individual conscience that one can do sociology. 61

Ibid., –; tr., . Ibid., , tr., . 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., ; tr., . The emphasis is mine, JT. 65 Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study (Stanford: Standford University Press, ), . 62



chapter four

In his new preface to the Rules, Durkheim similarly insisted that social phenomena are not located in the consciousness of individuals, but in “another substratum” which is “society itself ”.66 He now described as wrong the commonsensical understanding of social facts as rooted in the states of mind of the members of society. Instead, Durkheim emphasised that “one is forced to admit that these specific facts reside in the society itself that produces them and not in its parts.”67 Lastly, in the preface to the second edition of the Division of Labour (), Durkheim tried to efface an impression this book may have left concerning the social order, namely that it is a spontaneous outcome of the interaction of individuals. He argued that [a]lthough it is true that social functions seek spontaneously to adapt to one another, provided that they are in regular contact, on the other hand this mode of adaptation only becomes a rule of behaviour if a group bestows its authority upon it. Nor indeed is a rule merely a customary manner in which to act: it is above all an obligatory manner of acting, that is one to some extent not subject to individual arbitrariness.68

As we see, Durkheim now insisted on the externality of social facts visà-vis individual minds. He also insisted that individuals, in order to develop a sense of their belonging to the whole, need to be confronted, not merely with a loose cooperative group, but with the “only moral entity which is above that of private individuals . . . [i.e.] the one constituted by the collectivity.”69 Durkheim believed that this moral entity could not be society itself, which is too remote from the direct experience of individuals to exert a binding authority. Instead, as is well known, he advocated the re-introduction of professional corporations: the role of

66

Règles, XV; tr., . Ibid. Here is the full quotation: “If, as is granted to us, this synthesis sui generis, which constitutes every society, gives rise to new phenomena, different from those which occur in consciousnesses in isolation, one is forced to admit that these specific facts reside in the society itself that produces them and not in its parts—namely its members. In this sense therefore they lie outside the consciousness of individuals as such, in the same way as the distinctive features of life lie outside the chemical substances that make a living organism. . . . Thus yet another reason justifies the distinction we have established later between psychology proper—the science of the individual mind—and sociology. Social facts differ not only in quality from psychical facts; they have a different substratum, they do not evolve in the same environment or depend on the same conditions.” Règles, XIV– XX; tr., –. 68 Division, v; tr., xxxiv. 69 Ibid., v; tr., xxxiv. 67

the location of society



these intermediary institutions would be to symbolise the overall society in the minds of individuals, thus producing “a more envigorated feeling of their common solidarity”.70 Numerous commentators have taken the position I have just described, which is expressed particularly clearly in the Rules, to be Durkheim’s definitive one.71 For instance, Georges Gurvitch criticised Durkheim for his belief in “the transcendence of collective consciousness”, which had forced him to imagine a “supra-temporal Spirit” whose existence he justified with “metaphysical arguments”.72 On the other hand, this interpretation has also been contested by other authors, such as Charles Blondel, who denied that Durkheim’s notion of society described a metaphysical, supra-individual substance. Rather, the phrase “collective consciousness” should be taken to refer only to “the totality of feelings, representations and volitions common to the group as a whole”.73 And more recently, Gianfranco Poggi has argued that for Durkheim, society “is not a substance, but a process, a performance, an insofar as reality.”74 My view is that Durkheim eventually adopted a position between sociological realism and sociological nominalism.75 In order to describe this position in the terms which interest us here, one could say that Durkheim came to believe that the substratum of society is neither the consciousness of individuals in toto, nor the consciousness of a transcendent social being, but a specific region of individual minds. It is this idea that I want to discuss in the next section. Religion, Collective Ideation, and “Homo Duplex” In the preface to the second edition of the Rules, Durkheim complained that his position had been misunderstood, insofar as he was wrongly read as positing “consciousness, both individual and social” as something 70

Ibid., xii; tr., xxxix. Cf. Némedi, “Explanation and essence,” . 72 Gurvitch, Georges “Le problème de la conscience collective dans la sociologie de Durkheim,” in Antécédents et perspectives, vol.  of La vocation actuelle de la sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 73 Cited in Bruno Karsenti, L’ homme total. Sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 74 Gianfranco Poggi, Durkheim (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, ), . 75 A similar point is made by Schmaus, Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 71



chapter four

“substantial”, as something real.76 This may be the reason why Durkheim, in his later work, made less use of the term “substratum”. When he did use it—many times, for instance, in the Elementary Forms—he gave it the more general meaning of an “underlying layer of reality”, without connecting it to the question of the ultimate substance of society.77 However, the question of the location of society continued to be a central problem for him. In spite of its ambiguities, the overall message of the Division of Labour was that social cohesion, in its modern form, was by and large an unstable phenomenon. Conversely, the Rules of Sociological Method, in trying to offer a corrective to Division, had perhaps too unequivocally situated social reality outside of individual consciousness, which attracted the criticism of many of Durkheim’s contemporaries. In his later writings, he tried to describe the social as belonging to the mental life of its members, while showing at the same time, consistently with his methodological principles: first, that the social shapes individual consciousness (through religion “the collective consciousness acts upon individual consciousnesses”);78 and second, that its emergence and transformations do not involve individual consciousness (“social phenomena are born, not in individuals but in the group”).79 Durkheim’s first option to develop a theory of society along such lines was to have recourse to notion of the unconscious.80 If he could claim the substratum of society to be the individual unconscious, the social could be described as being at the same time part of the mental life of individuals (rendering the hypothesis of a transcendent being useless) 76

Règles, ix; tr., . For instance, Durkheim argued that sacred things need a concrete materialisation which symbolise them in the mind of individuals—the material symbols of the sacred are their substratum. 78 Formes élémentaires, ; tr., . 79 Ibid., ; tr., . 80 The history of the idea of the unconscious in Durkheim would deserve an independent study. Some indications can be found in Susan Stedman Jones, Durkheim Reconsidered (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), esp. , . Let me also mention here that, after having defined the concept and justified its use in the article on collective representations, Durkheim continued to use it, although sparingly, until . In this year, he and his collaborators were caught in a polemic with the historian Charles Seignobos on historical explanation, which revolved around the role of intentions in history. Durkheim defended the position that the historian should not merely reconstruct the intention of historical agents, but also search for objective causes. This conviction rested on the argument that many individual actions derive from unconscious motivations, as opposed to conscious intentions. 77

the location of society



and external to individual consciousness.81 Durkheim was clear, however, that one should not consider as equivalent the individual unconscious and collective consciousness.82 On the one hand, he believed that some social facts are indeed characterised by their unconscious character. For instance, in the Rules of Sociological Method, he spoke of “the force of blind habit”,83 referring to a force independent of the intervention of consciousness. In his critique of historical materialism, he declared that he found it “fruitful” to explain social life through the “profound causes which escape consciousness”.84 In Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, he described social customs as a form of legal order that had not yet become conscious of itself.85 But more importantly, on the other hand, Durkheim believed that in a modern social organisation, collective rules and practices ought to inhabit the consciousness of individuals. As I have just suggested, in modernity, custom gives way to law. For Durkheim, this meant that what had once been habitually accepted and followed is now consciously viewed as an established system of binding prescriptions, enforced by a central state. In his text on “L’ enseignement philosophique” (), Durkheim wrote that “social organisation”, which had long been rooted in unconscious, automatic, almost instinctual practices and beliefs, was now slowly emerging from this “darkness”: social rules were being submitted to critical reflection, and were thus more and more becoming part and expression of a conscious collective worldview.86 In the Elementary Forms, Durkheim suggested that even traditional societies cannot allow their customs and beliefs to become entirely unconscious. If society is to survive as a coherent entity, they have to

81

Cf. Bruno Karsenti, “Présentation,” in Emile Durkheim, Sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), LI. 82 This is confirmed by Durkheim’s remarks on collective consciousness and the unconscious, in which he suggested that the two need to be considered separately: “if we admit the existence of a collective consciousness, we have not dreamed it up with the aim of explaining the unconscious.” Durkheim, “Débat sur l’ explication en histoire et en sociologie,” in Textes, vol. , ; tr., “Debate on explanation in history and sociology”, in The Rules of Sociological Method, . 83 Règles, ; tr., . 84 “La conception matérialiste,” ; tr.,  (modified). 85 Durkheim wrote that until the nineteenth century “[t]he whole of the law worked automatically in an unconscious way; it was a matter of custom.” Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France-Quadrige, ), ; tr., Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), . 86 Durkheim, “L’ enseignement philosophique et l’ agrégation de philosophie,” in Textes, vol.  (Paris: Minuit, ), .



chapter four

be regularly revived and, as it were, brought back into the consciousness of individuals, by way of rituals and social gatherings. As Durkheim wrote: [Collective representations] progressively lose their original energy. Being covered over little by little by the rising flood of daily experiences, they would soon fall into the unconscious, if we did not find some means of calling them back into consciousness and revifying them. . . .. The only way of renewing the collective representations which relate to sacred beings is to retemper them in the very source of the religious life, that is to say, in the assembled groups.87

If society is not located in the unconscious regions of individual minds, it seems that we are forced to come back to the position adopted in Division, namely, that society dwells in the consciousness of individuals. In other words, the substratum of the “conscience collective” can only be found in the “consciences individuelles”. Before he could adopt this position, however, Durkheim needed to solve the difficulties which had appeared in his early work. If society dwells in individual consciousness, what happens to the principle of the externality of the social vis-à-vis the individual? What happens to the notion that the social is a reality sui generis, that it occupies a specific layer of reality? In response to these challenges, Durkheim redefined the very notion of individual consciousness. In the tradition of Homo duplex,88 he proposed to distinguish, in each individual mental apparatus, between two distinct regions or sectors: one filled with collective, the other with individual representations.89 This notion had already been presented in the Division of Labour: Two consciousnesses exist within us: the one comprises only states that are personal to each one of us, characteristic of us as individuals, whilst the other comprises states that are common to the whole of society. The former represents only our individual personality, which it constitutes; the latter represents the collective type and consequently the society without which it would not exist. When it is an element of the latter determining our behaviour, we do not act with an eye to our own personal interest, but are pursuing collective ends. Now, although distinct, these two consciousnesses are linked to each other, since in the end they constitute only one entity, for both have one and the same organic basis. Thus they are solidly joined together.90 87

Formes élémentaires, –; tr., . Cf. Gianfranco Poggi and Giuseppe Sciortini, “Emile Durkheim,” in Incontri con il pensiero sociologico (Bologna: Il Mulino, ). 89 Schmaus, Rethinking Durkheim, . 90 Division, ; tr., . 88

the location of society



However, as shown above, Durkheim had not succeeded, in Division, to embed his idea of the two forms of consciousness within a theory compatible with his overall scientific programme. First of all, Durkheim averred that collective and individual consciousness necessarily “vary in inverse proportion to each other”.91 Since modernity is the era of the “cult of the individual”, the collective consciousness is, in modern societies, almost void, except for this collective cult itself. Moreover, as we have seen, Durkheim had not yet fully developed his theory on how, especially in modernity, the collective exerts a constraint upon individual minds. Durkheim now needed to rework his dualistic theory of the individual mind in order to make it more consonant with the central features of his sociology. In his later writings, he described in detail how individual minds are made of two separate regions; how individual “representations”, on the one hand, “collective influences”, on the other, “form two distinct and separate mental states in our consciousness”.92 One pole of the consciousness is made of “sensations” and “the tendencies of sensibility”; it is as such “personal”, the seat of bodily needs, basic emotions and interests. The other entails “conceptual thought and moral activity”, and is therefore collective and impersonal; it is the seat of language, knowledge, reflection, obligation, and religious feelings.93 Durkheim, moreover, needed to show that the seat of collective representations exerts an authority upon the individual, and that not all representations contained in individual consciousness can be modified at will. Durkheim suggested, thus, that individuals perceive some of their ideas as being of a special nature; they are felt as nobler and grander than others, and therefore more respectable and worthier of being obeyed: Now society . . . gives us the sensation of a perpetual dependence. . . . It requires that, forgetful of our own interests, we make ourselves its servitors, and it submits us to every sort of inconvenience, privation and sacrifice, without which social life would be impossible. . . . the empire which it holds over consciences is due much less to the physical supremacy of which it has the privilege than to the moral authority with which it is invested. If we yield to its orders, it not merely because it is strong to triumph over our resistance; it is primarily because it is the object of a venerable respect.94 91

Ibid., ; tr., . Ibid., ; tr., . 93 Durkheim, “Le dualisme de la nature humaine et ses conditions sociales,” in La science sociale et l’ action (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 94 Formes élémentaires, –; tr., –. See also “Le dualisme,” –. Already in “Deux lois de l’ évolution pénale” Durkheim spoke, in a striking formulation, of sentiments that are “in us but not of us [en nous sans nous] and even, in a sense, in spite of 92



chapter four

Lastly, Durkheim had to show that collective representations come to inhabit the minds of the members of society in a process that bypasses individual consciousness. This was required to for the sake consistency with Durkheim’s definition of the substratum (according to this definition, the individual and the social are separate; once constituted, collective representations produce combinations and associations independent of the substratum or of any other order of reality). Incidentally, by describing this last phenomenon, Durkheim would also offer a solution to the question he had raised in “Individual and collective representations” about “collective ideation” (the emergence and diffusion of new ideas in society). Durkheim realised his theoretical tour-de-force by borrowing from the theory of social suggestion, which was quite widespread in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century,95 and which had been adapted for sociology under the name of the theory of “social effervescence”.96 The fundamental assumption of this theory is that the individuals who enter into contact with an already existing group of human beings necessarily fall prey to its empire. The group exerts a kind of magnetic fascination which forces individuals, if so commanded or induced, to act in a certain way, regardless of their own particular feelings, habits, preferences, or convictions: When the consciousness of individuals . . . establishes tight relationships and actively interact [with the consciousness of other individuals], a new kind of mental life emerges from their synthesis. . . . The sentiments which emerge and develop within groups possess an energy that purely individual sentiments cannot match. The individual who feels them has the impression that he is dominated by forces which he does not recognise as his own, which steer him, of which he is not the master. . . . the individual loses interest in himself, forgets himself, gives himself totally to the common goal.97

us; and they appear to us in this way in consequence of the constraint which they exercise over us.” Durkheim, “Deux lois de l’ évolution pénale,” L’ Année sociologique , – (), ; tr., “Two laws of penal evolution,” in The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, edited by Mike Gane (London: Routledge, ), . 95 Concerning the influence of crowd psychology on Durkheim, see Lukes, Emile Durkheim, . 96 For instance by Marcel Mauss in his  “Essai sur les variations saisonnières des sociétés eskimos. Essai de morphologie sociale,” Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris, Presses universitaires de France: ). 97 “Jugements de valeur et jugements de réalité,” .

the location of society



In the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim made use of the theory of social effervescence to explain how religious representations emerge, how religious symbols and religious cults come into existence, and how these representations, symbols and cults perpetuate themselves.98 He stressed the importance of social gatherings in primitive societies, wherein the entire group assembles in one single location. The simultaneous presence of many individuals heightens the spirits of each. They collectively engage in rhythmic movements that turn into dances and songs, performed in a state of abandon, and that finally climax in a kind of frenetic group ecstasy. This fusion of each individual into the collective whole provides the participants with a feeling of the “moral unity” of the community: “It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to some object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison.”99 This engenders a feeling of common belonging, in Durkheim’s words, a “communion”, “a fusion of all particular sentiments into one common sentiment”.100 Shared symbols— a form of dance, a totemic animal, a ritual prayer—resultantly emerge, from then on taking on the function of representing the collective in the minds of individuals. The social effervescence entrenches in the memory of all something greater than the individual, something inherently social: the sacred itself, i.e. society. Social effervescence, according to Durkheim, produces in a process of “collective ideation” representations, symbols, practices, and even institutions. These elements spring from collective practices in which the consciousness of each individual is transfigured. The interactions described in the above quotes are examples of a combination sui generis of social facts, which Durkheim had long hoped to be able to describe adequately. They are social facts that pave the way for the emergence of other social facts without the mediation of the consciousness of the gathered 98

This applies to traditional as well as to modern societies. For instance, Durkheim described how, during the French Revolution, certain collective representations and practices emerged in a situation of social effervescence: “This aptitude of society for setting itself up as a god or for creating gods was never more apparent than during the first years of the French Revolution. At this time, in fact, under the influence of the general enthusiasm, things purely secular [laïques] by nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: these were the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. A religion tended to become established which has its dogmas, symbols, altars and feasts.” Formes élémentaires, –; tr. (modified), . 99 Formes élémentaires, –; tr., . 100 Ibid., ; tr., . Strikingly similar formulations can be found in “Le dualisme,” .



chapter four

individuals. In a certain way, the experience of the group represents a direct communication between the collective regions of the mind of each individual. This chapter has traced Durkheim’s varied renditions of the notion of the substratum, to which he notably ascribed meanings, in the course of his career, that were not merely different, but sometimes opposed to the point of incompatibility. Proceeding from the methodological premise that these divergences were not lapsi calami, i.e. that they did not result from mere inattention, I have rendered a perspective on Durkheim’s intellectual trajectory based on his definitions of what is the substratum of society. My main goal has been to account for the changing definitions Durkheim gave of this term. I have argued that, in the Elementary Forms, Durkheim finally managed to develop a theory that avoids the shortcomings of his previous attempts. Whereas in the Division of Labour his reading of the authority and influence of the social was too weak, in the Rules of Sociological Method and Suicide, he risked hypostasising society. His notion of Homo duplex allowed him to claim that the location of society (its substratum), is a specific region within the mind of the individual that is simultaneously also the seat of collective, morally superior and authoritative representations. Durkheim, however, never made this claim quite that explicitly. But even without speaking of a region of the mind Durkheim (notwithstanding the Rules, the Suicide, and his text on “Representations”), now clearly emphasised that the social is entirely located in the mental life of individuals. The social is immanent to individual consciousness, but it is also at the same time morally greater than the consciousness of individuals, and as such, it has a transcendent character. In the Elementary Forms, he insisted that “since society cannot exist except in and through the consciousness of individuals, it must also penetrate us and organize itself within us”.101 And later in the text: “social forces . . . are part of our internal life . . . this constraining and necessitating action, which escapes us when coming from an external object, is readily perceptible here because everything is inside us. Of course we do not always interpret it in an adequate manner, but at least we cannot fail to be conscious of it.”102 101

