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.

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 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 1

“Bearing the People’s Person”: Hobbes on Unity through
Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
“A Moral and Collective Body of Many Members”: Rousseau’s
Unitary State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
“A Unique Whole Composed of Integral Parts”: National Unity
during the French Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
“Politics Is to Be Wrought by Social Means”: Burke and de
Maistre on the Pre-eminence of the Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
The Natural and the Social: The Notion of Social Causality . . . . . . 21
“Determined by Its Character and Past”: Taine’s Traditionalist
Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
A Sociology for the Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Two Languages, Hybridised: Esmein on National Sovereignty. . . 39

. Nations and Their Adversaries As a Theme of Social Thought . . . 45

National Singularity and the Community of Nations:
Montesquieu, Encyclopédie, Mme de Staël . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Politics and National Characters: Rousseau and de Maistre . . . . . . 54
Increasingly Distinct Nations in a Social Age: Michelet . . . . . . . . . . 58
“A Spiritual Principle”: The Nation According to Renan . . . . . . . . . 62
A Racial Theory of National Characters: Gustave Le Bon . . . . . . . . 67
Societies and Nations As Totalities: Emile Durkheim . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Social Philosophy and the Figure of the Enemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

. Severing the Link to Nature: The Rise of the Culture Concept in

International Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
“National Character”: Varieties of Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Durkheim’s Fundamental Question: The Location of Society . . . . 119
The Question of the Material Substratum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
Individual and Collective Representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Collective Consciousness and the Externality of Social Facts . . . . 129
Religion, Collective Ideation, and “Homo Duplex”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

. The National and the Transnational: Marcel Mauss. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

Before Nations: From Hordes to Empires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
The Nation As an “Integrated Society” of Politically Conscious
Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
The Political Definition of a Social Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Excursus on Philological Problems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
“Everything Can Be Shared between Societies”: A Sociology of
International Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
The Question of a Human Civilisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
“An Entity with a Thousand Dimensions”: Society, Language,
and the Category of Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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 Wag-
ner, 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 Interdiszi-
plinäres 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 pro-
vided 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 Foun-
dation itself, I want to thank Hans-Peter Müller, Yves Sintomer and Pas-
cale 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 tech-
nologies of communication. Activities that once were invariably solitary,
and often tedious—such as searching for books relevant to one’s idiosyn-
cratic 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 pol-
itics itself is modified as a result of these semantic shifts. Many authors,
including Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Cornelius Castori-
adis,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 asso-
ciations 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 non-
associative, 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 associ-
ation: 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 typ-
ically 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”, “organ-
isations”, 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 mean-

ings 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 concep-
tual 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 won-
der 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. Poli-
tics was understood as an agonistic (though non-violent) sphere in which
citizens “appeared” and were recognised by their peers as unique individ-
uals.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 remain-
ing hidden in the private sphere of each citizen, were now of collective

7 Arendt, The Human Condition, –.

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

concern. Thus the state was transformed into a gigantic administration

responsible for the distribution of material benefits to atomised, identi-
cal 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 some-
thing 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 famil-
ial overriding its limits to contaminate the political. I will come back to
Arendt in the Epilogue to this volume, and discuss there the characteris-
tics and limitations of her analysis.
Hannah Arendt is by far not the only scholar to criticise the con-
cept 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 his-
tory.12 Probably the most widely adopted approach to historical prob-
lems 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 struc-
ture, on the one hand, and epiphenomena, usually identified with pol-

10 Ibid., –.
11 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, ).
 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 individu-
als were explainable by reference to factors external to the action itself,
typically operating without the intermediation of individual conscious-
ness. 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 “exter-
nal factors”, in the sense just mentioned, to be the overall configura-
tion of social relations in a given historical setting. In short, social his-
torians set forth to explain social phenomena of all kinds by envis-
aging them as local effects of a determining underlying social struc-
ture.13
To be sure, it would be wrong to see social history as a monolithic
methodology. Although the “social structure” or the “societal configu-
ration” always was the point of departure, it could be understood in
markedly different ways. For instance Emile Durkheim, at least in a com-
mon reading of his early writings,14 proposed to explain social forms and
phenomena by looking at the density of interactions within a given terri-
tory. At the most general level, he explained the difference between tradi-
tional (communitarian and homogeneous) and modern (individualistic,
diverse, and dynamic) social forms by reference to the density of the pop-
ulation. In territories with scattered populations, there are only limited
possibilities of exchange and emulation: this gives birth to static, undiffer-
entiated societies. In densely populated regions, by contrast, interactions
are more numerous and often take the form of competition, which fos-
ters 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 auton-
omy 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,” .

14 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, ).
xiv introduction

the quantity and quality of interactions are adequate, by contrast, posi-

tive 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, col-
lective representations) to being a mere epiphenomenon of social struc-
ture constitutes a very strong, and thus obviously debatable, method-
ological position. As Miguel A. Cabrera observed in , the “assump-
tion 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 epis-
temological 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 transfor-
mations, 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: Rout-
ledge, ).
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 dif-
ferent 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 par-
ticularly 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 depar-
ture from postwar social historiography is represented by cultural his-
torians. Finding inspiration in anthropology, and especially in the sem-
inal 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 pri-
mary 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 individ-
ual 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 So-
ciales , 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: reflec-
tions 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 increas-

ingly widespread in sociology and political science, is the theory of ra-
tional 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 ac-
tions, and structural phenomena are interpreted as the unintended con-
sequences 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 “cul-
ture” exists as more than a provisional effect of individual choices. In oth-
er words, the very choices of the individuals themselves are assumed to be
made independently from pre-existing shared representations, i.e. to re-
flect purely idiosyncratic hierarchies of preference (the fact that individu-
als, 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-struc-
turalism), 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 classi-
cal 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 com-
mon to all three approaches mentioned so far: the tendency, namely, to
consider as natural a particular unit of analysis (respectively society, cul-
ture, 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 individ-
ual 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 communica-
tion, provides them with opportunities to achieve particular goals. There
is, moreover, a further dimension of structure that new historians espe-
cially emphasise: the dimension of historicity.31 The major reference here,
in my understanding, is to linguistics and to the famous Saussurean dis-
tinction between langue and parole.32 The social is made, among other
things, of repertoires of meaning which operate like a grammar that indi-
viduals 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 pro-
cesses 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 pat-
tern, but on interacting with reality and on deploying itself socially, dis-
course modifies itself, producing new categories and leaving behind oth-
ers, and finally discourse declines and transforms itself into another one.33

The “specific social realm”34 of pre-existing concepts and categories Cabr-

era 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,” .