Ibid., ; tr. (modified), . Ibid., ; tr., . Durkheim further suggested that individuals often fail to identify the social origin and nature of this powerful voice speaking inside themselves. They 102

the location of society



At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that Durkheim sometimes revisited an idea he had once evolved and abandoned. Let me conclude by a offering a concrete example of this. We have seen above that, in his early review of the work of Schäffle, Durkheim described society as a “conscience de consciences”. It is striking to observe (and, incidentally, confirms my analysis of Durkheim’s final position on the question of the location of society) that he used the exact same formulation towards the end of the Elementary Forms: “the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses”.103

falsely imagine the constraints of the moral authority to stem from an external entity, whereas they spring from a special region in our minds: “They must think of these powers, at least in part, as outside themselves, for these address them in a tone of command and sometimes even order them to do violence to their most natural inclinations.” (Formes élémentaires, –, tr., —modified) What Durkheim indirectly seems to be suggesting here is that his own earlier understanding of the social being was based on a misrepresentation of the logic of the social, one that was itself induced by this logic. 103 Ibid., ; tr., .

chapter five THE NATIONAL AND THE TRANSNATIONAL: MARCEL MAUSS*

Although Marcel Mauss (–), a nephew of Emile Durkheim and his appointed intellectual heir, rightly counts as one of the most prominent figures in the history of French anthropology, his contribution as a writer extends beyond the limits of the discipline of anthropology. For instance, Mauss, who was a member of the socialist party in France, S.F.I.O (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière), also wrote many texts of a political nature: on socialism and Bolshevism, on the cooperative movement, on war, on the nation and internationalism.1 In this chapter, I will focus on Mauss’s understanding of the national question and on his theory of international relations. Of particular importance for my analysis is a long manuscript on which Mauss worked in the years – , and which he hoped to revise into a book on the national question. For a variety of reasons, Mauss never completed his project. However, the twin themes of “nation” and “international relations” continued to preoccupy him, as his publications attest.2 In fact, in the early nineteen thirties, he declared that he had an “almost complete manuscript” of a “great work on ‘The Nation’ (elements of modern politics)”, which provided the background for all his other publications on political matters.3 After Mauss’s death, selections from his manuscript on the nation appeared as

*

I am grateful to Klaus-Peter Sick and Yves Sintomer for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1 A large selection from Mauss’s political writings can be found in Marcel Mauss, Ecrits politiques, edited by Marcel Fournier (Paris: Fayard, ). For a recent study on this aspect of Mauss’s thought, see Sylvain Dzimira, Marcel Mauss, savant et politique (Paris: La découverte, ). 2 Most directly Mauss, “Les civilisations. Éléments et formes,” in Représentations collectives et diversité des civilisations, vol.  of Œuvres (Paris: Minuit, ); tr., “Civilisations. Their elements and forms,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, edited by Nathan Schlanger (Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, ). 3 Mauss, “L’ œuvre de Mauss par lui-même,” Revue française de sociologie , no.  (), .



chapter five

articles in scholarly journals.4 However, about half of the existing material still remains unpublished.5 On the one hand, Mauss’s reflection is an inquiry into the origins, development, and possible future of nations. This already suggests that he viewed the nation as a historical entity which undergoes transformation over time, as opposed to being natural and timeless. In fact, Mauss did conclude that nations are typically modern, and essentially political, phenomena. On the other hand, Mauss also had a clear political intent in drafting La nation. His aim was to discover sociological facts with which he could back up his arguments for popular sovereignty, peace, and internationalism. He ended up proposing a relatively complete sociological theory of international relations: this was original to begin with, since many among the scholars of his time, as we saw in Chapter , would have dismissed the very notion of an international society as an contradictio in adjecto. Next to presenting Mauss’s reflection on the nation and on international phenomena, I will suggest that his internationalist convictions and commitments offer deeper insights into his entire corpus. Contrary to Mauss, we have no moral or scientific obligation to distinguish strictly, as he did, the scientific from the political aspects of his thought. I argue that some of Mauss’s best known anthropological writings, most notably his celebrated Essay on the Gift (), can be better understood if read against the background of Mauss’s reflection on the national. Moreover, the subtle shifts in his thinking, between  and , which many scholars have commented upon,6 may have had something to do with the 4 Mauss, “La nation,” in L’ Année sociologique, troisième série (–), reproduced as “La nation,” in Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie, vol.  of Œuvres (Paris: Minuit, ), partial translations in: “The nation,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, as well as in: Nationalism in Europe:  to the Present, edited by Stuart Woolf (London: Routledge, ); Mauss, “Les idées socialistes. Le principe de nationalisation,” in Ecrits politiques; Mauss, “Les phénomènes morphologiques,” SocioAnthropologie  (). 5 The whole manuscript can be found at the Fonds Marcel-Mauss of IMEC/Institut Mémoires de l’ Edition Contemporaine (Caen, France) under the call numbers MAS . to MAS .. In the present chapter, I will occasionally directly quote from the manuscript. In such cases I indicate the source by giving the corresponding IMEC call number. A description of the manuscript and a discussion of its content can be found in Marcel Fournier, “Mauss et ‘la nation’, ou l’ œuvre inachevée,” Sociologie et sociétés XXXVI, no.  (). 6 For instance Bruno Karsenti, L’ homme total. Sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ); Camille Tarot, in De Durkheim à Mauss, l’ invention du symbolique: Sociologie et science des religions (Paris:

the national and the transnational



need Mauss felt to strengthen his internationalism by giving it a strong sociological and anthropological foundation. By making his argument for internationalism, understood as a political position, conditional upon the presentation of a sociological theory of the national, Mauss was adopting a Durkheimian attitude. The two scholars never presented their recommendations in social and political matters as deriving from a normative Stellungnahme, as dependent upon a moment of philosophical or ethical foundation. Revisiting the positivist separation between fact and value, they took the search for transcendent foundations to be unscientific and thus unreliable.7 Similarly, as Durkheim explicitly argued, one should not hope to find guiding principles for social and political action in nature itself. We saw in earlier chapters that Durkheim had a disenchanted notion of nature: he did not believe that it should be seen as possessing a moral authority of its own. In particular, Durkheim and Mauss both agreed that human nature is not uniform and stable enough to allow for generalisations on what should be the ideal conduct of all human beings. Instead, Durkheim chose the social itself as the main criterion of the good. He suggested that since social life is a condition of every human life, we should assume that the preservation of stable social forms is a good in itself. Depending on the way in which society is organised, certain developments could be described as detrimental to the social fabric, and therefore pathological. By contrast, as a contemporary of Mauss, the sociologist Georges Davy, noted in his introduction to Durkheim’s Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, a “normal” or “healthy” phenomenon is a phenomenon “that correlates exactly with the structure of society.”8 Davy argued that, in Durkheim’s work, “this notion of a normal fact or type is increasingly replacing the notion of an ‘ideal’ or ‘ought’.”9

La découverte, ) as well as in Sociologie et anthropologie de Marcel Mauss (Paris: La découverte, ). 7 The notion is not here that norms should not be adopted or advocated, but merely that such adoption should always come after a moment of detailed observation of empirical states of things. In other words, normative reflection should not work in the void of abstraction, but should rather be made dependent upon a critical observation of the world. According to Franck Fischbach, this attitude towards normativity is typical of the philosophy of the social as a whole: Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale (Paris: La découverte, ). 8 Georges Davy, “Introduction,” in Emile Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France-Quadrige, ), . 9 Ibid.



chapter five Before Nations: From Hordes to Empires

In theorising the nation Mauss found a good deal of his inspiration in Durkheim’s sociological framework. In the Division of Labour of Society (), Durkheim had distinguished, as we know, between two types of society: those organised around the principle of mechanical solidarity, in which collective consciousness is omnipresent, thus unifying the worldviews and habits of individuals into a potentially integrally homogeneous mass; and those organised around the principle of organic solidarity, as per which labour is divided and the functions specialised, resulting in an increased differentiation of individuals. Societies belonging to the first type of social organisation can be further classified into three subtypes. The horde is a mere aggregate of families with weak cohesion. As a form of social organisation it has always been rare, since as soon as the number of families increases, it becomes a clan. Lastly, several clans associated into a larger social complex make up a “segmental society” or tribe.10 In La nation, Mauss also started with distinctions between social types and subtypes, altogether four different kinds of social organisation. Like Durkheim,11 he called the first type “poly-segmental”: the social unit of reference, at least for the individual members, is not society itself, but the clans of which it is composed. In the first subtype, Mauss classified the most archaic societies, which are small, almost exclusively based on kinship, and deprived of stable specialised political institutions. The state is absent in such societies, and politics thought of in generic social terms, such as “cohesion, authority, tradition, education, etc.”12 As they develop and become larger and more complex, clan-based societies establish a political structure, marking the birth of tribal societies (the second subtype) which, despite being “still polysegmental, because clans

10

Emile Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Presses universitaires de France-Quadrige, ), Book I, ch. , sec. I; tr., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, ). 11 In the Division of Labour Durkheim spoke of “segmental societies,” but he later switched to calling them “polysegmental”: cf. Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France-Quadrige, ); tr., The Rules of Sociological Method: and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). Mauss picked up the second formulation. 12 Mauss, “Fragment d’ un plan de sociologie générale descriptive. Classification et méthode d’ observation des phénomènes généraux de la vie sociale dans les sociétés de types archaïques (phénomènes généraux spécifiques de la vie intérieure de la société),” in Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie, .

the national and the transnational



persist in them”, have “a stable organisation”, i.e. “leaders whose power is permanent, be it democratic, aristocratic, or monarchical.”13 Mauss called the second main type “integrated societies.”14 These are characterised by the progressive disappearance of intermediate institutions between the level of individuals and that of society as whole. On the one hand, relations between individuals within the framework of an increasing division of labour are no longer determined mostly by kinship ties. As a consequence, clans no longer dominate and there is greater internal social peace owing to the disappearance of feuds.15 On the other hand, political power becomes more determinate: to explicate this idea we may say, using a voculary different from his own, that Mauss saw political power in integrated societies as increasingly specialised, socialised and formalised. I develop the meaning of these notions below. “Peoples” (ethnè), “cities” (poleis), or “empires” constitute the first subtype under this category.16 Mauss mentioned, among others, the examples of ancient China, ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, the pre-Columbian civilisations of America,17 Islamic societies,18 as well as contemporary Ukraine.19 This kind of social organisation is both old and ubiquitous (i.e., it can be found in the history of all continents, with the possible exception of Oceania). While social integration is not yet fully developed in them, given the persistence of local rights and powers (for instance, in feudal forms of social organisation),20 the life of individuals is no longer integrally shaped by the clan they belong to. To identify such societies, a second criterion is even more decisive: the nature of political power. Mauss was not fully clear on this, but his reasoning seems to have been as follows. In peoples and empires there is an “institution of institutions” (to take up Maurice Hauriou’s famous expression), i.e. an organisation whose specialised task consists in establishing and enforcing social norms. Mauss tended to call “state” all such institutions and I follow this usage here. In incompletely integrated societies, according to Mauss, state legitimacy comes from non-political or even non-social sources. It is seen as deriving from religion (e.g., the monarch is seen as the representative 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

“La nation,” . Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., , . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –.



chapter five

of God on earth) or from nature (e.g., the political order is taken to be a reflection of the cosmic order).21 In societies with an “archaic art of politics”, argued Mauss, “the phenomenon of authority and cohesion is always moral and has a religious flavour (coloré de religion).”22 For this reason, Mauss described the political power prevalent in the first kind of integrated societies as “extrinsic”23 to the social relations, mechanically imposed upon them, rather than inherent to them and emerging out of them. In the terminology introduced above, political power is here incompletely socialised. This has important consequences for the kind of social norms prevailing in such societies. Mauss noted that those in power, instead of promulgating laws for the benefit of all, impose a “discipline” to protect their own interests.24 He also wrote that in place of legal norms, there are “customs of civil and criminal law.”25 In Weberian terminology, norms are here legitimised by tradition or charisma. They do not rely on a collective, conscious orientation of the will, expressed in binding decisions conform to formal criteria (e.g. consistency of the entire body of laws, principle of legal irretroactivity, obligation of publication, constitutionality). To that extent, political power, in peoples and empires, is not fully formalised. The Nation As an “Integrated Society” of Politically Conscious Citizens Mauss deliberated as to whether the societies belonging to this first subtype of integrated societies should be called “nations”. While confessing to having used the notion in such a way in the past, he now argued that it had been a mistake.26 He said that we should call “nations” only one specific and quite rare and recent form of social organisation, typical of Western Europe.27 In the only societies that one may legitimately call “nations”, we can observe transformations at three levels. To begin with, at the level of social structure and social relations, intermediate social groups have 21 Mauss wrote for instance that the public and political laws of “peoples” and “empires” are “almost entirely religious.” Ibid., –. 22 “Fragment d’ un plan,” . 23 Ibid. 24 Mauss wrote: “the mass of the people received a discipline from above, and not a law, a constitution.” “La nation,” . 25 Ibid., . Emphasis mine, JT. 26 Ibid., . 27 Ibid., , .

the national and the transnational



disappeared from society, so that social integration is almost complete. It is now such “that no intermediaries, as it were, exist between the nation and the citizen, that every kind of subgroups has disappeared, that individuals exercise their omnipotence in society” directly and without limits (sans frein et sans rouage).28 Also, the social space is clearly delimited and perceived as a unity by the members of society. Its borders are subjectively recognised by the citizens, and in most cases by the community of nations as well.29 Lastly, there is a strong material interdependence among the members of society within the framework of an economic division of labour.30 The second transformation occurs at the political level. Unlike the imperial state or the city-state, not only the actions of the nation-state are specialised, but state power is also more fully socialised and formalised. It is socialised to the extent that power is exerted neither by a monarch, nor by an aristocratic or priestly caste deriving its legitimacy from birth or religion, but, rather, by an “elite of delegates, who together constitute the ruling personnel.”31 The emphasis in this sentence, I believe, is on the word “delegates”, i.e., on the fact that the rulers, in a nation, act on behalf of the citizens and, at least in part, under their permanent control and surveillance. And it is precisely from this social function that the rulers derive their legitimacy. Even though “nation” and “democracy” are only related, not equivalent terms, rights and duties must be, in a nation, distributed evenly between the state and the individuals. In other words, the state (i.e. those who run the political organisation) must recognise that it has not only rights but also duties towards its citizens: the state is an institution in the service of its members, as opposed to an apparatus facilitating the domination of a caste. In a nation “there is a system of

28

Ibid., . Mauss said that there was something worrying in the disappearance of intermediary social groups. I suggest that he feared in particular that political power, in the absence of social institutions to counterbalance it, may tend to become absolute. Similarly individuals, freed from all bonds except the abstract one which attaches the citizen to the state, may lose any feeling towards the other members of society, thus causing a decline of cohesion and solidarity. Durkheim, as we saw, also believed that in advanced societies individuals could not have feelings for society as whole, but only for the smaller entities which symbolise it. This is why he advocated a re-introduction of medieval corporations, although in a completely new form. Mauss also believed that it was imperative to pose the “question of a reconstitution of [social] subgroups” within nations. “La nation,” . 29 Ibid., –. 30 Ibid., –. 31 Mauss, “Fragment d’ un plan,” .



chapter five

legislation and administration; the notion of the rights and duties of the citizens and of the rights and duties of the patrie are opposed to one another, [and at the same time] complement each other.”32 Furthermore state decisions, in Mauss’s understanding, are the direct or indirect expression of the common will of the nation and as such, as recorded in the old principle of Roman law that Nemo censetur ignorare legem (“no one is supposed to ignore the law”), are assumed to be present in the consciousness of all citizens. Lastly, in a nation, political power is also formalised. The norms that are here established and enforced are laws which, as such, differ qualitatively from customs, traditions, or transient rules: as suggested above, they are binding commands which must conform to certain technical criteria in order to be valid. The third kind of transformation occurs at the individual level. As a social formation, a nation depends on the constitution of a specific kind of subjectivity. Durkheim had argued that advanced societies rest less on blind habits and customs, and more on the conscious perception of the fundamental values around which society is organised. Mauss took up, and even radicalised, this idea. According to him, “social unity” in nations results from “a conscious and permanent general will.”33 What is needed to achieve a unity of this kind, in which laws are efficient only if they are perceived as legitimate and recognised as “worthy” of being obeyed, is the autonomous individual, i.e. an individual capable of independent reflection and rational decisions. The nation needs “clear consciousness, as opposed to the diffuse consciousness of public opinion and collective action.”34 In a fragment from , Mauss affirmed clearly that the clear consciousness that the individual has of himself and of others is a ‘characteristic of our civilisation’. . . . The individual has become the subject and the object, the responsible agent of social life. What he was unconsciously, a prisoner of his rank and habits, he has become consciously. He knows the power he has. . . . Now the individual is the source of social change. This he had always been, but he did not know it. His laws came from his princes and his religions. His customs came out of his techniques.35 32 Mauss, “La nation et l’ internationalisme,” in Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie, . 33 “La nation,” . 34 “Fragment d’ un plan,” . 35 Marcel Mauss, “Fait social et formation du caractère,” Sociologie et sociétés XXXVI, no.  (), . This suggests that Mauss, like Durkheim, took the nation to be an entirely moral and mental phenomenon. Rogers Brubaker, in his perceptive “Mauss on

the national and the transnational



All these various elements are present in Mauss’s definition of the nation, which I have already quoted in the previous chapter. For him the nation is a society materially and morally integrated, with a stable and permanent central power, with determinate borders, whose inhabitants possess a relative moral, mental and cultural unity and consciously adhere to the state and its laws.36

It may now be worthwhile to try to go beyond the wording of Mauss’s text in order to characterise his definition of the national. The Political Definition of a Social Form Mauss’s definition reveals a resolutely political understanding of the nation, which explicitly places itself in the continuity of the reflection of the French Revolution.37 Mauss saw as a decisive criterion of nationhood the development, on top of a social base, of specific political institutions: these were the main requirement for the existence of a nation, insofar as societal integration was in itself only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of nationhood. For Mauss, a nation is a community of citizens bound by a collective will, who live within borders recognised internationally, and who act within the framework of a state with clear rules and procedures, that is to say a state in which the principle of the rule of law applies. The nation, in other words, is envisaged as an État de droit. In defining the nation in terms of political and legal institutions, Mauss was not adopting a completely original position, but there still were marked contrasts with many widespread understandings of nationhood during his lifetime. To begin with, his understanding differed from the one nationhood: objectivism and its limits,” in Studies on Nationalism, edited by Maria Kovács and Petr Lom (Budapest: Central University Press, ), argues that Mauss remained trapped in an objectivist understanding of the national: instead of considering the nation as a claim or a value used in political action, Mauss saw it as a social formation with objective characteristics. My suggestion is that Mauss, like Durkheim, transcended the very opposition between objectivism and subjectivism. The nation is, “objectively” as it were, an integrated society. But a society is integrated because its members act in a certain way on the basis of shared collective representations, i.e. because of a certain “subjective” configuration of individual minds. Moreover, integrated societies can be either “peoples and empires” or “nations”. The decisive difference between these two political forms is, again, of a “subjective” or mental nature: in nations individuals adhere “consciously to the state and to its laws”, instead of blindly obeying customs. 36 “La nation,” . 37 Ibid., –.



chapter five

promoted by nationalists. While Mauss acknowledged that the nation was also a cultural phenomenon, nationalists took culture to be the most important factor of national identity. They understood culture as traditions,38 and they believed that traditions had a value of their own. Therefore, they made use of a rhetoric of tradition to mobilise the population against historical progress and against other nations, both of which were seen as threats to cultural identity.39 By contrast, Mauss was more neutral with regard to the instrinsic value of the different cultures within a civilisation. To begin with, he envisaged cultural phenomena, differently from the nationalists, as the result of social interactions, and not as their cause. Moreover, Mauss took exchange and influence across national border to be major features of cultural life. These two elements will be the topic of a further presentation later in this chapter. Another understanding of the nation could focus not on culture, but on the state itself. Here the nation is conflated with the nationstate. While rightly emphasising politics, this definition understands the political more narrowly than Mauss did: it equates politics with power, and not with collective autonomy. As a consequence, the question of the form of the polity is taken to be secondary: not an État de droit, but merely a strong independent state, is required for nationhood.40 Mauss suggested that such theories result in “hypostasising” and “divinising the state instead of the nation.”41 There is one further aspect which makes Mauss’s understanding of the nation a fundamentally political one. In his reflection, the nation appears primarily as an object of the future, as an object of desire, yet to be attained. This is obvious if we consider that Mauss saw nations as the best kind of political organisation for advanced, integrated societies, but argued at the same time that they made up only a small minority of existing polities. A large number of nations that existed at the time were still very young, and thus possibly full of the negative energy of nationalism.42 38

Ibid., . Ibid., . 40 Ibid., . 41 Ibid., . 42 Ibid., . Mauss saw as most advanced on the national path Switzerland, Norway, Britain, France, the Netherlands, the United States, Germany (Ibid.,  and “La nation et l’ internationalisme,” ). Mauss sometimes seemed reluctant to classify Germany as a nation, insofar as one of its major components, Prussia, still relied too much on the notion of the divine rights of kings (although tempered by a dash of “popular right”) (“La nation,” ). He was ambiguous on Russia, but at least before the October Revolution one should apply to it the same reservations as to Germany. Southern America was composed of 39

the national and the transnational



Moreover, Mauss believed that even constituted nations still had room for improvement. In particular, he pointed in Durkheimian fashion at the need for nations, such as France or Great Britain, to re-create intermediate social levels between the individual and the state.43 He also briefly mentioned the fact that a natural development of the national principle would be the extension of popular control to the economic sphere, i.e. the development of social property in the form of cooperatives.44 In sum, Mauss was facing the difficulty of trying to offer a sociological analysis of a social organisation that was still in the making, and as such, whose form was not yet stable. For this reason, it makes sense to interpret La nation as a declaration of hope that the future of politics would see the triumph of the national principle. In spite of the dangers of nationalism, Mauss saw positively the fact that, in the nineteenth century, many smaller nations such as Serbia, Romania or Finland had emerged. He suggested that such nations would further consolidate in the twentieth century, and that other societies, such as Japan or China, may reach the national stage.45 All this forms the background of this declaration by Mauss: The entire economic life of nations is only starting to emerge (s’ébaucher). But this has something to do with the fact that all processes of national life are far from having everywhere reached their ultimate developments, including in very old, large nations. The sense of the social and of the national is only starting to awake. . . . Nations have before them a distant and great ideal, economic, aesthetic and above all moral.46

On the one hand, this displacement of the moment of the full realisation of the national towards the future reveals the presence of some evolutionism in Mauss’s thought—a hidden philosophy of history which could “young nations” such as Brazil or Chile, and of societies which were too “composite and backward” (especially considering racial stratification) to be called nations (Ibid., ). Even in Europe, most states were still in the process of becoming national: Mauss wrote that the “Slavonic and Hellenic or mixed East of Europe is entirely peopled with young or imperfect nations or with societies of an inferior type” (Ibid., ). 43 “La nation et l’ internationalisme,” . 44 Ibid., . Here Marcel Mauss’s socialist convictions appear especially clearly. For a discussion of his ideas concerning cooperatives, see Dzimira, Marcel Mauss, ch. . 45 On this, too, Mauss was ambiguous. On the one hand he wrote that “in Japan a nation is constituting itself ”, and that “China is rapidly evolving”. On the other hand, he warned that such societies may eventually develop their own kind of political response to the fact of social integration, a response which may be impossible to describe with the concept of “nation” (“La nation,” ). 46 “La nation et l’ internationalisme,” –.



chapter five

not be entirely removed, in spite of Mauss’s declarations of scepticism in this regard.47 On the other hand, however, we may read this displacement as an indication of Mauss’s political intent. He was tacitly intervening here to orient the development of nations toward certain political forms that, in his view, were better suited to particular social configurations.48 In other words, La nation is a political intervention, disguised as a sociological treatise.49 More specifically, this text was an expression of Mauss’s political hopes that nations would understand the lesson of the First World War, and move away from false notions of nationhood which nurtured hatred and violence. Excursus on Philological Problems In my discussion of Mauss’s concept of the nation, I have voluntarily left out a few pages that pose philological problems.50 To begin with, this part of the text cannot be found in the corresponding dossier of the Fonds Marcel-Mauss at IMEC. This raises doubts concerning its authenticity as a section of La nation.51 A further indicator of the fact that the pages in question do not belong to the same manuscript is the following: it entails an alternative definition of the nation, which is not fully compatible with the one I have quoted above. Here Mauss defined that nation as a sufficiently integrated society, with a central power which is democratic to a certain extent, which in any case possesses a notion of national sovereignty and whose borders generally correspond to those of a race, a civilisation, a language, a morality (morale), in a word a national character.52

This definition has the disadvantage, in comparison to the other one, of being much more ambiguous. First of all, it turns democracy and 47 See for instance his description of the “philosophy of history” as an “error” (défaults) in “Rapports réels et pratiques de la psychologie et de la sociologie,” in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., “Real and practical relations between psychology and sociology,” in Sociology and Psychology. Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), . 48 This argument, which we have observed elsewhere, shows that Mauss belongs fully to the language of the social. 49 On this point too my reading differs from Brubaker’s, who argues that Mauss used the concept of “nation” primarily as an analytical category, as opposed to a political tool. Cf. Brubaker, “Mauss on nationhood,” . 50 “La nation,” –. The only exception is footnote , above. 51 That it is from Mauss’s hand, however, does not seem doubtful. 52 Ibid., .

the national and the transnational



national sovereignty (as opposed, more simply, to the rule of law) into criteria of nationhood, so that the concept becomes, from a sociological standpoint, even more restrictive. Moreover, this mention of democracy would be best combined with an emphasis on will and conscious union as characteristics of the nation. (This emphasis is clearly present in the other definition.) But here, rather than the notions of will or consciousness, Mauss mentions race and language as objective criteria essential to a proper understanding of the nation. In view of the fact that Mauss was opposed to the use of “race” as a sociological concept, this decision can only appear as puzzling. Besides, as we will see later on, Mauss carefully distinguished between nations and civilisations, so that his definition of the “nation” as corresponding to a “civilisation” is a bit askew. As things stand, I can only point to such philosophical problems, without being able to solve them (further evidence concerning the origin of the pages in question, their date of writing, etc., is lacking). In any event, the pages I left out are interesting in their own right. They entail a few highly original insights into the way in which nations are politically constructed as collective personalities whose members have shared beliefs concerning their racial, linguistic, or cultural specificity (and sometimes superiority). Mauss’s primary position seems to have been that nations are primarily political units, i.e. that they are independent of objective criteria like race, language or religion. However, because of the power of the state institution and because of the absence of intermediate social groups, nations have a high power of self-transformation. For instance, they can standardise and unify the language spoken by their inhabitants. With the passage of time, the origin of this unification may disappear from collective memory. It thus becomes possible to assume (wrongly), that the nation rests on common language, even though it in fact existed before full linguistic unification. Mauss saw in such phenomena of collective oblivion the origin of racialist or traditionalist understandings of nations. He wrote, for instance, that “it is because the nation creates the race that some believe that the race creates the nation.”53 While Mauss took it to be normal that nations should develop a sense of their internal cultural cohesion, he also believed that such a process could easily lead to excesses when it emphasised only closure, immutability, and distinctiveness. Thus, Mauss criticised the “fetishism of [national] literature, of fine arts, of science,

53

Ibid., .



chapter five

of technique, of morals, of religion, in a word: of character”.54 The very use of the notion of fetishism is interesting: in Marxian terms, a fetish is something which is made of social relations but which is taken to be independent from them (for instance, famously, commodities). It is difficult to refrain from taking these Maussian reflections as an implicit verdict on nineteenth-century social and political theory as a whole, which rested on a misunderstanding of cause and effect. “Everything Can Be Shared between Societies”: A Sociology of International Relations When Marcel Mauss worked on La nation the First World War, during which nationalist passions had brought death and destruction upon Europe as a whole, had just ended. Having voluntarily enrolled himself into the French army, despite being over the official age limit, Mauss had experienced the war from the inside.55 The eventual loss of many of his relatives, friends, and colleagues to the ravages of the war would haunt him for the rest of his life.56 As a result, in the aftermath of the conflict, much of his energy went into political reflections and writings on the war.57 His aim was to help in the realisation of a lasting peace between nations, by defending the ideal of internationalism. Mauss understood internationalism as a type of relation between societies, not as the fusion of societies into one—a utopia he called cosmopolitanism. Rather, he believed that it should take the form of an increasing cooperation between states, social and economic organisations, and individuals across national boundaries, with a view to strengthen the interdependence of societies. This would put such a high price on any disturbance of international peace that the community of nations would always tend to favour diplomatic solutions to emerging conflicts, as opposed to military ones. Mauss wrote that the “spirit of peace is nec-

54

Ibid., . Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. 56 Cf. for instance his remarks in Mauss, “A  interview with Marcel Mauss,” American Ethnologist , no.  (February ), . 57 Apart from “La nation”, Mauss reflected and wrote on the Russian Revolution. See for instance his “Appréciation sociologique du bolchevisme,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale , no.  (); tr., “A sociological assessment of Bolshevism,” in The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, edited by Mike Gane (London: Routledge, ). 55

the national and the transnational



essarily a spirit of federation.”58 He saw the newly founded League of Nations as the best tool available to start a process of international integration.59 This idea that political institutions come at the beginning and not at the end of intersocial relations is interesting in its own right, in that it represents a reversal of the position Durkheim had adopted. As we remember, according to Durkheim societies may merge into one, but only at the end of a long process of cooperation and integration, crowned by the emergence of a single set of social and political institutions, i.e. of a single society. By contrast, Mauss suggested that such shared institutions may be created first, and that they would accelerate the process of intersocial cooperation. For instance, Mauss made peace conditional upon the existence of an international federation of states, instead of positing that peace was required before political cooperation could begin: “only when the United States of Europe will exist will we have peace in Europe, and only when the United States of the world will exist will we have peace in the world. And not before.”60 While intersocial cooperation could be enhanced by international political integration, it is not created by it. As a matter of fact, only a portion of Mauss’s manuscript is on the national phenomenon itself. For the most part, it is dedicated to what happens across and between national societies. In other words, this text is an attempt to develop a sociology of international relations. Mauss’s aim was to demonstrate that such relations “have existed at all times”, even though they have gained importance as human history unfolded.61 He argued that societies commonly borrow from their neighbours, rather than suffering isolation: “the history of civilisation . . . is the history of the circulation, across societies, of the goods and discoveries (acquis) of each.”62 In order to offer a demonstration of such statements, Mauss followed a method characteristic of him: he began with a presentation of a variety of concrete facts from different societies and different time periods, and then moved towards more abstract reflections and considerations. 58 Mauss, “Les phénomènes morphologiques,” both as a manuscript and as typescript in MAS .. As indicated above, a partial retranscription has been published in  in Socio-Anthropologie. In what follows, references are directly to the source. Here: manuscript, –. 59 Cf. Frédéric Ramel, Les fondateurs oubliés. Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Mauss et les relations internationales (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), –. 60 “Les phénomènes morphologiques,” manuscript, . 61 “La nation,” . 62 Ibid., .



chapter five

Mauss distinguished between three relevant dimensions of the “life of relation of societies,”63 which he respectively called “international,”64 “morphological,”65 and “ideal phenomena.”66 International phenomena in the strict sense refer to the exchange of goods and the circulation of ideas across societies. Mauss selected different kinds of social facts (economic, technical, aesthetic, religious, legal, and linguistic) and undertook to show that, in each case, there was abundant historical and sociological evidence of exchange. That societies have always had commercial relations with one another, including over long distances, is indubitable and widely known. What must be emphasised, rather, are the non-economic consequences of such relations. For instance, they usually also propagate technical knowledge, so that the most important discoveries, especially those useful militarily, end up being adopted by all, after a certain amount of time.67 Concerning religions, Mauss also argued that they influence each other much more than usually assumed. He mentioned as one especially prominent example the adoption by the Romans of the religion of the Greeks.68 Similarly, Christianity grew out of Judaism, and Islam drew on both of them.69 Aware of the warning Durkheim had issued concerning the non-exchangeable character of legal phenomena, Mauss conceded that the exchanges in this field were less frequent than in other areas.70 But they existed nonetheless. The global influence of Roman law was, in this instance, the most convincing illustration. Moreover, Mauss was convinced that in the future, law would be increasingly internationalised: legal institutions can now be considered as tending towards unification and uniformisation, and this in an astonishing way. . . . there is a need for the nations which have reached a certain economic, aesthetic and political level to make their morality and laws mutually compatible (d’accorder leur morale et leur droit les uns avec les autres).71

Mauss’s first step, thus, consisted in describing the international exchange of goods and ideas as an absolutely normal, and even necessary, social 63

Ibid., . Ibid., . 65 “Les phénomènes morphologiques.” 66 Marcel Mauss, “Les phénomènes idéaux,” both as a manuscript and as a typescript in MAS .. This text is unpublished. 67 “La nation,” –. 68 Ibid., . 69 Ibid., –. 70 Ibid., . 71 Ibid., . 64

the national and the transnational



fact. In this light, there was little reason to believe that the future would be any different. In other words, the moment of closure and hatred represented by the First World War was an exception to, and a deviation from, the regular course of history. He believed that soon the world would witness an “increasing multiplication of borrowings, exchanges and identifications, including in the detail of moral and material life.”72 Mauss was aware that a description of religious, legal or linguistic commonalities across national settings could easily sound abstract, or even hollow. Classical evolutionists, or philosophers of history, such as Spencer or Comte, also believed, for instance, that societies at the same level of development would possess a similar technology, as well as comparable religious and political institutions. In order to avoid the abstract, non-sociological hypothesis of a necessary development of the mind through determined stages, Mauss proposed a concrete analysis of the morphological dimension of international relations. By international morphology Mauss meant, following a Durkheimian inspiration, the material basis (such as roads) and the social structure (communities of merchants, etc.) which made international phenomena possible. Mauss’s aim was to show that the existence of similar practices in different societies should not be explained by way of the metaphysics of social and mental development. Rather, they should be conceptualised as resulting from the social practice of transfer. Unlike “influence” or “circulation”, the notions of “exchange” and “transfer” entail connotations of concrete actions performed by situated individuals. As Mauss wrote, “[e]ven when things as ideal as maps, words, ideas, books, or sciences are being borrowed, there is a transfer of something from someone to someone.”73 Furthermore, Mauss thought that one should pay attention to the material and technical channels through which transfers take place. These premises led Mauss to propose some highly original analyses of the material and social conditions of international exchange. He wrote on the history of roads, of techniques of navigation, as well as of means of communication. He noted, for instance, that the appearance of the telegraph, the telephone, as well as the generalisation of steamers and trains, was transforming international relations. The remarkable pages he wrote on this topic could be applied, with some minor modifications, to the situation that is ours today. The earth had become in Mauss’s time a single space of communication, which “feels what happens in 72 73

Ibid., . “Les phénomènes idéaux,” typescript, .



chapter five

the whole world and reacts to it.”74 This corresponds to the emergence of a “public opinion of humanity”75 capable of exerting moral pressure upon governments, thus forcing them to abandon the “machiavelisms and brutalities of the past.”76 Another aspect, equally worthy of note, of Mauss’s reflection on international morphology is a theory of “dispersed people” (peuples dispersés).77 They are “entire societies which devote themselves entirely” to contact and exchange.78 As a result, they are “uprooted, freely floating between all kinds of other nations.”79 In other words, they do not possess their own territory but share it with, or borrow it from, other societies, either permanently (e.g. Jews) or temporarily (in the case of nomad populations, of which Mauss mentioned the “Gipsies”).80 Mauss also spoke of other internationalised groups, more professional in nature, such as merchants, colons, scientists or even artists and philosophers, who always live in between several societies.81 Mauss observed that because of their ambiguous role in society (they are at the same time within and without), these dispersed peoples and internationalised groups have been typically marginalised and even despised.82 However, Mauss saw them as playing a fundamental social role: since they have contacts with peers in other societies, they are the agents of international transfers. The articulation of societies with one another crucially depends on them and for this reason, they are the motor of cultural development, they are “powerful catalysts (levains) of progress and civilisation in all the places they went through.”83 War was the last element Mauss discussed in his reflection on the morphological dimension of intersocial life. Even though he believed that exchange and contact are permanent features of social life, he was aware that not all such exchanges and contacts are peaceful in nature.84 He 74

Mauss, “Les phénomènes morphologiques,” manuscript, . Ibid., . 76 Ibid., . 77 Ibid., . 78 Ibid., . 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., . 81 Ibid. 82 A classical statement concerning the fact that the liminal (that which belongs to two categories at once) is typically seen as taboo, dirty, and despicable, can be found in Edmund Leach, “Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories and verbal abuse,” in Anthropology and Society, vol.  of The Essential Edmund Leach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). 83 “Les phénomènes morphologiques,” manuscript, . 84 Mauss’s sensitivity to conflict also appears in his Essay on the Gift, in which he 75

the national and the transnational



affirmed that physical confrontation between human beings and groups is a permanent feature of social life, and that this central fact had been too little analysed by sociologists.85 In a few dense pages, he described the transformations of the exercise of violence through the ages.86 Mauss’s main point was that a sharp distinction between war and peace is not universal. Its first emergence is contemporaneous with the invention of international law in Roman antiquity,87 and before this point, argued Mauss, military conflict was part of normal social life, and it was more frequent because many more social activities entailed physically violent action. While nations draw a clear line between religious or legal activities and military ones, in earlier, polysegmental societies these activities were left indistinct. For instance, war was sometimes a rough equivalent of what later became legal, and especially penal procedure: vendetta, the most frequent case of military action in traditional communities, is a case in point.88 On the other hand, war does not necessarily mean opposition between two social wholes: very often, only smaller portions of society are involved. Especially common in archaic communities is the military action of a group against a single individual from another group.89 By contrast, according to Mauss, only modern nations know the phenomenon of a total mobilisation of society for its own survival or for the defence of its independence.90 Mauss concluded by saying that war has at least one beneficial effect: namely, to trigger a merger of societies into larger wholes. In concluding peace, societies forge alliances which form the basis of new societal configurations.91 And this is exactly what Mauss hoped would result from the First World War. Societies not only practise peaceful exchange or its polar opposite, war, but also theorise such activities. They give them meaning by embedding them in political or religious narratives. Thus Mauss, after his reflections analysed some forms of exchange that were intrinsically antagonistic, for instance the potlatch of the Native Americans of the West Coast. He showed that in the practice of giving particularly generous presents, there was often an intention of affirming one’s social status and the power of one’s group. Cf. Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’ échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), –. 85 “Les phénomènes morphologiques,” manuscript, . 86 See especially ibid., . 87 Ibid., . 88 Ibid., –. 89 Ibid., . 90 Ibid., . 91 Ibid., .