29 Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: Or, the uses of poststruc-
turalist 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,” .
xviii introduction

ceive and delimit themselves as subjects, and justify their practice.”36 It is

through the mobilisation of concepts and categories in historically spe-
cific 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 individu-
alism 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 prefer-
ences 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). More-
over, the emphasis on rational calculation and conscious action obscures
the fact that individuals typically act on the basis of deeply held, “author-
itative” 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: “Cat-
egories, concepts, or cognitive schemata of perception are [seen as] an
internalization, even if a symbolic one, of social reality itself.”39 Con-
nected to this is the fact that while cultural historians rightly insist on
the structural (constraining) character of culture, they miss the com-
plex 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 (contra-

36 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 represen-
tations, 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 struc-
tures such as language and culture; second, the notion of structure as
a cause that determines the behaviour of actors, as opposed to a pre-
existing 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 Han-
nah Arendt the “social” of social historians, as we see, is rather nar-
rowly understood. By contrast, the repentant social historian William
H. Sewell, who in his later work seeks to develop a methodology combin-
ing 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 inter-
dependence 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) condi-
tion 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 bring-
ing an offspring to a point in which he or she can fulfill without spe-
cial 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 man-

ifesto,” 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 prop-
erty, 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 refer-
ences, the belief in the legitimacy of given institutions, or religious rituals.
From the above, we can deduce the following point: that language, poli-
tics, 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: asso-
ciation of partnership for a common purpose, on the one hand; friend-
ship, 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 eth-
nic 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 increas-
ingly 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, com-
panionability, and civility do not disappear; but they are joined by a more
general meaning of society as the basic form of collective human exis-
tence, at once natural to human beings and instituted by them, a corol-
lary 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 Con-
tract () belongs to the first works bearing the term “social” in their

48 Baker, “Enlightenment,” .

49 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 ).
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” gov-
erned 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 Regen-
eration 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 pre-
vail are caused by corrupt, arbitrary governments. In the same way, a vir-
tuous 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 world-
views, 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 politi-
cal 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 Tra-
dition (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 Nat-
ural 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 (Chica-
go–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 behav-
iour:
In the social production of their existence, men invariably enter into def-
inite relations, which are independent of their will . . . The mode of pro-
duction 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 conscious-
ness.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 Bolshe-
vism”. 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 them-
selves, by changing customs (moeurs) through the collective, “clear, con-
scious action” of citizens acting in common,60 instead of through their
(self-appointed, in the case of Russia) representatives. He called “politi-
cal 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 expres-
sion,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 Mais-
tre, I have already suggested the point of departure of the present essay.
Similarly, my brief comments on Mauss and Bolshevism give an indi-
cation concerning its point of arrival. Between these two points, a vari-

60 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 numer-
ous 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 oth-
ers”.65 For my own purposes, I retain from this Pocockian notion espe-
cially four aspects. First, the study of “languages” entails a considera-
tion of continuities and commonalities. Languages are shared resources
made of a common vocabulary, collectively recognised problems, typ-
ical 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 differ-
ent ways, so that each speaker naturally develops unique actualisations
of their potential. Therefore, disagreements and controversies are nor-
mal 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 lan-
guages and their dynamic transformations, which can be seen as reac-
tions 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 consid-

erations 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 twenti-
eth 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 “lan-
guages” 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 compar-
isons with other countries and linguistic areas. Second, a temporal limi-
tation: 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, his-
tory, philosophy, and legal studies).68 But even then, I make no claim to
exhaustiveness. I have selected a number of authors—some very well-
known, 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 subse-
quent 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 “collec-
tive consciousness”) have been used in political arguments. Here “soci-
ety” 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 exclu-
sively for the adjective of the noun “society”, as opposed to other related
meanings. Most importantly, I have not taken into account the rich liter-
ature on “the social” in the sense of “relating to the poorer classes of soci-
ety” (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, col-
lective identity, and the relation that may exist between existing polities.
I will show how each of these classical political problems was reformu-
lated 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 politi-
cal 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 modifica-
tions 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 hu-
man 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 delim-
itation and the relative cohesion of the collectivity upon which one is
planning to act must emerge.1 Moreover, if the political action is collec-
tive (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 distin-
guished 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 assump-

tion 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 Uni-

versity 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 estab-
lishment 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 say-
ing that the social, understood both as ordinary relations between indi-
viduals 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 Soci-
ety.”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 per-
manent unity of the people’s will.14 However, this unity is imposed from
the outside, and a posteriori, to the persons who compose the peo-
ple. The people is not a “willing unity” to begin with, but is trans-
formed into such an entity in the representative process. The kind of
unity described in Leviathan seems like a fiction15—in both the com-
mon meaning and the etymological Latin sense of fingere: to create or
produce.

12Ibid.,  (ch. XVI).