chapter five

on the concrete facts and material conditions of the relations between societies, moved to the question of the collective representations of international relations, as found in different societies at different times. Mauss looked in particular at the various manifestations of the notion of humankind as a community of different yet necessarily interrelated societies. Even though it was regularly violated in practice, he found this notion in Antiquity, for instance in the Stoic concept of natural law,92 or among the lawyers specialising in international public law, starting from the Roman reflection on jus gentium.93 He found it, too, in the teaching of international religions such as Christianity or, less markedly, Bouddhism, with their universalist concept of the human being.94 However, Christianity betrayed its own values when it passed an alliance with secular powers:95 the Reformation was the climax of this relativisation of the internationalist principles of the Church.96 Mauss also wrote on the internationalism of the labour movement, which had the advantage of being not only an ideal, but also a concrete practice.97 However, socialist parties had often failed live up to their proclamations of international solidarity and backed instead their national governments, as proved by the experience of the First World War.98 More generally Mauss, while recognising the importance of ideals, also believed that they were unreliable if they remained pure theories, disconnected from actual social currents and movements that activate and promote them. As examples of a better articulation of theory and practice, he mentioned trade unions and social associations—and in particular the one he was active in, the international cooperative movement.99 This emphasis on social movements as the bearers of societal and political transformation can be further illustrated by looking at Mauss’s beliefs concerning the future of international integration. He argued that this integration would likely increase as a result of a double development: on the one hand, the emergence of international political and legal institutions, under the umbrella of the Leage of Nations; on the other hand, an evolution of public opinions in all countries, the diffusion of strong 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

“Les phénomènes idéaux,” typescript, . Ibid., –. Ibid., –, . Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –.

the national and the transnational



collective convictions regarding the vital importance of durably securing peace by increasing interdependence. Mauss, rather optimistically, believed that this was precisely the direction taken by the public opinion of European countries: What is even more important, politically and morally, is that this interdependence [which appeared after the war] is known, felt, desired by the nations [peuples] themselves. They very clearly wish that it be solemnly inscribed in laws, in real international, codified and sanctioned laws (droit international), both public and private.100

Because he saw the circulation of goods, ideas, and even institutions across borders as one of the most important phenomena in history, and because he believed that in the twentieth century a global social system may emerge, Mauss needed to take a position on the notion that many sociologists, including Durkheim, had rejected: the notion of a “human civilisation”. The Question of a Human Civilisation In an article from  he co-authored with Emile Durkheim, Mauss made the first attempt at conceptualising the “supra-national life”101 of societies. In this text, the two authors started by declaring that the primary social unit, and the most important one, is the “tribe, the people, the nation, the city, the modern state”, in other words the “political society.”102 At first sight, thus, “national life is the highest form of collective life, and . . . sociology cannot know phenomena of higher order.”103 This corresponds to the view, presented in Chapter , that Durkheim had defended in reference to society as a totality, which implies the impossibility of an international society. It seems that Marcel Mauss managed to convince his uncle to soften his position. In the second paragraph of the text, the authors suggested that although “less well defined” and “complex”, and therefore “difficult to study”, there indeed are properly social phenomena of some kind beyond society itself.104 Examples of 100

“La nation et l’ internationalisme,” . Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “Note sur la notion de civilisation,” in Marcel Mauss, Représentations collectives et diversité des civilisations, ; tr., “Note on the concept of civilisation,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, . 102 Ibid., ; tr., . 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 101



chapter five

phenomena “not strictly attached to a determined social organism”105 are, for instance, languages but also religions, both of which could be shared by several societies.106 In order to refer to this level of social reality, Durkheim and Mauss proposed to use the concept of “civilisation”, which they defined as “a moral milieu within which are immersed a certain number of nations, and of which each national culture is but a particular form.”107 A specific analysis of this aspect of social life was needed, using the tools which had proved efficient in the scientific study of national societies (comparison, classification, etc.). Defining the concept of civilisation as another level of social reality and introducing a (sociologised) notion of an international society was already an important achievement, especially considering Durkheim’s reticence. But the very concept of an international society needed to be carefully defined in order to avoid sounding too philosophical and abstract. First of all, the authors emphasised that there could not be, as Comte had wrongly believed, “a single human civilisation,”108 but only a variety of local ones. Second, not everything could be common to several societies. Durkheim and Mauss mentioned “myths, tales, money, commerce, fine arts, techniques, tools, languages, words, scientific knowledge, literary forms and ideals.”109 In other words, it seems that goods, especially economic ones, could circulate across societies. Certain ideas, especially scientific and aesthetic ideas as well as, to a certain extent, religious ones, could be exported and imported as well. By contrast, “phenomena of social morphology form part of the specific make-up of each people”110 and therefore cannot be shared. This should be obvious since social morphology, as we saw in the previous chapter, refers to the geographic base of society, as well as to the number and organisation of individuals and groups within the social space. Similarly, Durkheim and Mauss emphasised, “political and legal institutions”111 can neither circulate nor be shared by several societies. The consequence of this limitation is clear: international organisations (i.e. institutions belonging equally to the various nations which have created it, and capable of exerting a political and moral authority upon them) cannot exist. 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Ibid., ; tr., . Ibid., –; tr., –. Ibid., ; tr., . Ibid., ; tr., . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

the national and the transnational



Mauss eventually divested his own definition of the concept of civilisation of all the limitations that had been introduced in the text of . In La nation he wrote that the “more and more intense, numerous and vast material, intellectual and moral relations between nations” had now reached such a point that “no nation (peuple) is without some direct or indirect relationship with other” nations.112 According to Mauss, this was sufficient to speak of a “global human civilisation”.113 However, he carefully distinguished his understanding of this expression from the one which prevailed among the “cosmopolitan” thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Cosmopolitanism indeed rests on a conception of human beings as “citizens of the world”. This conception, in turn, requires a whole set of assumptions which Mauss could not accept, namely: “an idealist theory (théorie éthérée) of man as a monad that is everywhere the same”, and a notion of ethics “as something that transcends the concreteness of social life, that does not accept any other patrie than humankind and any other law than natural law.”114 In contrast to this a-social, a-historical vision, Mauss wanted to turn the term “civilisation” into a sociological concept. In a text he published in , “Civilisations: their elements and forms”, Mauss defined them as a “family of societies”,115 i.e. “societies more or less related to each other”116 either because they have things in common (such as language or religion), or because they regularly or even continuously exchange goods and ideas with one another. All societies “are in a way immersed in a bath of civilisation, they live on what they borrow (les sociétés sont en quelque sorte plongées dans un bain de civilisation; elles vivent d’emprunts)”.117 Concretely civilisations, according to Mauss, are cultural areas (such as Christianity, Islam, the Russian Empire, or South America—to name only a few examples) themselves subdivided in smaller interrelated but distinguishable units such as nations, peoples or tribes. On top of these general definitions, Mauss also used more technical formulations which reveal, incidentally, his belief that the social is 112

“La nation,” . Ibid., . 114 Ibid., –. This quote can be read as a summary of Mauss’s disagreement with the social thought of the thinkers of Enlightenment. In short, they had neglected the social: they saw human beings not as members of society, but as abstract individuals with a uniform human nature; they envisaged norms and obligations not as the expression of social requirements, but as divine or natural commands. 115 “Les civilisations,” ; tr., . 116 Ibid., ; tr., . 117 “La nation,” . 113



chapter five

made of more than the two basic levels of individual and society: he said that civilisation is a “hypersocial system of social systems”118—a notion I will try to further explicate below. On these premises, Mauss posited a general principle of social analysis: namely, that the social is a function of the intersocial, or in other words, that it is essential, in order to understand societies, to look at the broader civilisational context in which they are embedded. He wrote: we must remember that societies, like all things natural, do not change except if their milieu changes, that they have within them only limited forces of transformation. . . . precisely such relations between societies explain a good deal of the internal phenomena of the life of societies. As a matter of fact, it is an abstraction to believe that the internal life of a nation is not for a large part conditioned by that which is external to it, and vice versa.119

All this sheds light on Mauss’s understanding of the human civilisation of which he spoke in La nation.120 What he meant by this was not that societies would disappear and merge into a global social entity, but that one civilisation (still composed of distinct social entities) may emerge and replace existing ones. If anything, and paradoxically, the appearance of a global civilisation of interdependent nations would be accompanied not by a diminution, but by an increase of the individuality of each composing part: “Nothing proves that the division of labour within nations and between nations, which will be the principle of tomorrow in economic, legal and artistic matters, will not bring about a more fortuitous diversity of nations”.121 In order to account for this fact, Mauss appealed to the principle established by Durkheim in the Division of Labour: the individuals who specialise in performing a distinct function in society acquire a higher sense of their own self, a clearer perception of their own personality. Similarly, Mauss argued that international “[s]olidarity will do for nations what it did for men within nations”;122 namely, it will transform them into collective individuals. According to Durkheim, one of the primary characteristics of modern social individuals is autonomy, which could be defined by way of three concepts: personality (individu118

Ibid., ; tr., . Ibid., . 120 By contrast, his later essay on “Civilisations”, he did not use the term to describe the current state of international relations, which possibly indicates a passage to a less optimistic mood. 121 Ibid., . 122 Ibid. 119

the national and the transnational



als have a sense of their own self, and possess their own preferences and world-views); reflexivity (individuals are capable of reflexion and conscious decision); morality (individuals have a sense of their dependence upon a whole and thus spontaneously tend to show respect for legal and moral norms). Likewise, Mauss envisaged nations in the global civilisation as relatively autonomous parts of a larger entity. He believed that in each nation individual members would ideally possess the same rights and duties and participate equally to the life of the nation; that political decisions would result from rational, collective processes of law-making; and that the different populations and governments of the world would become aware of the advantages of exchange and progress, and thus prefer cooperation to war. In other words, Mauss’s human civilisation would be a whole made of nations at the same time integrated socially, sovereign politically, and conscious morally. As suggested above Mauss, in his own reflection on “civilisation”, abandoned the limitations which were introduced in the article he had co-authored with Durkheim. First, more things could be exchanged: not only goods and ideas, but also legal codes and political institutions. Mauss wrote that “everything social that is not the constitution of the nation itself can be borrowed [from a nation] by another nation, another society”.123 Second, Mauss now took it to be wrong to reduce morphology to social facts occurring within a single society, since morphological phenomena, as we saw, could be intersocial and international. And third, he claimed that it is too restrictive to envisage “national life as the highest form of collective life” and everything beyond it as less developed socially, and thus less relevant sociologically. On the contrary, a study of civilisations was one of the keys to the proper understanding of specific societies. It is interesting to observe that Mauss’s most famous and celebrated text, the Essay on the Gift (), was built precisely on such methodological assumptions. After La nation, Mauss turned to a new research topic, that of non-monetary forms of exchange within and across societies.124 Seen in this light, we may read The Gift as a continuation of Mauss’s 123

Ibid., . In Marcel Mauss (–), Fournier gives an indication of the various stages of the elaboration of the Essay on the Gift. Mauss was working on “La nation” in –. Already in  he published “Une forme ancienne de contrat chez les Thraces” in Revue des études grecques. This was the beginning of a series of publications (e.g. “L’ obligation à rendre les présents” in  or “Gift, Gift”, in ) which all were related to the topic of the Essay, published in  in L’ Année sociologique (dated /). 124



chapter five

reflection on the intersocial and the international.125 The Essay is not only a micro-sociological study on the social fact of giving and returning presents, which is a common practice in all societies (including those which seem most commodified). It is also a macro-sociological inquiry into a fascinating intersocial phenomenon: the ritualised exchange of things, ideas, and values across group boundaries. In the great rituals of exchange known as kula (in the Melanesian islands) or potlatch (in the American North-West), we can observe one of the most important social facts coming to the fore: the “mixture of things, values, contracts and men”.126 In other words, directly following up on the track of La nation, the Essay on the Gift is a demonstration of the normalcy, for any society, of transcending the “narrow sphere of its physical boundaries, and even of its interests and rights.”127 “An Entity with a Thousand Dimensions”: Society, Language, and the Category of Relation The “Note on the concept of civilisation” already represented an evolution with respect to the position Durkheim had previously adopted. Moreover, Durkheim’s initial position was itself quite far from nineteenthcentury deterministic and naturalistic nationalisms. The fact that for Mauss the position of  needed to be further radicalised is an indicator of the extent of his break with the human sciences of his time. These sciences, argued Mauss, “have too easily attributed to social groups an internal capacity to evolve, and have too much isolated from each other the social phenomena of the various societies”.128 At several junctures in this volume, I have argued that a representation of societies as self-centred and self-contained played an important role in the history of the human sciences. Conceptually, this has something to do with the attribution of a primacy to the notion of unity or identity as opposed to other notions and categories, such as those of “interaction” (community or Wechselwirkung, the reciprocal influence of two or more elements, in Immanuel Kant’s understanding)129 or “relation”. It is 125

On this point, see Ramel, Les fondateurs oubliés, –. “Essai sur le don,” ; tr., . 127 Ibid., ; tr., . 128 “La nation,” . 129 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . 126

the national and the transnational



arguable that Marcel Mauss, together with a few further authors such as Gabriel Tarde and perhaps Franz Boas, constitutes a significant exception here, insofar as he can be seen as building his entire social reflection upon the category of relation itself. As we saw, he emphasised that the embeddedness of elements within a larger context (i.e., their relations with other similar elements) determines their being. Specifically, he spoke of the “life of relations of societies” to refer to international exchanges and contacts, and to the fact that societies are defined by their relations with other societies within the same civilisation. Thus, instead of depicting society as a self-centred, neatly ordered totality with hermetic boundaries, Mauss described it as “an entity with a thousand dimensions, an environment of living and thinking environments (milieu de milieux) . . . agitated by all sorts of currents, often contradictory ones, and in all directions”.130 One of the inspirations for Mauss’s re-conceptualisations was linguistics, a science that he described as perhaps “the most secure among the sciences of man.”131 As we already saw in the introduction to this volume, linguists emphasise especially four characteristics of language. First, language is a relational structure: words are defined by their position within the entire lexical system, and by their exact relations with other words. Second, language is a resource that speakers activate or mobilise: it influences their thought and action without determining it (this is the famous Saussurean distinction between langue and parole).132 Third, language can be transformed, in the long run, by repeated, collective deviations from the norm in ordinary speech or parole. Fourth, the boundaries of a language are impossible to determine with precision: languages blur into each other; foreign words and expressions can easily be imported, transformed, assimilated, and even re-exported. If we try to construct a social theory with such characteristics of languages in mind, we end up with a notion of the individual and of 130

“Appréciation sociologique du bolchévisme,” ; tr., . The parenthesis is mine, JT. The expression “milieu de milieux” also appears in “La nation” (p. ) to describe the international level. In other words, individuals are a “milieu” (of something Mauss does not name) living in the “milieu” of society, which itself is embedded in the “milieu” of international relations. It seems, thus, that any social object could be understood as a “milieu”, i.e. as something whose identity is defined by its relations to all other social objects. This is also the meaning of the expression “hypersocial system of social systems”: each society is made of systems (e.g. individuals or families) embedded in larger systems (e.g. clans, tribes, corporations, nations), all the way up to the highest level, the hypersocial system constituted by civilisation. 131 “Fragment d’ un plan,” . 132 Edmond de Saussure, Course of General Linguistics (London: Open Court, ).



chapter five

society different from those promoted by Hippolyte Taine, Gustave Le Bon, or even René Worms, for whom everything is function, causation, determination, boundary. The model of language inspires a vision of the social as more open, more fluid, in which the levels are less strictly defined and in which the elements entertain reciprocal relations. At the same time, since this vision puts at its core an intrinsically social institution, i.e. language itself, it avoids the individualism, the rationalism and the voluntarism of contractarian and utilitarian social theories. It is precisely such a vision of the social which Mauss tried to develop, on the basis of a new notion: the symbolic. In “Real and practical relations between psychology and sociology”, Mauss wrote: It is a long time now since Durkheim and I began teaching that communion and communication between men are possible only by symbols, by common signs, permanent ones, external to individual mental states which are quite simply sequential, by signs of groups of states subsequently taken for realities. . . . we began to think that one of the characteristics of the social fact is precisely its symbolic aspect. In the majority of collective representations, it is not a matter of a unique representation of a unique thing but of a representation arbitrarily, or more or less arbitrarily, chosen to signify other representations and to govern practices.133

To say that a phenomenon is a symbol is first of all equivalent to saying that on top of its material dimension (which can be a sound, an image, or even an action, as in rituals), it has a mental dimension, a meaning for the person who is using or interpreting it. However, a symbol is more than a representation, since it exceeds in all directions its material substratum, to borrow from Durkheim’s vocabulary. Any symbol belongs to a system, a society of signs: all symbolic phenomena—for instance, social facts— are interconnected with an indefinite number of other ones. It is their position within this system of relation which determines their meaning. A further element related to this one concerns the understanding of social change: far from having to be caused by factors external to society, it can be understood as resulting from new associations and connections between symbols and signs, i.e. as the actualisation of potentialities of meaning already latent in the social system considered. Given that new symbolic associations can emerge and develop much more easily than associations between material things, this perspective suggest that transformations are more likely to occur and may often take more surprising forms. In other words, it supports a vision of the social as more trans133

“Rapports réels,” ; tr., .

the national and the transnational



formable (both from within and from without) than more materialistic and naturalistic understandings typically suggest. At the same time, this vision of the social does not envisage society primarily as the rational result of conscious decisions and actions. While social actors must possess a certain understanding of the symbolic conventions of their society, it is obvious that the entire system of relations and interconnections cannot be present at the same time in consciousness. For this reason, individuals act consciously, and sometimes reflectively, but the full meaning and impact of their actions tend to escape them. Mauss’s idea of the symbolic, thus, enabled him to redefine the relation between the individual and society as the inscription of the former into the tight web of social significations. Similarly, he could replace the image of societies as self-centred totalities with another one, namely societies as networks which overlap and intersect. These overlaps and intersections are the intersocial, the relations and interactions between social entities at and across all levels, which, Mauss believed, are a constitutive dimension of the collective life of humans.

epilogue THE LANGUAGE AND DIALECTS OF THE SOCIAL

This volume has attempted to describe French social thought as a language. To qualifiy as a language, in my usage of the term, a realm of discourse has to display a few characterisic elements. To begin with, of course, it must possess a minimal set of recognisable assumptions. The language of classical contractualism, regardless of the diversity of its forms, could not operate without the opposition between the state of nature and civil society. The language of commercial society could not stand without the presupposition that the main effect of the pursuit of material interest is to strengthen socially beneficial dispositions such as discipline and tolerance instead of detrimental ones, such as idleness or aggression.1 The most recognisable component of the language of the social is the notion of a relative thickness of human relations: a thematisation of the endurance of habits, the sharedness of beliefs and, perhaps most importantly, the situatedness of both in time and space. All these aspects stand in contrast to an exclusive emphasis on the will, understood as a conscious ability to choose a certain goal and to adopt a certain kind of conduct as conducive to it. The language of the social also differs from universalistic theories which minimise the impact of local circumstances on human life. As shown in Chapters  and , an emphasis on both universal principles and on the will was a central component of political thought at the moment of constitution of the language of the social. For this reason, one further characteristic of the latter is a tendency to use the epithet “political” within the context of a description of false views on society. Taine, for instance, discussed the understanding of human relations upheld by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. He argued that their political science, despite its claim of resting on objective observation, was 1 On these themes cf. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, ed., Wealth and Virtue. The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).



epilogue

purely mathematical and abstract: “In accordance with the customs of the classic mentality, and with the precepts of the prevailing ideology, a political system is now constructed after a mathematical model.”2 This approach was doomed to overlook the complexity of human relations and thus to remain for ever incapable of “penetrating or grasping” anything of “this vast moral and social world.”3 As we saw in the Introduction Marcel Mauss, although much less critical of the social thought of the Enlightenment than Taine was, also distinguished an exceedingly political and formal understanding of human relations, which he called “political fetishism,” from a richer and more empirical conception of society. Obviously, the promoters of the language of the social did not take the political per se to be a minor or less important dimension of life in common. What they criticised was an understanding of politics as a realm independent from, and superior to, other human realms. By contrast, the promoters of the language of the social pleaded for a subordination of the political to, or at least for its inclusion in, the social itself. Any political action should take into account, without rejecting them a priori as “prejudices”, the existing state of human relations in society. This was the sense of de Maistre’s insistence that national characters could not be transformed by political action, or of Taine’s denunciation of the abstraction of French revolutionary thought, which had no idea of the true life of the French population. A language, thus, is structured around common assumptions and common problems. It is important to underline, however, that this does not preclude a certain freedom of interpretation on the part of those who speak the language. I extensively discussed how the general principle of a thickness of human relations could be theorised in markedly different ways. There are of course huge differences between de Maistre’s notion of national characters as determined by God and Burke’s insistence on the accumulation of historical experience, between Le Bon’s emphasis on genetically inherited racial traits and Durkheim’s vision of the authority of collective representations. This is even more obvious in the case of common problems, which typically allow for a variety of contrasting answers. For instance, the problem of an articulation of the social and 2 Hippolyte Taine, L’ Ancien Régime, tome deux, vol.  of Les origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, ), ; tr., The Ancien Regime, vol.  of The Origins of Contemporary France (Teddington: The Echo Library: ), . 3 Hippolyte Taine, L’ Ancien Régime, tome premier, vol.  of Les origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, ), ; tr., The Ancien Regime, vol.  of The Origins of Contemporary France (Teddington: The Echo Library: ), .

the language and dialects of the social



the political was variously solved: generally speaking the notion, among the representatives of the language of the social, was that political decisions should take into account existing social relations. But this abstract principle left open the question of concrete implementation. Taine and Esmein, for instance, believed in the necessary independence of the legislative institution. They both suggested that the people could not easily form appropriate opinions concerning the laws that should be promulgated. However, they warned that the legislature should have clear historical and sociological notions concerning the existing state of society. As Esmein affirmed in an attempt to correct the excessive voluntarism of the French Revolution, laws would be most successfully established (in the sense of being universally recognised as legitimate), if they formalised or reinforced expectations already latent in the population. Durkheim, the great theorist of the division of labour, shared with these two scholars the belief in the inevitability of representation. In his reflection on politics, he started from the assumption of different levels of social awareness in society. According to him, the state is a social organ capable of keeping a clear vision of the most important social rules. This is one of the conditions of its ability, if needed, to enforce them by distributing sanctions. At the same time, the state is able to evaluate which rules are no longer adequate, considering the state of social relations. Its function is thus also to propose new rules, to “think and act for society.”4 However, the members of society would be more likely to adopt and follow these new rules if, instead of receiving them passively from above, they could understand their meaning and raison d’ être. In modern democratic nations the activity of the state, especially the deliberation of legislative bodies, should be open to the public, so as to establish, in a delicate equilibrium, a permanent communication between state and society, between the political and the social.5 Very much in the spirit of Montesquieu Mauss, in his later work, seemed to favour a direct action of society upon itself.6 Without going 4 Emile Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de FranceQuadrige, ), ; tr., Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), . 5 For recent assessments of Durkheim’s political thought, see Yves Sintomer, “Emile Durkheim zwischen Republikanismus und deliberativer Demokratie,” and Hans-Peter Müller, “Emile Durkheims Moralpolitik des Individualismus,” both in Berliner Journal für Soziologie , no.  (June ). 6 According to Sylvain Dzimira the younger Mauss, by contrast, was more open to



epilogue

into practical details, he suggested that any political project of social transformation should occur through a change of customs, habits, and— most importantly—ideals and representations, as opposed to direct action on the part of the state. Practically, new political principles should be implemented by way of a cultural action of social groups and movements. For instance, Mauss believed that the realisation of the kind of democratic socialism he supported would require a greater popular control over economic institutions, for instance through the social ownership of industries and their management by professional associations. However, this could not occur via mere administrative fiat, as the Bolsheviks had wrongly assumed. Rather, such a transformation would need to be preceded socially by a diffusion of the idea and practice of cooperation and self-management. Mauss himself was active in the cooperative movement, and he saw one of its principal merits in its contribution to the “education” of citizens by offering a practical example of an alternative configuration of the economic system.7 It is only in a second moment, after the social and cultural transformation of economic representations, that the state could modify its economic policy and, for instance, successfully take control over specific economic institutions such as the banking system and key heavy industries.8 It is worthy of note that languages, despite resting on common assumptions and recognising similar problems as central, are not primarily characterised by a fixed set of shared concepts. Of course, some terms have an especially broad currency and play a particular role within the language. This is obviously the case for the primary categories of all languages, for instance “virtue” for civic humanists, “commerce” for the promoters of commercial society, “law” for the theorists of natural jurisprudence, or “society” and “social” for the representatives of the language of the social. However, the key concepts of a language are shared with other languages, even though they are typically defined very differently. We observed, for instance, how the meaning of “social” shifted from “malleable stuff ” to “constraining relations”. We also looked at the transformations of the idea of revolutionary action. See Sylvain Dzimira, Marcel Mauss, savant et politique (Paris: La découverte, ), –. 7 See Dzimira’s observations on this point in ibid., –. 8 Mauss, “Appréciation sociologique du bolchévisme,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale , no.  (); tr., “A sociological assessment of Bolshevism,” in The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, edited by Mike Gane (London: Routledge, ). Mauss, however, believed that the economic role of the state should remain limited. He did not believe that the abolition of the market was possible, only its regulation.

the language and dialects of the social



meaning of further notions used across languages, such as “national character”, “nature” or “state”. Lastly, and importantly, some prominent concepts may disappear from a language. I argued in Chapter , for instance, that the concept of character lost its centrality in the twentieth century, while the term “culture” moved to occupy a central position within the language of the social. This brief overview of some of the common assumptions and problems of the language of the social also illustrates the second important element of all languages, namely the breadth of their use and their extension over time. The assumptions and main problems of the language of the social have occupied a recognisable area of discourse for over two centuries. By contrast, some discursive configurations are too short-lived, or insufficiently widespread in intellectual circles, to deserve the appellation of a language.9 For instance, the philosophy of Hegel proposed a system of thought which, due to its originality and thematic extension, may have lent itself to become the foundation of a new language. Hegel’s philosophy could have occupied an area of intellectual discourse different from the one covered by other languages, including both natural jurisprudence and social thought. On the one hand, Hegel’s philosophy entailed a critique of the natural law tradition as empty speculation. The idea of a will fully detached from all influence of cultural and historical factors was clearly rejected by Hegel. On the other hand, unlike the proponents of the language of the social, Hegel’s emphasis did not lie on the local and the specific, but on the universal. He envisaged social events as the manifestation of the historical development of the spirit, which followed a logical path towards the universal realisation of human freedom. Hegel’s philosophy, I suggest, could have given birth to a language of history—not history in the mere historicist sense of a temporal situatedness of human action, but in the sense of a necessary unfolding of social events towards a universal end.10 While Hegel’s reception was, as we know, far from negligible, it was insufficient to give birth to a full-fledged language, at least in 9 We may want to call a “school” a specific form of discourse which extends through time, while remaining confined to a small number of individuals. Similarly we could call, for lack of a better term, “intellectual fashion” a discourse adopted by many, but for a short period of historical time. 10 One of the reasons why the important figure of Auguste Comte is not seriously considered in the present volume is that I am still in the process of deciding whether we should consider the founder of positivism a speaker of the language of the social, or rather the inventor of a language of history alternative to that of Hegel (but equally unsuccessful in the long run).



epilogue

the sense in which I use that term. The development of Hegelian philosophy into a language was halted by the critique of Marx and Nietzsche.11 The third element to take into account when considering the logic of languages is their thematic extension. As the language of the social illustrates, a language must be capable of yielding pronouncements on several aspects of the human condition. While remaining true to its fundamental assumptions, it should be capable of encompassing a stance on human relations; on collective rule-making, or politics; on historical time; on nature; on religion. On the basis of the French example, we have seen in this volume how the language of the social proposed answers to the question of the nature of social relations as well as to the question of political action. Without always thematising this explicitly, I have also touched upon further fundamental themes, such as the concept of time or the concept of nature. Let me here add a few observations concerning the relation of the language of the social to the question of the disenchantment of the world. Incidentally, this will allow me to make a few comments, as promised in earlier chapters, on the notion of collective personality. Generally speaking, the language of the social emerged contemporaneously with, and contributed to reinforce, the process of a disenchantment of the world.12 This phrase means here more than just secularisation, i.e. the separation of church and state and the decline of religious beliefs: I also have the erosion of traditional figures of authority in mind. For instance, the promoters of the language of the social acknowledged the decline of great personalities possessing charismatic authority, from the pater familias to the monarch. Concerning the decline of paternal authority, the reflection of Frédéric Le Play (–) is especially revealing. Around the mid-nineteenth century, he tried to explain the convulsions of French history (exemplified by the social upheavals of ,  and ) as due to the diminishing recognition of social authorities. In particular, the respect of children for their father had been eroded, resulting in a lack of discipline which was detrimental politically as well as economically. Le Play envisaged stable and harmonious families, in their different forms, as crucial for the order of society: 11 This is the theme Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche. The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought (London: Constable, ). On Hegel’s reception in Europe, see Domenico Losurdo, Hegel et la catastrophe allemande (Paris: Albin Michel, ). 12 On the notion of disenchantment, see Marcel Gauchet, Le disenchantement du monde (Paris: Gallimard, ). Also recently Jürgen Habermas, “Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (April ).

the language and dialects of the social



The main source of the good is to be found in certain families in which [the members] are traditionnaly submitted to a severe discipline of respect and labour. In them harmony, together with the knowledge of God and of the moral order, is preserved by the rule of the father and the mother.13

Le Play’s hope was that paternal authority may be restored. By contrast, other authors did not deplore the decomposition of traditional families, while still believing that a notion of authority was important for the stability of social institutions.14 Many, but not all, of them, suggested that the function of traditional figures of authority could be taken up by new ones: especially, society envisaged as a collective person. This accounts for the tendency of many scholars to describe society as a person worthy of inspiring feelings of affection and dedication. We remember, for instance, Michelet’s description of France as a collective person or Durkheim’s remarks on society as an entity embodying collective ideals, possessing body and soul. Some authors even emphasised explicitly that the main advantage of the “personalist” analogy was that it made the collective easier to identity with. For instance, Edmund Burke criticised the nominalist philosophies of the Enlightenment for undermining the metaphor according to which society is a person and, as such, is intrinsically worthy of being honoured: On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place. These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. . . . There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-informed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.15

Burke argued, thus, that instead of living in the mind of individuals as an abstract collection of individuals, society should be imagined as a concrete person. Importantly, if society was comparable to a person, it could also be loved and respected as one. In other words, the “personalist” analogy played an important social and political role: by making the 13 Frédéric Le Play, L’ Organisation de la famille, selon le vrai modèle signalé par l’ histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps (Tours: Alfred Mame, ), –. 14 See, for instance, Émile Durkheim, “Introduction à la sociologie de la famille,” in Fonctions sociales et institutions, vol.  of Textes (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, ). 15 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), .



epilogue

representation of society by individuals easier, by making society into a possible object of affection and dedication, it was a factor of social cohesion and political loyalty. Similarly, the representatives of the language of the social observed that religion was losing its strength as a binding element in human relations. Many of them believed that traditional religion could be replaced by a new religion of the social. As a case in point, Comte argued for the introduction of a religion of humanity. Michelet described France as a collective person, and as a religion. For Renan, the nation was a spiritual principle. Durkheim, perhaps most strikingly, argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that all the traditional attributes of God, such as immortality, ubiquity, or omnipotence, were also characteristics of society. On this basis, he argued that God was a distorted, fetishised representation of society itself. Durkheim believed that the representation of a divine being was not necessary to social life. He argued, however, that it belonged to the very logic of life in common that society should inspire collective feelings akin to religious ones, where awe, respect and love, closely intertwined, attached themselves to a concrete object, the substratum or symbol of higher principles.16 Another bearer of traditional moral authority was nature itself. As I argued in Chapter  and Chapter , drawing on Lorraine Daston, the notion that nature could be seen as a source of moral prescriptions had a long tradition. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many authors adopted the view that nature had endowed human beings with similar capabilities, which could serve as a basis for common understanding. This notion, however, lost strength during the nineteenth century. Nature was now seen as an immanent system of regularities without end or purpose, in such a way, in Daston’s phrase, that it eventually lost its “moral authority.”17 This phenomenon was an integral part of the secularisation process itself: whatever moral authority nature has enjoyed has been parasitic, and theological (indeed Christian) to boot. On this account, the sweeping normative authority ascribed to nature in Enlightenment ethics, politics, theology, and aesthetics is a straightforward example of transitional

16 Emile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, ); tr., The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, ), –. 17 Lorraine Daston, “I. The morality of natural orders: the Power of Medea. II. Nature’s customs versus nature’s laws,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. , edited by Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, ).

the language and dialects of the social



secularization: nature, once God’s minister, simply took over divine prerogatives. The next step, accomplished only in the nineteenth century, was to de-divinize nature altogether[.]18

With the possible exception of Gabriel Tarde, who as we saw had a different notion of nature, most scholars belonging to the later developments of the language of the social adopted the view that nature should be conceived as an unfolding of morally neutral events, governed by causal laws.19 However, it is possible to distinguish between two opposed ways of drawing the consequences of this view for an understanding of the social, with a variety of positions in between. For authors endorsing naturalism, such as Taine or Le Bon, society should be envisaged as a part of the natural world, in the sense that the action of natural causes such as race or climate is taken to determine the behaviour of human beings. By contrast other authors, for instance Durkheim and his followers, declared the independence of the social vis-à-vis the natural. As we saw in Chapter , these scholars went to great lengths to demonstrate that society, while having nature as its substratum, was still to a large extent autonomous from it. Human beings were still envisaged as subjects of causal determinations, but the cause of their actions was mostly in the social realm. In this framework, it was possible to accommodate the idea of a self-transformation of society, which as I suggested above was crucial to Durkheim and Mauss, as well as to other authors committed to the defence of the Third Republic. In this light, it may be worthwhile to introduce an ideal-typical distinction between two “sub-languages” or dialects of the social. The conservative dialect of the social emphasises the determination of human relations by factors external to societies, but always specific to each of them. Consequently it assumes, on the one hand, the difficulty of voluntary social change, and on the other hand, theorises the necessary closure of societies and the incompatibility of their characters. Moreover, it typically endorses a negative anthropology and a pessimistic sociology which de-emphasise the role of ideal aspirations as factors capable of governing human conduct. The progressive dialect of the social, which historically appeared in reaction to the other one, as we saw in Chapter , sets very different accents. It understands society as a distinct level of reality, relatively independent from nature. It solves the problem of the articulation of the social and the political by affirming that a 18 19

Ibid., . The case of earlier authors, such as de Maistre and Burke, may be different.



epilogue

purposeful transformation of society is possible, provided that it takes the form of a truly collective undertaking. On the basis of this view concerning the transformable character of social organisation, this dialect can more easily accommodate the notion of a beneficial exchange of ideas and material goods across societies. Lastly, as the examples of Michelet, the late Renan, Durkheim, or Mauss indicate, this dialect operates with the assumption that human beings are moved, not only by material interest or fear, but also ideal considerations, by a positive feeling of enthusiasm.20 Since these uplifting ideals originate in the social itself and are embodied in it, it is possible to understand society as a moral entity. It is this distinction between two different dialects of the language of the social which is sometimes missing in the reflections on the history of social and political thought in France, as well as in those dedicated to the concept of the social itself. In a recent study of the counter-enlightenment tradition, the intellectual historian Zeev Sternhell writes that in the last years of the nineteenth century, it becomes obvious in France that the reflections on the decadence caused by equality, the explication of history by cultural and subsequently by racial factors, the meditations on the baseness of the utilitarianism of present times, and the reflections on the moral illness of the century, undermine an entire political culture based on the rationalism of the Enlightenment and therefore, the very foundations of the Republic.21

In part, Sternhell is right to affirm that in the last few decades of the nineteenth century there was a conservative critique of the Enlightenment, and of the Republic as the regime which had directly inherited its principles. However, there was also, on the part of progressive thinkers, a constructive criticism of the philosophy of the eighteenth-century which endorsed its values, including the republic so dear to Rousseau, but rejected many of its anthropological, epistemological and ontological assumptions. For instance, part of the citation above could be applied to Durkheim: he did explain historical events by reference to the social and cultural (though not racial) framework in which they were embedded. He also criticised utilitarianism for its failure to theorise the moral import of social life. He believed that his age was characterised, among other things, by a moral crisis. Especially, he saw collective values as insufficiently 20 On this point, see Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . 21 Zeev Sternhell, Les Anti-Lumières. Du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris: Fayard, ), .