13Ibid.,  (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, ).
 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 com-
mensurate 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 pos-
sess two main passions (the instinct of self-preservation and compas-
sion) 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 vol-
untaristic 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 deter-
mine to what kind of will Rousseau referred. One of the central ele-
ments 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 individ-
ual 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 com-
mon 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 high-
est number of individuals is adopted by all. However, Rousseau could not
be content with such a system, since it entails several risks. Most impor-
tant among those risks is the perennial fear of republican thought, namely
that, in the worst case, a minority may impose its views to the major-
ity. 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 reflec-

tions on the Government of Poland, he proposed the establishment of a
system that would require qualified majorities for certain kinds of deci-
sions.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 him-
self 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 sub-
sequently need to be accepted by an (ideally as large as possible) majority
of the citizens. In the Government of Poland, in contrast, Rousseau sug-
gested 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 fun-
damental 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 exempli-
fied 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 consti-

system 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 con-
tract, as Rousseau wrote in the Geneva Manuscript, there exists only a
“multitude of relations without measure, without rules, without consis-
tency, that men continuously alter and change.”28 Unlike Hobbes, how-
ever, 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 ques-
tion 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 Rous-
seau played an important role—as one could expect—in the debates
which took place during and after the French Revolution. A promi-
nent example of a reflection on this topic can be found in the work of
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes (–). A deputy at the National Assem-
bly 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 concep-
tion 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, con-
trary 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 representa-
tives.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 unity-
through-representation is not the only aspect of social unity. From the
perspective of conceptual history, Sieyes’s conception of unity is interest-
ing 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 représen-

tation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, ), ; Giuseppe Duso, La rappre-
sentanza 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 na-

tion 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 jusnatural-

41 Sieyes’s position concerning the clergy was more ambiguous. While not economi-
cally active, they did perform useful social (not only religious, but also educational) func-
tions. 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 impor-
tance of the division of labour, whose political equivalent is the princi-
ple 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, .

48 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, .

 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 defend-

ed 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 Rev-
olution 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 architec-
tural 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, –.

54 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 Revo-

lution in France, edited by J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), xliv.

56 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, .
57 Ibid., .
 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 arrange-
ment, 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 prob-

lem 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 pro-
vides any polity with stability is the cultivation of a political center—of a
sovereign—legitimised through different modalities of consensus forma-
tion. However, de Maistre’s definition of the supreme authority was differ-
ent 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.
59 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,  [micro-

form]).
62 Ibid., .
63 On this point, see Pierre Manent’s entry on de Maistre, in Dictionnaire des oeuvres
 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 con-
ceptual 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 vio-
lent 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 charac-
ter 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, ori-
enting customs, and determining appropriate social and political institu-
tions. “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 individ-
ual dogmas and the absolute and general rule of national dogmas, i.e. of
useful prejudices.”69 De Maistre thus rejected the voluntarism of the rev-
olutionaries, writing for instance that human action could only have a
very limited influence over the world: “human power cannot create any-
thing” 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., .
69 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, ).
 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, cus-
toms, character, prejudices—de Maistre himself considered at the out-
set as a form of national will upon which sovereignty could be based.
Directly contradicting the allegations of his opponent,76 de Maistre sug-

72 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 prefer-
ences and of an identification of a common interest would not be nec-
essary. Thus, de Maistre proposed to maintain Rousseau’s connection
between sovereignty and collective will, but he could do so only by mod-
ifying the notion of will itself. He now defined the national will as “pref-
erences” deriving from a stable collective character that historical anal-
ysis 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 for-
mer. It is during the French Revolution that such changes were initi-
ated, 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 pro-
posals 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 calcula-
tion 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 be-

lieved 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 assem-
blies (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 consis-
tently, absolute monarchy is perfectly appropriate. Cf. Etude sur la souveraineté, –.
 chapter one

nominalistic assumptions which, in the evaluation of Laurence Kauf-

mann, 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 Rev-
olution, 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 “objec-
tivist apprehension” of “nominal beings such as the Nation or public
opinion”81 at the beginning of the nineteenth-century must be under-
stood 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 men-
tion, 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 super-
seded 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 con-
ceptual history of the birth of the modern age, is their removal of politics
from explanations of human nature, redescribing legislation and politi-
cal action as abstract, utopian, metaphysical and, after the Terror, danger-
ous 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 under-

mine the centrality of free will as a factor of individual action. They sup-
ported instead the view that human actions are influenced, or even deter-
mined, 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 spe-
cific 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 excep-
tion.86 As long as the second concept prevailed (roughly until the eigh-
teenth 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 con-
form 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 (Lon-
don: 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 prin-
ciple 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 ques-
tioned 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 excep-
tion 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 clas-
sical 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 irreg-

88 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,” .

92 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 Press-
Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), .
96 I return to this question in more detail in the next Chapter.
 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 num-

ber 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 conscious-
ness) 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 explana-
tory model. In his influential preface () to the Histoire de la littéra-
ture anglaise, Taine proposed a historical method founded on the consid-
eration of three factors: race, milieu, and moment. According to Taine,
societies are ruled by the “law of mutual dependencies: a civilisation con-
stitutes 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 terri-
tory, 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 intellec-
tual dispositions . . . formed in times prior to civilisation, when the influ-
ence 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 his-
torical, 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 sys-
tem 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 sociolog-
ically, 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 collec-
tion 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 per-
formance of markedly different functions. This homogeneity, however,
was described as resulting from organic integration and not from inher-
ited 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 Durk-
heim’s sociological school, which rested on the axiom of an independent
society vis-à-vis individual consciousness. Society, for the Durkheimi-
ans, 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 deter-
mining 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 vol-
untarist conception of individual action, so widespread in eighteenth-

106 René Worms, Organisme et société (Paris: Giard & Brière, ), –.
107 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  ().
 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 poli-
tics as a search for the institutions best adapted to a fixed collective char-
acter. In the nineteenth-century, many traditionalist political thinkers
went down the path charted by the counter-revolutionaries. The “tra-
ditionalists” 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 usu-
ally 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 tradi-
tionalisme 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 individ-
ual 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 conse-
quence 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 knowl-
edge of national character and history is essential for successful polit-
ical 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 his-
torical notions. For instance, Taine wrote: “if I should some day under-
take 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, .