the language and dialects of the social



present in the daily life of individuals, a phenomenon which increased the risk of anomic forms of conduct such as suicide or crime. At the same time, however, Durkheim made very clear that the solution to such problems did not lie in the abandonment of republican ideals, to which he was deeply committed. Rather, the new social and moral crisis should be remedied by way of a series of reforms within the Republic—reforms concerning primarily the education system and the social structure, in particular the re-introduction of intermediary institutions between the individual and society. Nor was Durkheim alone in adopting this combination of republicanism with an elaborate critique of some aspects of the Enlightenment. In Chapter , we saw that there was a sociological turn in French republican thought during the early decades of the Third Republic. The scholars who promoted it accepted the main values of the French Revolution, such a national sovereignty, the principles of the “Rights of Man”, and equality before the law. However, they offered new justifications for these values, which avoided the individualistic, rationalistic and voluntaristic premises of the eighteenth-century languages of politics and natural law. For instance, we saw how scholars such as Esmein, Fouillée or Bouglé redefined human rights as collective values, as beliefs shared within a community—as opposed to natural rights intrinsic to individuals, or to prescriptions God or Nature had written in “the hearts of men”, to use the classical expression of Paulinian origin.22 Even the republican regime could be justified on the basis of historical and sociological reasoning: Alfred Fouillée was explicit in his arguments that the republic was the regime which best suited the country at this particular historical juncture. The case of such authors, who do not fit either in the category of Enlightenment thought nor in the category of traditionalism or conservatism, suggests that one should indeed add a category to the toolbox of the historian working on French social and political thought. This has already been suggested by scholars, although no label has stuck so far.23 I entertain no illusion as to the probability that my own clumsy coinage— 22 Saint Paul, Epistle to the Romans, :–. There are many observations on the history of this notion in Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). 23 For instance Seidman discusses “moral liberalism”, as distinct form “individualistic liberalism”. He also speaks of “liberal democracy”. See Liberalism, –. Sudhir Hazareesingh discusses the meaning of radicalism and liberalism in Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). For further reflections on this topic, see my article, “The idea of a Republican tradition. Reflections on the debate



epilogue

the “anti-naturalistic” or “progressive” dialect within the language of the social—may win the hearts and minds of scholars. At the beginning of this volume, I introduced Hannah Arendt’s notion of the social and her critique of the conception of human life it entailed. She defined society as “the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”24 The social, for her, is the result of a blurring of the private and public realms. Before modernity, there was a strict separation between the political and the familial: the former constituted a sphere of appearance in which individuals regarded each other as equals, recognised the individuality and distinctive value of each, and collectively exercised their freedom. The latter was the realm of material constraint and bodily need. Because of the disappearance of the separation between the private and the public, in modernity material necessity and biological need have come to contaminate all areas of social life. As a result the loss of freedom, according to Arendt, characterises the modern experience. On the one hand, the more private forms of freedom have receded because individuals are now condemned to spend most of their time in economic activities, thus becoming labouring animals (animal laborans). On the other hand, and similarly, freedom as collective autonomy has been undermined in the nation-state by the development of a bureaucratic system of administration distributing material benefits. Politics thus has lost its status of an end in itself and has become an instrumental activity, a technique in the service of the principle of fulfillment of material needs. In other words, politics is subordinated to the life process and to nature itself. Furthermore, Arendt argued, during the rise of the social individuals are de-humanised, since they are increasingly deprived of the opportunity of exercising their highest faculties. They are reduced to sheer survival, and since all humans have the same bodily constitution this means, for Arendt, that they become identical, thereby losing any sense of their individuality and dignity.

concerning the intellectual foundations of the French Third Republic,” Journal of Political Ideologies , no.  (October ). Also, Claude Nicolet, “Les ‘trois sources’ de la doctrine républicaine en France,” in Histoire, Nation, République (Paris: Odile Jacob, ); Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (London: Heinemann Educational, ). 24 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), .

the language and dialects of the social



Hannah Arendt, thus, operated with a concept of the social which emphasises constraint, homogeneity, loss of individuality, and the reduction to nature. Moreover, she pointed out that the language of the social historically developed as an alternative to an understanding of human relations focusing on politics and purposeful individual action. Thus, at first sight, her understanding of the “social” seems to bear a lot of resemblance to the one which, according to my own analysis, was adopted by the authors discussed in this volume, especially in Chapters  and . Does this mean that Arendt’s analysis should be declared correct? My conviction is that Arendt is offering an appropriate depiction, not of the language of the social as a whole, but only of one of its dialects. The progressive dialect of the social, in fact, promotes a vision which is at variance with Arendt’s understanding of the social. While it is true that it theorises the social as constraining, it typically underlines that this constraint is not of a material kind, but of a moral one. Similarly, as the case of Durkheim and Mauss suggests, the state is not envisaged as a mere administrative machine but as the bearer of collective ideals. These scholars believed that the cohesion of society is necessary, but they understood cohesion as interdependence and not as homogeneity. They endorsed the paradox that, in modernity, social cohesion results from a specialisation of social functions, which is accompanied by an increase of individual freedom. Lastly, while critical of an excessive emphasis on political voluntarism, they believed that purposeful, transformative collective action is at all times possible. The differences between Arendt and at least some representatives of the language of the social are thus smaller than her sweeping condemnation of “the social” and “society” may suggest. Marcel Mauss is a case in point, since he shared with Arendt a great admiration for Aristotle.25 For instance, there was room in his reflection for a theory of recognition, although different from the one proposed by Arendt. Relinquishing the distinction between a public sphere of freedom and a private sphere of necessity, Mauss envisaged society as a whole as a space of appearance, as something which “relates and separates men at the same time”,26 i.e. as a “world” in the Arendtian sense. Contrary to Arendt’s a-historical use of these terms, for Mauss need and necessity are always socially interpreted, so that even economic activities are embedded in thick cultural significations. Thus individuals, in any of their activities and not just in 25 26

Sylvain Dzimira, Marcel Mauss, savant et politique (Paris: La découverte, ), . Arendt, The Human Condition, .



epilogue

political ones, could be envisaged as seeking the recognition of others. They constantly adopt strategies to distinguish themselves, with a view to confirm or improve the esteem others have for them, i.e. their social standing. One could easily apply to the potlatch, as interpreted by Mauss, the description Arendt offered of politics: To belong to the few “equals” meant to be permitted to live among one’s peers; but the public realm itself, the polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all.27

Moreover, it is ironic that the representatives of the progressive dialect of the social described rival approaches in terms reminiscent of Arendt’s condemnation of the social. According to them, it is the naturalistic determinism of racialist and climatological conceptions, or the economicist notion of homo oeconomicus,28 which are potentially de-humanising, since they reduce individuals to nature or material interests. The progressive language of the social also represents an anomaly for the critics of social history. In the Introduction to this volume, I observed that those who describe their position by using the prefix “post-” often leave one question intentionally unclear: whether the new is a radical rupture with the old, or whether it is a development and transformation of the old. This ambiguity can also be found in the work of Miguel A. Cabrera and of other authors advocating a “post-social” turn. In my opinion, though, it is the second option which better describes their purposes. “Post-social” should be taken here to mean: beyond the conception of the social typically adopted by those who called themselves “social historians”; or, more broadly: beyond the conception of the social typically held during the twentieth century.29 In other words, Cabrera operates with two concepts of the social: his work is a call to move beyond one of these, while maintaining the other. What should be abandoned, as we saw, is a view of society as a closed structure causally determining the action of individuals. By contrast, Cabrera advocates a concept of the 27

Ibid., . Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’ échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), . 29 This broader formulation would not apply to Cabrera himself, but it would apply, for instance, to Bruno Latour. See his “Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social,” in The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, edited by Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, ). 28

the language and dialects of the social



social encompassing discourse and imagination as constitutive elements of social life. Moreover, this concept should enable us to think social change and intersocial exchange as normal features of collective life. Cabrera, in developing his alternative concept of the social, strikes me as remaining very faithful to some of the core assumptions of the language of the social, in the sense described in this volume. To begin with, he emphasises that the social is not merely a malleable and transformable stuff, but that it exerts a constraint upon individual action. For him, this constraint first and foremost takes the form of a framing of what can be individually and collectively thought, of a delimitation of the thinkable. As we remember, Cabrera redefines society with a view to put at its center, not classes (as social historian do) nor culture (as cultural historians do), but discourse; a discourse made of concepts and categories which are “inescapable” and thus directly influence the range of options of individuals. For instance, the emergence of political groups seeking to radically transform society is possible only if a certain conception of time is available which envisions the future as something open, and not as an eternal repetition of the past.30 Second, Cabrera assumes that the social has a primacy over the political: that which can be thought and done politically depends upon the existing configuration of social relations. Moreover, the prevalent understanding of politics itself, as well as the identification of certain aspects of human life as relevant for politics, are an effect of social discourses: “Discourse constitutes politics itself, at each historical moment, as an object; it is discourse that determines the status of politics as a field of activity and its function in the shaping of identities.”31 This does not mean, however, that political action is entirely determined by social structures, as some nineteenth-century social theorists may have argued. It rather means that political change is possible only as a result of social processes. In particular, wide-ranging social transformations require in most cases deep conceptual and categorial change. Mere decisions cannot bring this latter kind of change about—what is needed is Arbeit am Begriff, a sustained 30 On this point, see Keith Michael Baker, “Inventing the French Revolution,” in Inventing the French Revolution. Essays On French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae. The dissolution of the topos into the perspective of a modernized historical process,” in Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, ). 31 Cabrera, “Linguistic approach of return to subjectivism? In search of an alternative to social history,” Social History , no.  (January ), .



epilogue

collective work on concepts and categories. It is not inconceivable that an alternative conceptual system should be elaborated by individuals, but its impact upon society will depend upon its adoption by at least one social group. In turn, this social group may engage in the political activity of challenging and unsettling existing concepts and categories, simultaneously offering theirs as preferable alternatives. It is interesting to note, for the sake of illustration, that feminist groups in recent history have proceeded in exactly that way.32 Cabrera’s way of envisaging the social seems to me to be compatible, and even to bear affinities, with some of the social theories I have presented in this volume. The emphasis of Tarde, Boas and Mauss on the openness of society; the theorisations of Weber or Mauss of language, concrete social representations, and social movements, entail a vision of the social very different from the causalism and closure supposedly typical of mainstream social science. We have even seen how Durkheim, despite being often criticised for his naturalistic, deterministic, and holistic conception of society, repeatedly emphasised that society is entirely made of representations;33 and how his nephew Marcel Mauss, at least, saw him as the theoretician par excellence of the symbolic. I mention Boas, Durkheim, Mauss, Tarde, and Weber purposely here, to prevent the accusation that I am considering marginal cases in the history of the human sciences. My point is not that these authors are the whole of human science—but at least they were influential enough to allow me to define the language of the social, in part, on the basis of the elements that were common to all of them. These remarks bring me to several final observations. To begin with, as Mauss suggested, one may question the very usefulness of a strict analytical separation between independent realms of human life, variously titled “the cultural”, the “political”, or “the economic”. For instance, Mauss was the theorist of “total social facts”, i.e. facts which “involve . . . the totality of society and its institutions.”34 It easy to suggest, in this spirit, that all social relations entail a dimension of power, and thus, at least a potential politi-

32 The reflection on, and deconstruction of, existing categories features prominently, for instance, in the work of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, ) or Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, ). 33 On this point, see Susan Stedman Jones, Durkheim Reconsidered (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), ch. . 34 Ibid., .

the language and dialects of the social



cal dimension.35 Conversely, political action, including individual political action, can be conceptualised not only as an action aiming at impacting on society, but also as an action located within social relations.36 From a conceptual perspective, thus, it makes probably most sense to suggest that we should take the social and the political not as realms of human life or levels of reality, but as perspectives on human relations. My main aim in this volume has been to shed some light on the conceptual history of the “social”, by way of discussing examples drawn from a specific setting, namely (for the most part) France during the long nineteenth century. I have especially tried to give a sense of the richness and variety of the language of the social. My second aim, as suggested in the Introduction to this volume and in the preceding pages, has been to present, and take a stance within, the debate concerning the limitations of the concept of the social which took place in the last decades. In this debate, it has been argued in particular that many of the core assumptions of the language of the social are wrong and detrimental: wrong, because they prevent us from seeing human relations in their true light; and detrimental, because they force us to adopt a sceptical attitude concerning the liberating potential of political action. My argument is that this critical evaluation can only be true under a certain description of the language of the social itself—a description whose limitations I have pointed out. In a sense, of course, the critics of the “social” are correct. In particular, the desiderata they formulate concerning what any theory of the nature of human relations should entail are legitimate: we should, in effect, be able to recognise the centrality of language, symbols and representations; the permeability of social boundaries; the transformability of social relations. My contention is that the language of the social, at least in some of its dialects, already meets precisely such desiderata. I am in a position to suggest, consequently, that the critics of the “social” actually operate within the language of the social (as I understand it), and not outside of it. On such premises, I can only conclude by saying that I see little reason for an abandonment of the language of the social. On the contrary, its insistence on collective action and on the fact of interdependence seems to me to be crucial in our day 35 This is, famously, one of the suggestions of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York; Vintage, ), –. 36 For an argument concerning the need to articulate better the political and the social, see Peter Wagner and Nathalie Kariagannis, “The social and the political. Retrieving the meanings of a conceptual distinction,” in The Social Sciences in a Global Age, edited by Peter Wagner (Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming).



epilogue

and age—an age marked by the rise of a lighter concept of the social as loose voluntary networks insulated form one another, and incapable of collective transformative undertakings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alliez, Eric. “Différence et répétition de Gabriel Tarde,” Multitudes  (). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, . Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, . Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death. From the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Aron, Raymond. Les étapes de la pensée sociologique. Montesquieu. Comte. Marx. Tocqueville. Durkheim. Pareto. Weber. Paris: Gallimard, . Baczko, Bronislaw. “The social contract of the French: Sieyes and Rousseau,” The Journal of Modern History  (September ). Bagehot, Walter. Physics and Politics, vol.  of The Work and Life of Walter Bagehot. London: Longmans, Green, and Co, . Baker, Keith Michael. “Enlightenment and the institution of society: notes for a conceptual history,” in Civil Society. History and Possibilities, edited by Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. “Inventing the French Revolution,” in Inventing the French Revolution. Essays On French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. “On the problem of the ideological origins of the French Revolution,” in Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. “Representation redefined”, in Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. “The early history of the term ‘social science’,” Annals of Science , no.  (). Barberis, Daniela. “In search of an object: organicist sociology and the reality of society in Fin-de-Siècle France,” History of the Human Sciences , no.  (). Behrent, Michael C. “The mystical body of society: Religion and association in nineteenth-century French political thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (). Bell, David A. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, – . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Beller, Manfred and Joep Leerssen, eds. Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Character. Amsterdam: Rodopi, . Beller, Manfred. Eingebildete Nationalcharaktere. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur literarischen Imagologie. Göttingen: V & R Unipress, . Bendersky, Joseph. W. Carl Schmitt. A Theorist for the Reich. Princeton: Princeton University Press, .



bibliography

Berlin, Isaiah. “The Romantic Revolution. A crisis in the history of modern thought,” in The Sense of Reality. Studies in Ideas and their History. London: Chatto & Vindus, . Billaud, Jacques N. Principes régénérateurs du systême social. Paris: Imprimerie Vatar, . Blais, Marie-Claude. La solidarité. Histoire d’ une idée. Paris: Gallimard, . Boas, Franz. Race, Language and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, . Boas, George. “Nature,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. III, edited by Philip P. Wiener. New York: Scribner, . Bobbio, Norberto. Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Fictions. London: Penguin, . Bouglé, Célestin. “La tradition nationale,” in Pour la démocratie française. Conférences populaires. Paris: Edouard Cornély, n. d. []. ———. La démocratie devant la science. Études critiques sur l’ hérédité, la concurrence et la différenciation. Paris: Alcan, . ———. Les idées égalitaires. Étude sociologique. Paris: Alcan, . Brague, Rémi. Europe, la voie romaine. Paris: Gallimard-Folio, . Brooks, John I. The Eclectic Legacy. Academic Philosophy and the Human Sciences in Nineteenth-Century France. Newark–London: University of Delaware Press–Associated University Press, . Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . ———. “Mauss on nationhood: objectivism and its limits,” in Studies on Nationalism, edited by Maria Kovács and Petr Lom. Budapest: Central University Press, . Bublitz, Hannelore. Diskurs. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, . Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by J.G.A. Pocock. Indianapolis: Hackett, . Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, . Cabrera, Miguel A. “Linguistic approach of return to subjectivism? In search of an alternative to social history,” Social History , no.  (January ). ———. “On language, culture, and social action,” History and Theory , no.  (). ———. “The crisis of the social and post-social history,” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms , no.  (). ———. Postsocial History: An Introduction. Oxford: Lexington Books, . Carré de Malberg, Raymond. Contribution à la théorie générale de l’ Etat, spécialement d’ après les données fournies par le Droit constitutionnel français,  vol. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, . Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Castoriadis, Cornelius. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, .

bibliography



———. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, . Chartier, Roger. “Le monde comme représentation,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales , no.  (November–December). ———. “Text, symbols, and Frenchness,” Journal of Modern History , no.  (). Chernilo, Daniel. “Social theory’s methodological nationalism: Myth and reality,” European Journal of Social Theory , no.  (). Claret, Philippe. La personnalité collective des nations: Théories anglo-saxonnes et conceptions françaises du caractère national. Bruxelles: Établissements Émile Bruylant, . Collingwood, G.R. The Idea of Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . Comte, Auguste. “Discours d’ ouverture du cours de philosophie positive,” Revue encyclopédique  (November ). ———. Discours de l’ esprit positif. Paris: Société positiviste, . Constant, Benjamin. Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements. Genève: Droz, . Crouch, Colin. Post-Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press, . d’ Entrèves, Antonio P. Natural Law. A Historical Survey. London: Harper & Row, . Daston, Lorraine. “I. The morality of natural orders: the Power of Medea. II. Nature’s customs versus nature’s laws,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. , edited by Grethe B. Peterson. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, . Davy, Georges. “Introduction,” in Emile Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France-Quadrige, . Dérathé, Robert. Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps. Paris: Vrin, . Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. Paris: Le Robert, . Digeon, Claude. La crise allemande de la pensée francaise (–). Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Dobuzinskis, Laurent. “Defenders of liberal individualism, republican virtues and solidarity: The forgotten intellectual founding fathers of the French Third Republic,” European Journal of Political Theory , no.  (). Donzelot, Jacques. L’ invention du social. Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques. Paris: Fayard, . Duguit, Léon. La théorie générale de l’ Etat (suite et fin), vol.  of Traité de droit constitutionnel. Paris: Fontemoing, . ———. Leçons de droit public général faites à l’ Université égyptienne pendant les mois de Janvier, Février et Mars . Paris: Boccard, . ———. Les transformations du droit public. Paris: Armand Colin, . Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. “Note sur la notion de civilisation,” in Marcel Mauss, Représentations collectives et diversité des civilisations, vol.  of Œuvres. Paris: Minuit, . Translation: “Note on the concept of civilisation,” in Marcel Mauss, Techniques, Technology and Civilization, edited by Nathan Schlanger. Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, . ———. “De quelques formes primitives de classification—contribution à l’ étude des représentations collectives,” L’ Année sociologique , – ().



bibliography

Translation: “On some primitive forms of classification—contribution to the study of collective representations,” in Primitive Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  Durkheim, Emile and Paul Fauconnet. “Sociologie et sciences sociales,” in Textes, vol. . Paris: Minuit, . Translation: “Sociology and the social sciences,” in The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. Basingstoke: Macmillan, . Durkheim, Emile. “Cours de science sociale. Leçon d’ ouverture,” in La science sociale et l’ action. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: “Course in sociology. Opening lecture,” in On Institutional Analysis, edited by Mark Traugott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. “De la définition des phénomènes religieux,” L’ Année sociologique , – (). ———. “Débat sur l’ explication en histoire et en sociologie,” Textes, vol. . Paris: Minuit, . Translation: “Debate on explanation in history and sociology” in The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. Basingstoke: Macmillan, . ———. “Détermination du fait moral,” in Sociologie et philosophie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. “Deux lois de l’ évolution pénale,” L’ Année sociologique , – (). Translation: “Two laws of penal evolution,” in The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, edited by Mike Gane. London: Routledge, . ———. “Internationalisme et lutte des classes,” in La science sociale et l’ action. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. “Introduction à la sociologie de la famille,” in Textes, vol. . Paris: Minuit, . ———. “Jugements de valeur et jugements de réalité,” in Sociologie et philosophie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. “L’ enseignement philosophique et l’ agrégation de philosophie,” in Textes, vol. . Paris: Minuit, . ———. “L’ individualisme et les intellectuels,” in La science sociale et l’ action. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. “La conception matérialiste de l’ histoire,” in La science sociale et l’ action. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: “Review of Antonio Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’ histoire,” in On Institutional Analysis, edited by Mark Traugott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. “La sociologie et son domaine scientifique,” in Textes, vol. . Paris: Minuit, . ———. “Le dualisme de la nature humaine et ses conditions sociales,” in La science sociale et l’ action. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. Leçons de sociologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, . ———. “Les principes de  et la sociologie,” in La science sociale et l’ action. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, .

bibliography



———. “Morphologie sociale,” L’ Année sociologique , – (). Translation: “Social morphology,” in The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. Basingstoke: Macmillan, . ———. “Organisation et vie du corps social selon Schaeffle,” in Textes, vol. . Paris: Minuit, . Translation: “Review of Albert Schaeffle, Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers: Erster Band,” in On Institutional Analysis, edited by Mark Traugott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. “Pacifisme et patriotisme,” in La science sociale et l’ action. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: “Pacifism and Patriotism,” Sociological Inquiry , no.  (). ———. “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives,” in Sociologie et philosophie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. De la division du travail social. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The Free Press, . ———. L’ éducation morale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, . ———. L’ évolution pédagogique en France,  vol. Paris: Alcan, . ———. Le suicide. Etude de sociologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: Suicide: A Study in Sociology. London: Routledge, . ———. Leçons de sociologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, . ———. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Paris: Alcan, . Translation: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: George Allen & Unwin, . ———. Les règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. Basingstoke: Macmillan, . Duso, Giuseppe. La rappresentanza politica. Genesi e crisi del concetto. Milano: FrancoAngeli, . Dzimira, Sylvain. Marcel Mauss, savant et politique. Paris: La découverte, . Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol.  (Si-Subu), edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’ Alembert. LausanneBerne: Sociétés typographiques, . Esmein, Adhémar. Eléments de droit constitutionnel. Paris: Larose et Forcel, . Favre, Pierre. Naissances de la science politique en France (–). Paris: Fayard, . Ferry, Jean-Marc. “Face à la question européenne, quelle intégration postnationale?” Critique internationale  (April ). Fisch, Jörg. “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. : Verw-Z, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck. Stuttgart: KlettCota, . Fischbach, Franck. Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale. Paris: La découverte, . Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, . Translation: Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, .



bibliography

———. “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’ histoire,” in Dits et écrits, vol. : –. Paris: Gallimard-Quarto, . Translation: “Nietzsche, genealogy, history,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell: Cornell University Press, . ———. “Sur la nature humaine: la justice et le pouvoir,” in Dits et écrits, vol. : –. Paris, Gallimard-Quarto: . Translation: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature. New York: New Press, . ———. Il faut défendre la société. Paris: Gallimard–Le Seuil, . Translation: Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, –. London: Penguin, . Fouillée, Alfred. Esquisse psychologique des peuples européens. Paris: Alcan, . ———. L’ idée moderne du droit en Allemagne, en Angleterre et en France. Paris: Hachette, . ———. La démocratie politique et sociale en France. Paris: Alcan, . Fournier, Marcel. “Mauss et ‘la nation’, ou l’ œuvre inachevée,” Sociologie et sociétés XXXVI, no.  (). ———. Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Freud Sigmund. Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse/Die Zukunft einer Illusion. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, . Translation: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. New York: Norton, . Gasparini, Eric. La pensée politique d’ Hippolyte Taine: entre traditionalisme et libéralisme. Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires d’ Aix-Marseille, . Gauchet, Marcel. Aux origines de la démocratie II. La crise du libéralisme. Paris: Gallimard, . ———. Le disenchantement du monde. Paris: Gallimard, . Geary, Patrick J. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Gobineau, Arthur de. Essai sur l’ inégalité des races humaines, in Œuvres, vol. . Paris: Gallimard, . Translation: The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races. Philadephia: J.B. Lippincott, . Gravlee, Clarence C., H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard, “Boas’s Changes in Bodily Form: The immigrant study, cranial plasticity, and Boas’s physical anthropology,” American Anthropologist , no.  (). Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Guilhaumou, Jacques. “Sieyès et le non-dit de la sociologie: du mot à la chose,” Revue d’ histoire des sciences humaines  (). Gurvitch, Georges. “Le problème de la conscience collective dans la sociologie de Durkheim,” in Antécédents et perspectives, vol.  of La vocation actuelle de la sociologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Habermas, Jürgen. “Das Konzept der Menschenwürde und die realistische Utopie der Menschenrechte,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie , no.  (). ———. “Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (April ).

bibliography



———. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, . Hanley, Ryan Patrick. “The ‘Science of the Legislator’ in Adam Smith and Rousseau,” American Journal of Political Science , no.  (April ). Hannaford, Ivan. Race. The History of an Idea in the West. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, . Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge, . Hazareesingh, Sudhir. Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century French Republican Political Thought. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, . ———. Political Traditions in Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Heimann, M.P. “Voluntarism and immanence: Conceptions of nature in eighteenth-century thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (April– June ). Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. On the Citizen, edited by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, . Hoffmann, Stanley. “Rousseau on war and peace,” The American Political Science Review , no.  (). Hont, Istvan and Michael Ignatieff, eds. Wealth and Virtue. The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London: Simon and Schuster, . Jaume, Lucien. “Problématique générale des droits,” in Les Déclarations des droits de l’ homme. (Du Débat – au Préambule de ), edited by Lucien Jaume. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, . Joyce, Patrick, ed. The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences. London: Routledge, . Joyce, Patrick. “The end of social history?,” Social History , no.  (January ). Kail, Michel and Geneviève Vermès, eds. La psychologie des peuples et ses dérives. Paris: Centre national de documentation pédagogique, . Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Karsenti, Bruno. “Présentation,” in Emile Durkheim, Sociologie et philosophie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. “Présentation,” in Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’ imitation. Paris: Kimé, . ———. L’ homme total. Sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, .



bibliography

———. La société en personnes: études durkheimiennes. Paris: Economica, . Kaufmann, Laurence. “Le Dieu social. Vers une socio-logie du nominalisme en Révolution,” in L’ invention de la société. Nominalisme politique et science sociale au XVIIIe siècle, edited by Laurence Kaufmann and Jacques Guilhaumou. Paris: Editions de l’ EHESS, . Keck, Frédéric. Lévi-Strauss. Une introduction. Paris: Pocket, . Kidd, Colin. “Constitutions and character in the eighteenth-century British world,” in From Republican Polity to National Community. Reconsiderations of Enlightenment Political Thought, edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation [Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century :], . Kim, Sung Ho. “Max Weber’s liberal nationalism,” History of Political Thought , no.  (). Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, . Koskenniemi, Martti. “International law as political theology: How to read Nomos der Erde?” Constellations , no.  (). ———. The Gentle Civilizers of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Kra, Pauline. “The concept of national character in th century France,” Cromohs  (), –. Available online: http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/_/ kra.html. Accessed on August , . Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago University Press, . Lalande André. Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie,  vol. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Laquièze, Alain. “Etat de droit e sovranità nazionale in Francia,” in Lo Stato di diritto. Storia, teoria, critica, edited by Pietro Costa, Danilo Zolo and Emilio Santoro. Milan: Feltrinelli, . Latour, Bruno. “Einleitung,” in Gabriel Tarde, Monadologie und Soziologie. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, . ———. “Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social,” The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, edited by Patrick Joyce. London: Routledge, . ———. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Launay, Michel. Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain politique (–). GenèveParis: Slatkine, . Laurière, Christine. “L’ anthropologie et le politique, les prémisses: les relations entre Franz Boas et Paul Rivet (–),” L’ Homme – (). Lazarus, Moritz and H. Steinthal, “Einleitende Gedanken über Völkerpsychologie als Einladung zu einer Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft  (). Le Bon, Gustave. La psychologie des foules. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. Lois psychologiques de l’ évolution des peuples. Paris: Alcan, .

bibliography



Le Play, Frédéric. L’ Organisation de la famille, selon le vrai modèle signalé par l’ histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps. Tours: Alfred Mame, . Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories and verbal abuse,” in Anthropology and Society, vol.  of The Essential Edmund Leach. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, . Leerssen, Joep. “The poetics and anthropology of national character (– ),” in Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Character, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, . Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Introduction à l’ oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. “Race and culture,” International Social Science Journal XXIII, no.  (). ———. Race et histoire. Paris: Gallimard-Folio, . Translation: Race and history. Paris: UNESCO, . Levi, Giovanni. “Les dangers du geertzisme,” Labyrinthe  (). Available online, http://labyrinthe.revues.org/index.html. Accessed on June , . Levine, Donald N. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, . Losurdo, Domenico. Hegel et la catastrophe allemande. Paris: Albin Michel, . Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche. The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought. London: Constable, . Lukes, Steven. “Methodological individualism reconsidered,” The British Journal of Sociology , no.  (). ———. Durkheim. His Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study. Stanford: Stanford University Press, . Mair, Peter. “Ruling the void? The hollowing of Western democracy,” New Left Review  (November–December ). Maistre, Joseph de. Considérations sur la France, in Ecrits sur la Révolution. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: Considerations on France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines. Paris: Société typographique, . ———. Etude sur la souveraineté. Oxford: Pergamon Press/The French Revolution Research Collection—Archives de la Révolution Française,  [microform]. ———. Trois fragments sur la France, in Ecrits sur la Révolution. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Malinowski, Bronislaw. A Sientific Theory of Culture. Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, . Mandler, Peter. The English National Character from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. New Haven: Yale University Press, . Manent, Pierre. “Joseph de Maistre: Considérations sur la France,” in Dictionnaire des oeuvres politiques, edited by François Châtelet, Olivier Duhamel and Evelyne Pisier. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, .



bibliography

Marx, Karl. “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett, . Mauss, Marcel. “A  interview with Marcel Mauss,” American Ethnologist , no.  (February ). ———. “Appréciation sociologique du bolchevisme,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale , no.  (). Translation: “A sociological assessment of Bolshevism,” in The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, edited by Mike Gane. London: Routledge, . ———. “Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’ échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” in Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. “Essai sur les variations saisonnières des sociétés eskimos. Essai de morphologie sociale,” Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. “Fait social et formation du caractère,” Sociologie et sociétés XXXVI, no.  (). ———. “Fragment d’ un plan de sociologie générale descriptive. Classification et méthode d’ observation des phénomènes généraux de la vie sociale dans les sociétés de types archaïques (phénomènes généraux spécifiques de la vie intérieure de la société),” in Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie, vol.  of Œuvres. Paris: Minuit, . ———. “L’ œuvre de Mauss par lui-même,” Revue française de sociologie , no.  (). ———. “La nation et l’ internationalisme,” in Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie, vol.  of Œuvres. Paris: Minuit: . ———. “La nation,” in Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie, vol.  of Œuvres. Paris: Minuit, . Partial translation: “The nation,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, edited by Nathan Schlanger. Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, . Also in: Nationalism in Europe:  to the Present, edited by Stuart Woolf. London: Routledge, . ———. “Les civilisations. Éléments et formes,” in Représentations collectives et diversité des civilisations, vol.  of Œuvres. Paris: Minuit, . Translation: “Civilisations. Their elements and forms,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, edited by Nathan Schlanger. Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, . ———. “Les phénomènes morphologiques,” Socio-Anthropologie  (). ———. “Rapports réels et pratiques de la psychologie et de la sociologie,” in Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Translation: “Real and practical relations between psychology and sociology,” in Sociology and Psychology. Essays. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, . ———. Ecrits politiques, edited by Marcel Fournier. Paris: Fayard, . Mauzé, Marie. “Les Kwagul et le potlatch. Éléments pour une réévaluation,” L’ Homme , , no.  (). Mead, Margaret. “Preface,” in Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, . Mezzadra, Sandro. “Il giovane Max Weber, il diritto di fuga dei migranti tedeschi

bibliography



e gli stomaci polacchi,” in Il diritto di fuga. Migrazione, cittadinanza, globalizzazione. Verona: Ombre corte, . Michelet, Jules. Introduction à l’ histoire universelle, in Œuvres complètes, vol. . Paris: Flammarion, . ———. Le peuple. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, . Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, vol. VII–VIII of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. TorontoLondon: University of Toronto Press-Routledge & Kegan Paul, . ———. On Liberty, in Essays on Politics and Society Part I, vol. XVIII of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto-London: University of Toronto Press-Routledge and Kegan Paul, . Mitzman, Arthur. “Michelet and social romanticism: Religion, revolution, nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (). Mommsen, Wolfgang. Max Weber and German Politics, –. Chicago: Chicago University Press, . Montesquieu, De l’ Esprit des lois, in Œuvres complètes,  vol., edited by Roger Caillois. Paris: Gallimard, . Translation: The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. London: Penguin, . Mucchielli, Laurent. “Sociologie versus anthropologie raciale. L’ engagement des sociologues durkheimiens dans le contexte fin de siècle (–),” Gradhiva  (). ———. La découverte du social: Naisance de la sociologie en France (–). Paris: La découverte, . Müller, Hans-Peter. “Emile Durkheims Moralpolitik des Individualismus,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie , no.  (June ). ———. Max Weber: Eine Einführung in sein Werk. Cologne: Böhlau/UTB, . Muthu, Sankar. “Enlightenment anti-imperialism,” Social Research , no.  (Winter ). ———. Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Némedi, Dénes. “Collective consciousness, morphology, and collective representations: Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge, –,” Sociological Perspectives , no.  (). Nicolet, Claude. “Les ‘trois sources’ de la doctrine républicaine en France,” in Histoire, Nation, République. Paris: Odile Jacob, . ———. L’ idée républicaine en France. Essai d’ histoire critique. Paris: Gallimard, . Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zur Genealogie der Moral, in Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin–New York: DTV–De Gruyter, . Translation: On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Nisbet, Robert. The Sociological Tradition. London: Heinemann Educational, .



bibliography

Noiriel, Gérard. Les origines républicaines de Vichy. Paris: Hachette, . Norkus, Zenonas. “Max Weber on nations and nationalism: political economy before political sociology,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie , no.  (). Nussbaum, Martha. “Kant and Stoic cosmopolitanism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy , no.  (). Nye, Robert A. The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, . Outhwaite, William. The Future of Society. Malden, MA-Oxford: Blackwell, . Pasquino, Pasquale. Sieyes et l’ invention de la constitution en France. Paris: Odile Jacob, . Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press, . Pitt, Alan. “The irrationalist liberalism of Hippolyte Taine,” The Historical Journal , no.  (). Pocock, John Greville Agard. “Editor’s introduction,” in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by J.G.A. Pocock. Indianapolis: Hackett, . ———. “The concept of a language and the métier d’ historien: some considerations on practice,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. Virtue, Commerce and History. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Poggi, Gianfranco and Giuseppe Sciortini. “Emile Durkheim,” in Incontri con il pensiero sociologico. Bologna: Il Mulino, . Poggi, Gianfranco. Durkheim. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, . Poovey, Mary. “The liberal civil subject and the social in eighteenth-century British moral philosophy,” Public Culture , no.  (). Pufendorf, Samuel. On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Ramel, Frédéric. Les fondateurs oubliés. Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Mauss et les relations internationales. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . Renan, Ernest. “Identité originelle et séparation graduelle du judaïsme et christianisme,” in Discours et conférences. Paris: Calmann Lévy, . ———. “La guerre entre la France et l’ Allemagne”, in La réforme intellectuelle et morale. Paris: Michel Lévy, . ———. “La monarchie constitutionnelle en France,” in La réforme intellectuelle et morale. Paris: Michel Lévy, . ———. “La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France,” in La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France. Paris: Michel Lévy, . ———. “Qu’ est-ce qu’ une nation?,” in Discours et conférences. Paris: Calmann Lévy, . ———. De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’ histoire de la civilisation. Paris: Michel Lévy, . ———. L’ avenir de la science. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, . Riedel, Manfred. “Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.

bibliography



Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. : E– G, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, . Riley, Patrick. “A possible explanation of Rousseau’s general will,” The American Political Science Review , no.  (March ). ———. “How coherent is the social contract tradition?” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (October–December ). ———. “Rousseau as a theorist of national and international federalism,” Publius , no.  (). Roche, Daniel. “Encyclopedias and the diffusion of knowledge,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Romani, Roberto. National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France. –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le Modèle politique français. La société civile contre le jacobinisme de  à nos jours. Paris: Le Seuil, . ———. Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France. Paris: Gallimard, . Rotenstreich, Nathan. “Volksgeist,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. IV, edited by Philip P. Wiener. New York: Scribner, . Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, . Translation: Considerations on the Government of Poland and its Proposed Reformation, in Political Writings, edited by Frederick Watkins. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, . ———. Du contract social; ou principes du droit politique, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, . Translation: The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, in Political Writings, edited by Frederick Watkins. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, . ———. “Extrait du projet de perpétuelle de Monsieur l’ abbé de Saint Pierre,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, . ———. La nouvelle Héloïse, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, . ———. Les Confessions, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, . ———. Projet de constitution pour la Corse, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, . Translation: Constitutional Project for Corsica, in Political Writings, edited by Frederick Watkins. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, . Runciman, David. “What kind of person is Hobbes’s state? A reply to Skinner,” Journal of Political Philosophy , no.  (). Saussure, Edmond de. Course of General Linguistics. London: Open Court, . Scaff, Laurence A. “Fleeing the Iron Cage: Politics and culture in the thought of Max Weber,” The American Political Science Review , no.  ().