110 Taine, L’ Ancien Régime, tome premier, vol.  of Les origines de la France contempo-
raine (Paris: Hachette, ), II; tr., The Ancien Regime, vol.  of The Origins of Contem-
porary 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., .
 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 explic-
itly against “Rousseau’s Social Contract and against the Declaration of
the Rights of Man”,114 the state belongs to the second category of “nat-
ural” 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” compa-
rable to the one which prevailed during the French Revolution. (This
major event of French history, argued Taine, emerged from a combi-
nation 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 “hap-
pens 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 rational-
ity.
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 peo-
ple, 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 tenden-
cies 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 trans-
form 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 inde-
pendence 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.
120 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,

).
 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 repub-
lican regime which was established after the definitive defeat against the
German enemy in  could not follow Rousseau’s rejection of repre-
sentation. 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 demon-
strated the risks that were inherent to the direct government by the peo-
ple. 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 suf-
ficiently solid and sufficiently “social” concept of the nation. The prefer-
ence 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 con-
struction of mass loyalty—all primarily social phenomena. At the same
time—thirdly—the notions of society or nation promoted by conserva-
tives and traditionalists, while sociologically and historically more plau-
sible, and therefore perhaps preferable to the one promoted by the actors
of the French Revolution, rested on too strong naturalistic and determin-
istic, 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 repub-
lican imagination: first, obviously, the republican form itself; second, a
strong notion of the representative institution as the locus of an indepen-
dent rationality that should remain insulated from the contingencies of
public opinion; third, the most potent symbol of the Revolution, the flag-
ship 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 ele-
ment 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 tradi-
tional 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 lib-
erties, insofar as the very idea of fundamental rights (the requirement to
respect the equal dignity of all),131 was deeply embedded in the world-
view 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 for-
ever 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., –.
126 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., .
 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, constitu-
tional 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 conscious-
ness. It is precisely a theory of this kind that Duguit developed, reject-
ing 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 “with-
out” 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 ori-
gin of rights, purportedly revealed to humankind by a supreme being).139
He further argued that from a practical point of view it was unrealis-
tic 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., .

135 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 , .

 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 re-
formulated 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 free-
dom 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 tra-
dition [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 unfor-
tunate 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 consol-
idation 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 sociolo-
gists 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 collec-
tive consciousness as it could be. Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie (Paris: Presses univer-
sitaires 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. Con-

férences populaires (Paris: Edouard Cornély, n. d. []), .

148 Ibid., .
 chapter one

widespread division of social labour had triggered the industrial revolu-

tion and forced individuals to specialise more and more. This had created
larger, more heterogeneous, and more fragmented societies. In them, dif-
ferentiated 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 accom-
panied 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 rep-
resentation, 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.

152Ibid., –.
153On 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, ).
 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 succes-
sive generations.”155
For Esmein, since sovereignty is the “indivisible and inalienable attri-
bute of the nation itself,”156 suffrage must be understood not as an expres-
sion of sovereignty, and as a way to declare individual preferences, but
as a “social function.”157 In an election, the citizens who cast their bal-
lot 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, sug-
gested Esmein, a form of tyranny may arise—the tyranny of living citi-
zens 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, .

155 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.”
 the collective will: from the political to the social 

The great majority of citizens, very capable of choosing their representa-

tives 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 under-
stand 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 col-
lectivity 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 estab-
lish 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 dis-
cover, 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 Esmein, Eléments, .

161 Ibid., .
162 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 con-
ditions 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 posi-

tion 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 unde-
sirable. 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 prod-
uct of the nation so understood—impose itself to the individual wills of the
citizens? Isn’t the sovereignty constituted by historical evolution the legiti-
mate 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 transi-
tions 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 Ibid., .

164 Ibid., –.
165 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 con-
stitutional lawyer even explicitly claimed to have proposed “an applica-
tion 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 con-
struction 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 rep-
resentative mechanism, as he understood it, would yield the very same
result that the critics of representation were arguing for: a correspon-
dence 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 tra-
ditionalists, 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 Ger-
man 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 equi-
librium, 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 terri-
tories, 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 Völker-

recht 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 appear-
ance of the notion of international police operations. A third one is the
transformation of the figure of the enemy. In the Theory of the Parti-
san, 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 abso-
lute 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 abso-
lute, an enemy of humankind, an existential menace, a species to eradi-
cate.5
What is the plausibility of Schmitt’s interpretative scheme of the emer-
gence 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 transforma-
tions 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 represen-
tations concerning the kind of enmity that may arise between nations.
Specifically, it proposes, by way of a consideration of a few histori-
cal 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 stabil-
ity of customs, the frequent reduction of morality to mores, could not
fail to have an impact on the way in which nationality was conceptu-
alised.

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 polit-

ical” 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 dis-
tinguishes between three main political languages or discourses in pre-
revolutionary 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 institu-
tions. 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 Cail-

lois (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 con-

temporary 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 col-
lective representations, on the basis of which corresponding legal and
political arrangements are built. In order to be stable, laws and politi-
cal institutions should match the habits of the population living under
them:
the government most in conformity with nature is the one whose particu-
lar 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 Hip-
pocrates and Aristotle to Jean Bodin and beyond,14 geographic condi-
tions shape manners—for instance giving birth to either hot, passionate
temperaments or cold, moderate ones, which are especially suited to lib-
erty. Obviously, the existence of a correspondence between the natural
environment and the forms of human life can be understood in very dif-
ferent ways. In the previous chapter, we have seen for instance the deter-
ministic 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 govern-
ment, 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., .

14 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., .
 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 Pufendor-
fian 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 self-
defence, 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 cir-
cumstances 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 atti-
tude may even inspire a concern for the improvement of the nations con-
quered. Montesquieu deplored the cruelties inflicted and the opportuni-
ties 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 weak-
ness 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 His-
tory 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: Prince-

ton University Press, ).

27 Montesquieu, De l’ Esprit des Lois,  (X, ); tr., .
 nations and their adversaries 

Although his position now sounds somewhat patronising, Montes-

quieu’s assumption of a community of all nations, seen from the per-
spective 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 jurispru-
dence 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 Mon-
tesquieu 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 liter-
ary 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 phi-
losophy, 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 empha-
sis 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 coun-

tries 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 cli-
mate was not the only factor shaping social life. According to her, gov-
ernments 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 cli-
matic 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 elabo-
rate 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 demon-
strated. 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 Ibid., ; De la littérature, .

33 De l’ Allemagne, vol. , .
34 Ibid., vol. , –.
35 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. How-
ever, among the characteristic assumptions accompanying their reflec-
tion, 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 belong-
ing in an international community. Lastly (and this is really a conse-
quence 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 Enlighten-
ment 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 estab-
lishment 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. , .

37 Ibid.
38 Peter Mandler, The English National Character from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair

(New Haven: Yale University Press, ), .

 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 schol-
ars is that such a characterisation does, at least to an extent, make sense.
However, one should not lose from sight that less openly cosmopoli-
tan 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 impor-
tance 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 influ-

enced 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 insti-
tutions rested both on well-understood interest and on deeper men-
tal dispositions, such as habits or religious sentiment. In his discus-
sion 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 Enlighten-
ment 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., Constitu-

tional 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 sig-
nificantly 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 father-
land”, with a view to bring “patriotism and its attendant virtues to the

44 Ibid., –; tr., .

45 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. .
 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 Pol-
ish 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 sec-
onded this author’s conviction that the price to pay for internal pacifi-
cation, 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., .

49 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., –.
 nations and their adversaries 

between them “the social bond (liaison sociale)” was still of an “imper-
fect” kind.54 Thus, the establishment of peace on the basis of a “broth-
erhood of European peoples”55 was heavily compromised. The main
difference between Rousseau and Abbé de Saint-Pierre was that the lat-
ter 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 inter-
est. By contrast, Rousseau did not think that even that minimal inter-
national political form was likely to appear. In Hobbesian fashion, he
did not envisage that binding rules could be implemented at the inter-
national 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 prop-
erly 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 con-
tracts at the interstate level, not to mention at the global level, are not
only impossible but also undesirable, since all large states have the ten-
dency to put at the risk the freedom of their citizens.57 What is inter-
esting in Rousseau’s reflection is that it entails no postulate concern-
ing 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, determin-
istic 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 char-
acterised, at least in part, the eighteenth century, de Maistre affirmed
that national characters are naturally incompatible. Nations have “visible

54 Ibid., .
55 Ibid., .
56 Ibid., .
57 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. How-
ever, 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 great-
ness. 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,  [micro-
form]), .
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: Cam-

bridge 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 Chris-
tianity established the principle of liberty for all, i.e. equality.67 The main
question for Michelet, however, was to determine which one of the Euro-
pean 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 neigh-
bours, 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 beauti-
ful.”70 Especially since , France was in the best position to represent
the principles of unity and of liberty for all, beyond privileges and hier-
archies. 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, culminat-
ing 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 per-
sons. 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”, Miche-
let claimed that in the French revolutionary process “[s]ociety did every-
thing”.74 Not isolated individualities, but the great masses of the peo-
ple, had been the motor of a revolution “without heroes, without proper
names”.75 This insistence on unity as the outcome of historical, imper-
sonal, 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 broth-
erhood. 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 char-
acters 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 disap-
pear.”80 The people, far from being the result of a political construction,

73 Ibid., .
74 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.
 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 inter-
national 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 ene-
mies.”84 As national souls became more and more distinct, communica-
tion 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 phi-
losophy, 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., .
82 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.  ().
 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 oppo-
sition 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 con-

90 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 intel-

lectuelle 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 para-
doxically 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 Ger-
manic military aristocracy with Gallo-Roman materials.95 The century-
long labour of France has consisted in ridding itself from all elements
which had been brought by the Germanic invasion, until to the Revolu-
tion 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 affirm-
ing 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 iden-
tity by distancing itself from other comparable civilisations. In effect, in
his reflections on the best way to restore the moral and political stand-
ing 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 peo-
ple of manual workers) and of Africa (a continent of peasants), would
enable Europeans to acquire an aristocratic identity of “masters and sol-
diers”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,” .

99 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,” .
 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 cul-
tural 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 Euro-
peans, “in adopting the Semitic religion”, had “deeply transformed” it, to
the point that Christianity should be regarded as a purely European prod-
uct (“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 civil-
isations, but this time he expressed his regrets that Judaism and Chris-
tianity 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 civilisa-
tions (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: Gallimard-

Folio, ), 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 objec-
tive 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 “ensem-
ble 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 reflec-
tion on the concept of nation is more ambiguous than often suggested.116
Renan distinguished between several visions of the national and dis-
missed 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 Switzer-
land.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 dimen-
sion 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, Cit-
izenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity 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 solidar-
ity: 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 ratio-
nal 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 his-
tory, 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 nec-
essary 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 col-
lectivity 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., .

121 Ibid., .
122 Ibid., .
123 On this point, see Jean-Marc Ferry, “Face à la question européenne, quelle intégra-

tion postnationale?” Critique internationale  (April ), –; Todorov, Nous et les
autres, –.
 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 quali-
ties of character cannot be transmitted”.133 Because of this lack of com-
patibility between collective psychological traits nations cannot under-
stand each other and thus tend to see one another as potential enemies:
“[t]he perennial struggles between races have as their origin, primar-
ily, 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 under-
mines its aptitude to defend the characters of its race, the monuments of
its history, the work of its ancestors.”137

131 Ibid., –.

132 Ibid., .
133 Ibid., .
134 Ibid., .
135 Ibid., –.
136 “Altérer”, i.e. transform and denature at the same time.
137 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, rejec-
tion of the notion itself. At any rate, Durkheim was convinced that “some
lessons of the highest importance” could be derived from “the observa-
tion 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 pur-
sue 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., .

140 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., .
 chapter two

admiration for the complexity of human societies and for the innumer-
able 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 funda-
mental categories of understanding, which Kant had taken to be the same
in all reasonable beings, derived from experiences specific to each soci-
ety.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 clo-
sure 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 concep-
tual closure of society, Durkheim could not accept the classical notion of
a community of nations, which was dependent on the notion that a “com-
mon 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 mean-
ingful 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., –.