bibliography

Schmaus, Warren. “Explanation and essence in The Rules of Sociological Method and The Division of Labor in Society,” Sociological Perspectives  no.  (). ———. Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Schmitt, Carl. Der Begriff des Politischen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, . Translation: The Concept of the Political. Chicago: Chicago University Press, . ———. Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, . Translation: The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press, . ———. Theorie des Partisanen. Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, . Translation: “Theory of the Partisan,” Telos  (). Schnapper, Dominique. Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, . Schneewind, Jerome B. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Scott, Joan W. “Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: Or, the uses of poststructuralist theory for feminism,” Feminist Studies , no.  (). Scott, John. “Rational choice theory,” in Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of The Present, edited by Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli, and Frank Webster. London: Sage, . Sebastiani, Silvia. I limiti del progresso. Razza e genere nell’Illuminismo scozzese. Bologna: Il Mulino, . Seidman, Steven. Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, . Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. London: Faber & Faber, . Sewell, William H. “A theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation,” The American Journal of Sociology , no.  (). ———. “Geertz, cultural systems, and history: from synchrony to transformation,” Representations no.  (Summer ). ———. “Refiguring the ‘social’ in social science. An interpretivist manifesto,” in Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: Chicago University Press, . ———. A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and ‘What is the Third Estate?’ Durham: Duke University Press, . ———. Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: Chicago University Press, . Seys, Pascale. Hippolyte Taine et l’ avènement du naturalisme. Un intellectuel sous le Second Empire. Paris: L’ Harmattan, . Sieyes, Emmanuel-Joseph. “Discours à l’ Assemblée nationale du  septembre . Sur le véto royal,” in Archives parlementaires de  à . Première série, de  à , volume VIII. Paris: Libraire administrative Paul Dupont, . ———. Vues sur les moyens d’ exécution dont les Représentants de la France pourront disposer en  (n.p., ). Translation: Views on the Executive Means

bibliography



Available to the Representatives of France in , in Political Writings, edited by Michael Sonenscher. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, . ———. Essai sur les privilèges (n.p., n.d. [Paris, ]). Translation: “An Essay on Privileges,” in Political Writings, edited by Michael Sonenscher. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, . ———. Qu’ est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (n.p. [Paris], ). Translation: “What is the Third Estate?” in Political Writings, edited by Michael Sonenscher. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, . Sintomer, Yves. “Emile Durkheim zwischen Republikanismus und deliberativer Demokratie,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie , no.  (June ). Skinner, Quentin. “Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state,” in Hobbes and Civil Science, vol.  of Visions of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. “Hobbes on persons, authors and representatives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, edited by Patricia Springborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Smart, Paul. “Mill and nationalism. National character, social progress and the spirit of achievement,” History of European Ideas , no. – (). Smith, Anthony D. The Nation in History. Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism. Hanover: Brandeis University Press-University Press of New England, . Smith, Jeffrey A. “Nature, nation-building, and the seasons of justice in Rousseau’s political thought,” The Review of Politics , no.  (Winter ). Smith, Steven B. Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism. Rights in Context. ChicagoLondon: University of Chicago Press, . Sparks, Corey S. and Richard L. Jantz. “Changing times, changing faces: Franz Boas’s immigrant study in modern perspective,” American Anthropologist , no.  (). Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Sociology I, vol.  of A System of Synthetic Philosophy. London-Edinbourg: Williams and Norgate, . Spitz, Jean-Fabien. Le moment républicain en France. Paris: Gallimard, . Staël, Germaine de. De l’ Allemagne,  vol. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, . ———. De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, . Stedman Jones, Susan. Durkheim Reconsidered. Cambridge: Polity Press, . Sternhell, Zeev. La droite révolutionnaire. –. Paris: Gallimard-Folio, . ———. Les Anti-Lumières. Du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide. Paris: Fayard, . Stocking, George W. “Ideas and institutions in American anthropology: thoughts towards a history of the interwar years,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, . ———. Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press, . ———. “Franz Boas and the concept of culture in historical perspective,” American Anthropologist , no.  (), Stoczkowski, Wiktor. “Racisme, antiracisme et cosmologie lévi-straussienne. Un essai d’ anthropologie réflexive,” L’ homme , no.  ().



bibliography

Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Taine, Hippolyte. Du suffrage universel et de la manière de voter. Paris: Hachette, . ———. Histoire de la littérature anglaise, vol. . Paris: Hachette, . ———. L’ Ancien Régime, tome premier, vol.  of Les origines de la France contemporaine. Paris: Hachette, . Translation: The Ancien Regime, vol.  of The Origins of Contemporary France. Teddington: The Echo Library, . ———. L’ Ancien Régime, tome deux, vol.  of Les origines de la France contemporaine. Paris: Hachette, . Translation: The Ancien Regime, vol.  of The Origins of Contemporary France. Teddington: The Echo Library, . ———. La Révolution. L’ anarchie, tome premier, vol.  of Les origines de la France contemporaine. Paris: Hachette, . Translation: The French Revolution, vol. I: Anarchy, vol.  of The Origins of Contemporary France. Teddington: The Echo Library, . ———. L’ historien (–), vol.  of Sa vie et sa correspondance. Paris: Hachette, . Tarde, Gabriel. “Monadologie et sociologie,” in Essais et mélanges sociologiques. Lyon-Paris: Storck-Masson, . ———. L’ opinion et la foule. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, . ———. L’ opposition universelle. Essai d’ une théorie des contraires. Paris: Alcan, . ———. La logique sociale. Paris, Alcan: . ———. Les lois de l’ imitation. Paris: Kimé, . Translation: The Laws of Imitation. New York: Henry Holt, . ———. Les lois sociales. Esquisse d’ une sociologie. Paris: Alcan, . Translation: Social Laws. An Outline of Sociology. London: MacMillan, . Tarot, Camile. Sociologie et anthropologie de Marcel Mauss. Paris: La découverte, . ———. De Durkheim à Mauss, l’ invention du symbolique: Sociologie et science des religions. Paris: La découverte, . Taylor, Charles. “Modernity and the rise of the public sphere,” in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg and Angela McRobbie. London: Verso, . ———. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, . Terrier Jean, and Peter Wagner, “Declining deliberation: civil society, community, organized modernity,” in Languages of Civil Society, edited by Peter Wagner. Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, . Terrier, Jean. “Culture et types de l’ action sociale,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales—Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto LX, no.  (). ———. “The idea of a Republican tradition. Reflections on the debate concerning the intellectual foundations of the French Third Republic,” Journal of Political Ideologies , no.  (October ). ———. “The impact of war on the French human sciences and the image of Germany: –,” in War and Peace: The Role of Science and Art, edited by Soraya Sour and Olivier Remaud. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, .

bibliography



Tierney, Brian. The Idea of Natural Rights. Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, –. Atlanta: Scholars Press, . Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les autres. La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine. Paris: Seuil-Points, . Turner, Stephen. “Cause, teleology, and method,” in The Social Sciences, vol.  of The Cambridge History of Science, edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . UNESCO. Statement by experts on race problems. Paris: UNESCO,  June , available at http://www.unesco.org. Accessed on August , . Vacher de Lapouge, Georges. Les sélections sociales. Cours de libre de science politique professé à l’ université de Montpellier (–). Paris: Thorin & Fils, . Voegelin, Eric. “The growth of the race idea,” The Review of Politics , no.  (). Wagner, Peter and Nathalie Kariagannis. “The social and the political. Retrieving the meanings of a conceptual distinction,” in The Social Sciences in a Global Age, edited by Peter Wagner. Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming. Wagner, Peter. “ ‘An entirely new object of consciousness, of volition, of thought.’ The birth and (almost) passing away of society as a scientific object,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by Lorraine Daston. Chicago: Chicago University Press, . ———. A History and Theory of the Social Sciences. Not All That Is Solid Melts into Air. London: Sage, . ———. A Sociology of Modernity. Liberty and Discipline. London-New York: Routledge, . Weber, Max. “Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozial-politischer Erkenntnis,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck-UTB, . ———. “I. Roschers ‘historische Methode’,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck-UTB, . ———. “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland. Zur politischen Kritik des Beamtentums und Parteiwesens,” in Gesammelte politische Schriften. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck, . Translation: “Parliament and Government in Germany under a new political order,” in Political Writings, edited by Peter Lassman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. “Politik als Beruf,” in Gesammelte politische Schriften. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck, . Translation: “The profession and vocation of politics,” in Political Writings, edited by Peter Lassman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck/UTB, . Translation: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, . ———. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), . Translation: Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, .



bibliography

Wehler. Hans-Ulrich. Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, –. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, . Williams, David L. “Justice and the general will: affirming Rousseau’s Ancient orientation,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (). Wilson, Catherine. “From limits to laws: the construction of the nomological image of nature in Early Modern Philosophy,” in Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe, edited by Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis. Aldershot: Ashgate, . Wokler, Robert. “Repatriating modernity’s alleged debts to the Enlightenment. French Revolutionary social science and the genesis of the nation state,” in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, edited by Patrick Joyce. London: Routledge, . Worms, René. Organisme et société. Paris: Giard & Brière, . Yack, Bernard. “The myth of the civic nation,” Critical Review , no.  ().

INDEX OF SUBJECTS adversary, see enemy anthropology, xv, xxi, , , – , , –, –, – , , –, , , ,  artifice, artificial, xxiii, xxiv, –, , ,  association, ix, xxiii–xxiv, xxxi, , , , , –, , , ,  sociology of, xxi atomism, , ,  authority, , , , , , , , , , , – Begriff, Begriffsgeschichte, see concept belief, , –, –,  category, categories, xviii, , –  cause, causality, xiii–xvi, xxv, – , , , , , , , , –, , ,  change, social change, xvii–xix, xxii, , , , –, , , , , –, –, – , – character, see national character concept, conceptual history, xxx– xxxi, , –, –, , – , ,  choice, see will Christianity, , , , ,  circulation, see exchange civilisation, –, –, , – , –, –, , –  class, xiv, xxxi, , –, ,  climate, climatology, xxvii, n, – , , , –, , –, , , , , 

cohesion, –, , , , , , , –, –, , , , ,  colony, colonialism, , –, – , ,  conflict, –, , , , , , , , , – conquest (see also colony), , ,  conscience, see moral consciousness individual, xxvi, , , , , –, , –, ,  collective, , , , , , , –, –, –,  constraint, xxi–xxii, xxv–xxvi, xxvii, , , ,  cooperation, cooperative, , , , , ,  corporation, , – cosmopolitanism (see also international), –, –, , ,  counter-revolution, see revolution culture, xv, xvii–xviii, , , , –, , ,  customs, see habits Declaration of the Rights of Man, , – democracy (see also sovereignty, popular), , – determinism (see also cause), xiii, –, ,  dialect, see language discourse, see language education, , , , –, , ,  enemy, –, , , , –, – 



index of subjects

Enlightenment, xxii–xxiii, , , , –, , , , ,  ethnicity (see also race), – evolution, evolutionism, –, ,  exchange, ix–x, , , , , , –, –, –, , –,  family, x, xxiii, – federation, , , , – feminism, feminist, x,  fetish, fetishism, xxviii, –, ,  fiction, see artifice God, see religion habits, xxiii–xxiv, xxviii, –, , , , , –, , –, – , , , – heredity, see race humankind, see cosmopolitanism and society, human individual, individualism, individuality (see also consciousness, individual), xiii, xvi–xviii, xxi, , – , , –, , –, –, , –, – interdependence, xix–xx, , , ,  international, internationalism, – , –, , –, –, , , –, – jusnaturalism, see law, natural langue and parole, xvii, xxix,  language, xvii, xxix–xxx, –, , , , , –, –, –,  of the social, see social, language of the law, xvi, , –, –, , –, –, –, –, –, , , , –, , 

liberty, see will, free manners, see habits modernity, ix, xi–xii, xiii, , –, , , , –, , , , , –, – monarchy, –, , , – moral, morality, , –, , , , –, –, –, – , , , , , – morphology, –, –, ,  nation, nationalism (see also national character and international), – , –, , , , , –, –, –, –, –, –, – national character, xxxi, , –, , , , , , , –, – , , –, –, –, – , , , –, , , , , ,  national spirit, see national character natural law, see nature nature concept of, ix, xvi–xvii, xxiii–xxv, –, –, , , , – , , , – state of, , , –,  human nature, , –, , n, –, , – natural causes (see also cause), –, , , , , – , , , ,  natural law, jusnaturalism, xxv, –, –, , , , , –,  nominalism, , ,  opinion, , , , , –, , , , – organicism, –, , , , , , ,  pacifism, see peace parole, see langue

index of subjects



heterogeneity/homogeneity of, peace, –, , , , , – , –, , , , –, , ,  –, –, –, , personality  individual personality, see individual human society, –, –, collective personality, , , , –, –, – , , , –, –, location of, see substratum –, –, – openness of, xix, xxvii, , – politics, concept of, ix–xii, xxiii– , –, –,  xxviii, xxxi, , , , –, stability/malleability of, see , – change progress, progressive, , , , sociology, discipline of, xxvi, , –, , , , –, –, , –, , , – –  solidarity, , , , , – race, –, , –, –, , , ,  , , –, –, , sovereignty, –, , , ,  , , national, , , , –, – religion, , , –, , , , ,  , –, –, , , popular, –, –, –, – , , ,  ,  revolution, xxiv, xxvi–xviii, –, soul of the people, see national –, –, , ,  character counter-revolution, –, ,  substratum of society, – Rights of Man, see Declaration of the and the mental life of individuals, Rights of Man –, , , –,  sociability, see society concept of, , – social material substratum, –, concept of, ix–xxix, xxxi, , , – , –, –, , , supranational, see international –, –, – language of the, xxv–xxxi, , , Third Republic, –, , – –, , , , , , tradition, traditionalism, , –, – , , –, –, –, , social change, see change , –,  society transfer, see exchange as a moral entity, see moral as a natural entity, see nature unity, political vs. social, –, , –, as person, see personality, , , , – collective boundedness of, xiv, xix, xxvii, war, –, , , – –, ,  will, choice, free will, xvi, xxiv, xxvi, concept of, xxii–xxiii, xxvii, xxxi, , –, –, , –, , , , –, , –, –, , , , –, –, , –, –, , , , , – , –, , –, , ,  , , –, , 

INDEX OF NAMES Arendt, Hannah, ix–xii, xix, –  Aron, Raymond, xxv n Ariès, Philippe, xv n Bacon, Francis,  Baczko, Bronislaw, n Bagehot, Walter, , ,  Baker, Keith Michael, xxii–xxiii, xviii n, n, n, , n Barberis, Daniela, n Behrent, Michael, n Bell, David A., n, , n Beller, Manfred, n, n Benedict, Ruth, – Billaud-Varenne, Jacques, xxiv, –  Boas, Franz, , , , –, , , , ,  Bobbio, Norberto, xxv n Le Bon, Gustave, –, , , , , , , ,  Borges, Jorge Luis,  Bouglé, Célestin, , , ,  Brague, Rémi, n Brooks, John I., n Brubaker, Rogers, n, –n, n Burke, Edmund, xxvii, xxviii, –, , , , – Cabrera, Miguel A., xii n, xiii n, xiv– xix, xx, – Castoriadis, Cornélius, ix, xviii n Chartier, Roger, xv n, xviii n Chernilo, Daniel,  Comte, Auguste, xxx, n, , , , n, , , n,  Condorcet,  Constant, Benjamin, n, n Crignon, Philippe, n, n

Darnton, Robert, xv n Daston, Lorraine, , n, , –  Davy, Georges,  Dérathé, Robert, n, n, n Descartes, René,  Digeon, Claude, n, n, n Duguit, Léon, –,  Durkheim, Emile, xiii–xiv, xviii n, xxi, xxvi, xxvii, xxxi, , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , –, – , –, , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , ,  Dzimira, Sylvain, n, n, – n, n Fischbach, Franck, xxvii, n Foucault, Michel, xvi, , n, , n Fouillée, Alfred, , , , –,  Fournier, Marcel, , n, n, n, n Freud, Sigmund, ,  Gauchet, Marcel, n, n Geertz, Clifford, xv,  Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, –, – Guilhaumou, Jacques, n Hannaford, Ivan, n, n Hauriou, Maurice,  Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich, – , , n, , – Hobbes, Thomas, xxxn, –, , – , , , , , , , , , 



index of names

Kant, Immanuel, , ,  Karsenti, Bruno, n, n, n, n, n, n Kaufmann, Laurence,  Koselleck, Reinhart, , n, n Koskenniemi, Martii, n, n, n Kuhn, Thomas, xxix Vacher de Lapouge, Georges, n Latour, Bruno, xx–xxi, , n, n Lazarus, Moritz, –, ,  Leerssen, Joep,  Le Play, Frédéric, – Lévi-Strauss, Claude, , , – , – Maistre, Joseph de, xxvii, –, , , –, n, , , , , n Malinowski, Bronislaw,  Mandler, Peter, –, , n, n, , n, n, Mauss, Marcel, xxvii–xxviii, xxxi, n, n, , , , , , , –, , , , – , , , , , , – ,  Mead, Margaret, ,  Michelet, Jules, –, , , , , , ,  Mucchielli, Laurent, n, n, n Müller, Hans-Peter, n, n Nietzsche, Friedrich, , –,  Outhwaite, William, xii n, xvi n,  Pareto, Vilfredo,  Pocock, John Greville Agard, xxix– xxx, , n Poggi, Gianfranco, , n

Pufendorf, Samuel, ,  Riedel, Manfred,  Riley, Patrick, xxiii n, n, , n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xxiii–xxiv, xxviii, xxx n, , –, , –, , , , , , , –, , , , , ,  Saussure, Ferdinand de, xvii, xxix,  Schlegel, Friedrich,  Schmitt, Carl, –, , n, ,  Schnapper, Dominique, n Seidman, Steve, n, n Sewell, William H., xii n, xv n, xvii n, xix–xx, n, n, n Sieyes, Joseph, xxviii n, –, , , , , , , , n Skinner, Quentin, n Staël, Germaine de, –, ,  Steinthal, H., –, ,  Sternhell, Zeev, n,  Taine, Hippolyte, –, –, , , , , , , , , , –,  Tarde, Gabriel, xxi, xxxi, , , – , , , , ,  Voegelin, Eric,  Wagner, Peter, ix, xii n, xv n, n, n Weber, Max, x, xiv, xxxi, , , , , , –, , , , , –, , ,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xxix Wokler, Robert,  Worms, René, , , 