148 This is an important theme in Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “De quelques
formes primitives de classification—contribution à l’ étude des représentations collec-
tives,” L’ Année sociologique  (– []); tr., “On some primitive forms of
classification—contribution to the study of collective representations,” in Primitive Clas-
sification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). It also plays a central role Emile
Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, ); tr., The Ele-
mentary Forms of Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, ).
149 Formes élémentaires, ; tr.,  .
 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 brother-
hood”, Durkheim used the arguments above to warn that such aspira-
tions 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 soci-
ety”: 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 Euro-
pean 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 necessar-
ily 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 trans-
formations of the concept of the social have invited human scientists and
political thinkers to increasingly question the notion that there is a “com-
mon measure” valid across nations; and on the other hand, to spell out

155 Ibid., ; tr., .

156 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., .
 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 repre-
sentation of difference: for instance the more national singularity is con-
ceived as closed, the stronger the notion of enmity becomes. This, how-
ever, 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 Press-
Routledge & 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 delin-
eated against a background of differences. The striking fact is that this
background (differently from Rousseau’s suggestion) is not made of gen-
eral, abstract human potentialities, but of differences which are perceived
as actually existing. In other words, in the same way that we can only con-
cretely, 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 attrac-
tion and repulsion exerted by identifiable forms of life.
Another “common measure” binding all nations, apart from jus gen-
tium and religion, is human nature. As we saw, Durkheim was very crit-
ical of this notion, but his scepticism must be seen as only one manifes-
tation 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 Nietz-
sche (–) 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 his-
tory 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 contin-
gent 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 inspira-
tion. 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 immor-
tal 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 understand-
ing 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, adver-
saries 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 Lan-
guage, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Cornell: Cornell Uni-
versity 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 promi-
nent as the nineteenth century advances. Second, Schmitt gave a great
importance to the modification of political conceptions, and in particu-
lar 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 phenom-
ena, in modernity, caused a deep transformation of the representation of
what nations are, and of the nature of their relations: one was secularisa-
tion; the other was what Voegelin called the “closure of groups”. The tradi-
tional medieval idea of a corpus mysticum transcending national belong-
ings was progressively substituted with a vision of society as autonomous,
heterogeneous, and self-centred. In such a context the citizens of differ-
ent nations, no longer connected with one another by the “common mea-
sure” 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-conceptualisa-

167 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 ori-
entation, 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 compa-
rable 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 theori-
sations. 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 con-
cept 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 con-
trast, 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 exter-
nal 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 organi-
cist 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 ele-
ments 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 “person-
alist” 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 legit-

imately compare societies to individual persons. Thomas Hobbes and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and generally, all the representatives of the clas-
sical 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 ful-
filling 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 per-
sonalist 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 peo-
ple forming a given nation have some psychological or cultural charac-
teristics 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 nine-
teenth centuries, as well as across Europe, when referring to the existence
of social commonalities (e.g. collective habits or shared ways of think-
ing). 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 col-
lective struggle for life in the formation of nations (Physics and Politics,
) that “the existence of national character is the greatest common-
place in the world”.4 Moritz Lazarus and H. Steinthal, the two editors of

1Jules Michelet, Le peuple (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ), .

2Emile 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
 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’ (Volks-
geist) 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 activ-
ity 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 alterna-
tive 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 Liter-
ary Representation of National Character (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ); Manfred Beller,
Eingebildete Nationalcharaktere. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur literarischen Imagologie (Göt-
tingen: V & R Unipress, ); Philippe Claret, La personnalité collective des nations:
Théories anglo-saxonnes et conceptions françaises du caractère national (Bruxelles: Étab-
lissements Émile Bruylant, ); Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit
in Britain and France. – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Sil-
via 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 col-
lectivity 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 asser-
tion 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 objec-
tive 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 liter-
ally, 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

8René Worms, Organisme et société (Paris: Giard & Brière, ), –.
9Ibid., .
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., .
 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 other-
wise may well be diverse in their habits and world-views. “Characteristic
trait” is an expression used by Germaine de Staël: “one ought to be look-
ing 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 prob-
abilistic 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 expe-
riences 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 dif-
ferences are without their influence in forming a different type of charac-
ter”.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,” .

13 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 Press-
Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), .
17 Ibid., .
18 Ibid., .
 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 man-
ifests itself through common allegiance, mutual recognition and sympa-
thy. 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 “ethol-
ogy”.22 This science would represent the pivotal point of the social sci-
ences, 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 charac-
ter 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 charac-
teristics 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., .
20 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., .
 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,” .

26 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, .
 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 inde-
pendence 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 eco-
nomicism 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 in-
evitable in modern times, owing to more fluid social relations in extant
industrial societies.29 Gabriel Tarde, on the other hand, intended to estab-
lish sociology as a discipline by declaring everything, including the nat-
ural, to be essentially social. In this, his strategy was markedly differ-
ent from that of Durkheim and his followers who, having proclaimed
the social to be independent from the natural, did not need to ques-
tion 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 knowl-
edge 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 imagi-
nary.

29 Célestin Bouglé, Les idées égalitaires. Étude sociologique (Paris: Alcan, ); Céles-

tin 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 soci-
ologist Bruno Latour.30 Before that, Tarde was primarily remembered as
the main opponent of Emile Durkheim in the last decade of the nine-
teenth 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 reg-
ularities 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 differ-
ent contradictory examples, which thus cannot be all simultaneously imi-
tated: 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: Rout-
ledge, ); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-
theory (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 inven-

tion 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 con-
trast 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 under-
standing of the person,39 Tarde developed a notion of consciousness as a
site of tension where contradictory desires, tendencies and images coex-
ist. 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 revo-
lution in the realm of sociology”, Tarde argued, would consist in recog-
nising 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 pre-
serve.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 Soci-
ologie 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 his-
torical 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, dis-
tinguishing 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 indi-
vidual 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, –, .

43 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 compar-
ison 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, .
 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 com-
pletely “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 char-
acteristic of social arrangements, Tarde nuanced this notion. In a second
step, he interrogated the assumption of homogeneity. Widespread analo-
gies between society and living beings had promoted a view of society as
compact and tightly organised. Tarde argued, by contrast, that social enti-
ties (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 ontol-
ogy 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 under-
stood in a chimerical sense, which it is fundamental to dismiss. It consists
in conceiving of a collective spirit, a social consciousness, a we, which sup-
posedly 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., .
48 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., .
 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 charac-
ter is an effect, not a cause, a “function” and not a “factor”,55 of individ-
ual thought and action. He derided the tendency to explain social life
through the idea of collective personality, to envisage all social phenom-
ena, 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 dis-
tinctiveness 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 open-
ness of societies rather than in their closure. He suggested that, as soci-
eties evolve, the “indeterminacy of their actual borders, their mutual and
continuous penetration” increase, in such a way that their “own personal-
ity” becomes “less clearcut and discontinuous . . . more and more inter-
nationalised”.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 even-
tually 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., .

55 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., .
 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 con-
sciousness 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 fol-
low 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 under-
lying 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 ori-
entation, the internal tendency, of each particle which is fundamental:
each particle, according to Tarde, strives for the “assimilation and domi-
nation”,64 for the “possession”65 of the particles which surround it (since
this striving is present in all, Tarde suggested that particles end up mutu-
ally 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 Lois de l’ imitation, XVI–XVII; tr. (modified), XXI.

61 “Monadologie,” .
62 Ibid., –.
63 Ibid., –, .
64 Ibid., .
65 Ibid., .
66 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 individ-
uals 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 pos-
sess one another in thousands of different ways, and each of them has the
desire to know news ways to possess its peers. Hence, their transforma-
tions.”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 har-
mony, 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 expres-
sion of their powers. By contrast, Tarde de-emphasised society in order to
privilege, on the one hand, individuals (especially their faculties of inven-
tion 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 real-
ity, 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 Ibid., .
68 Ibid., .
69 Ibid., .
70 Ibid., .
71 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 aston-
ishes 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 “ethnic-
ity”. 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 com-
bine 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 Wis-

senschaftslehre (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 histor-
ical 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 individ-
uals, all follow the same path of development: they are born, grow older,
and eventually die.77 Weber dismissed this view as too abstract and verg-
ing 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 phenom-
ena 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 (Einwirkun-
gen)”, rather than as their cause.80
In discussing puritanism in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Cap-
italism (–), Weber quoted from the end of Milton’s Paradise
Lost. He evoked the banning of Adam and Eve from Eden and the mis-
sion 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 pas-
sage 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., .
77 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.  (), –.
 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 irreconcil-
ability 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 occu-
pations 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 indi-
viduals 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 phe-
nomena, instead of offering a detailed historical description of the suc-
cession 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 de-
scent”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 belong-
ing to a distinct racial type rather emerges from social processes. Weber
explained that there is a connection between the geographic proxim-
ity of social actors and the political need to act collectively. Potential

83 Protestantische Ethik, ; tr. (modified), .

84 Ibid.; tr., .
85 Ibid.
86 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Tübin-

gen: 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.
 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 oppo-
sition 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 charac-
teristics (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 draw-
ing 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 rela-
tions 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” rep-
resentation of common descent.94 A nation, far from being a really exist-
ing 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 phenome-
non—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 collec-
tivity to identify with. However, Weber did not seem to think that identi-
fication and belonging, by themselves, are primary psychological needs.
He thus searched for another explanation of the desire to belong and con-
cluded 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 crit-
ical treatment of the concepts of ethnicity and nationality, Max Weber
was faithful to the strict methodological individualism he defended in

97 Ibid., ; tr., .

98 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., .
 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 col-
lectivities [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 socio-
logical purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality which
“acts”.101
In this methodological statement, Weber explicitly targeted the pre-
sociological 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 inter-
individual 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 func-
tionally, 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 char-
acter was that they could be used in political arguments. More specif-
ically, the rhetoric of character was used to bolster support for politi-
cal 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., –.

102 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 delib-
eration: civil society, community, organized modernity,” in Languages of Civil Society,
edited by Peter Wagner (Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, ), –. Also Sandro
 chapter three

character. During the First World War, he wrote several articles advo-
cating 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 con-
trol 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 exist-
ing cultural traditions. He criticised vigorously those he ironically called
the Literaten (“littérateurs”, “men of letters”) for their misguided argu-
ment that the German temperament was incompatible with the parlia-
mentary 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 eco-
nomic efficacy, and thus endangered the international standing of Ger-
many. 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 princi-
pally dedicated to analysing the social life of Northern American Indians.
His reports on his fieldwork among the Kwakiutl, famous for their prac-
tice 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 deci-
sively 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 sci-
ences, 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 deter-
mined”.109 Boas contrasted this view with the classical “assumption that
the individual exists in vacuo”110 and that mental activities develop inde-
pendently from the environment they are part of.
Second, Boas criticised the philosophy of history, as well as its pen-
dant 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 pro-
gressive 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, Lan-

guage 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 cul-
tural analysis, he insisted that “geographical conditions become opera-
tive 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 characteris-
tics in common.”118 In other words, scientific racialism is a theory of the
determination of individual and collective character by an inherited bio-
logical structure. The belief in the link between psychology and phys-
iology was widespread at the time, to the point that Boas saw himself
facing a number of studies on racial character that claimed scientific sta-
tus. He referred to the “enormous amount of literature dealing with men-
tal 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 measure-
ments to demographic data. His strategy was to offer a criticism of ra-
cialism 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., .

115 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 arti-
cles: 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 anthro-
pology,” American Anthropologist , no.  (); Corey S. Sparks, Richard L. Jantz,
“Changing times, changing faces: Franz Boas’s immigrant study in modern perspec-
tive,” American Anthropologist , no.  (). On a related topic, Laurière describes
Boas’s direct involvement against National-Socialist racial science: Christine Laurière,
 the rise of the culture concept 

obtained by the members of certain countries disappeared if one con-

trolled 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 measure-
ments (such as the cephalic index or the width of the face) of the immi-
grants to the United States were different from those of their descen-
dants.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, includ-
ing 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 “Geisteswis-
senschaften”, 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 indi-
vidual 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 inter-
pret 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 characteris-
tics; 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 dis-
tinct from neighbouring societies, but even to a large extent, incompat-
ible with them. Boas seems to have endorsed the first of these assump-
tions. 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 behav-
ior” displayed by every people.129 On the other hand, however, he dis-
tanced 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 explana-
tion: 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 migra-
tion 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 “Race and progress”, .

129 Boas, “Race and character,” in Race, Language and Culture, .
130 “The methods of ethnology,” .
131 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 assump-
tions of homogeneity, stability and incommensurability it typically en-
tailed. 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 char-
acter”. 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 all-
important 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 rev-
olutions 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 seculari-
sation, urbanisation or industrialisation, may trigger feelings of uncer-
tainty 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 indi-
viduals 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, ); Durk-

heim, 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, tra-
ditional 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 deeply-
seated tendencies similar to natural instincts. Conscience, instead, sug-
gested 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 pro-

posed 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 pro-
moted 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 evo-

lutionism. As suggested above, “culture” was predominantly used, dur-
ing the nineteenth century, to describe a moment or a stage in historical
development. As a term, culture had an important rival, namely “civili-
sation”. 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 pro-
cesses” (in his work the term “culture” is typically used in such adjec-
tival forms), he was referring to the fact that such phenomena and pro-
cesses have a meaning and represent a value for individuals, as opposed
to being mere manifestations of the pursuit of material interests. A fur-
ther fact to consider is that “culture” is not presented as one of the fun-
damental concepts of sociological reasoning at the beginning of Econ-
omy and Society.146 This section contained a definition of “meaning”,
“social action”, “social relation”, and “power”, but no definition of “cul-
ture” 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 perspec-

tive,” American Anthropologist , no.  (), .

142 Weber, “Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozial-politischer Erkennt-

nis,” 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 con-
cepts, 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 reflec-
tion.149 He too refrained form offering a definition of culture,150 even
though his overall position was clear: “culture” had to become the pri-
mary object of the human sciences. The “subject-matter” of cultural
anthropology, according to Boas, is “the study of the origin and his-
tory of cultural forms and of the interrelations between individual men-
tal life and culture.”151 Culture is here understood as a system of rela-
tions 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 inte-
grated”.153 Even though this integration implies that each culture is an
entity with a specific identity, it does not mean that cultures are com-
pletely 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, depen-
dent 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 Ein-
führung 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 sug-
gested 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 corre-
spond 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 consid-
erable success, selling , copies in the years following its publica-
tion. 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 Cul-
ture.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 pro-
moted 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 char-
acter. The term “culture” eventually came to replace other collective con-
cepts 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 per-
sons 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 charac-
teristics 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, Sociolo-

gie 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 per-
sistently continued to have recourse to the metaphor that societies can
legitimately be compared to persons. Moreover, this recourse is some-
thing that the language of the social shares with other important lan-
guages, 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 original-
ity 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 influ-
ential theoretician of culture in post-war social anthropology, Clifford
Geertz, has been repeatedly criticised for his failure to theorise interna-
tional 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 collec-
tive.
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 understand-
ings of personhood, social relations, states of mind/soul, goods and bads,
virtues and vices, and the like. These languages are often mutually untrans-
latable.”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 Guaran-

tees: 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 refer-
ence to non-social, natural factors was increasingly perceived as unsatis-
factory. In particular, the nineteenth-century language of the social had
made the establishment of sociology and social anthropology more dif-
ficult as independent disciplines, since they suggested that the analy-
sis of social events should in part be the task of sciences such as phys-
ical anthropology or climatology. Instead, the proponents of the new
disciplines tried to give further legitimacy to their disciplines by argu-
ing 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 Chap-
ter , posed political problems: specifically, it made social change more
difficult to envisage. By contrast, the supporters of the Third Repub-
lic, who sought to offer arguments in favour of social and economic
reform, were in need of a theory of social transformation. Such devel-
opments 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 treat-
ment.

Durkheim’s Fundamental Question: The Location of Society

Durkheim famously noted in his Division of Labour in Society that soli-

darity—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 Gian-

franco 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 re-
elaborations. 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 soci-
ety 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 under-
stood 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 sug-
gest at this stage that the substratum, for Durkheim, refers to the consti-
tutive, 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 metaphys-
ical 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 “col-
lective 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 var-
ious 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 Socio-
logical 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 sub-
stratum are studied by distinct branches of knowledge, such as demog-
raphy and geography, which specialise in the exploration of what Durk-
heim called “social morphology”.19 At the beginning of his career espe-
cially, he lay great importance on the material substratum, which, accord-
ing to him, determined social forms.20 In the Division of Labour, for
instance, he explained that the transition from archaic to complex soci-
eties (from mechanical to organic solidarity) had been caused by demo-
graphic 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 some-
what sceptical about this, Durkheim did not completely exclude the pos-
sibility 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 environ-
ment, and more especially to the human environment”,23 but also empha-
sised 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 representa-

tions: 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 sci-
entifique”, ), he wrote that “the explanatory analysis of this sub-
stratum should not be confused with the explanatory analysis of that
which takes place on its surface.”27 In “Value judgements and judge-
ments 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 organ-
ised body fulfilling certain vital functions. In this body lives a soul: it
is the totality of collective ideals”.28 This suggests that the most impor-
tant 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 ter-
ritorial).”29
To sum up, it appears that Durkheim made increasingly explicit that
while the material substratum may condition social life, it does not deter-
mine 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 abso-
lute”: 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,” .

28 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, ), .
 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 obvi-
ously 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 sub-
stratum, 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 Sociolo-

gie 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 bio-
logical processes.38 As an alternative to this doctrine, Durkheim pro-
posed 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 sec-
ond time. This point enabled him to suggest, first, that mental life con-
sists, 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, “Collec-

tive 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 represen-
tations remains very abstract, and its precise sociological meaning is dif-
ficult 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 con-
sciousness 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 soli-
darity offers only little space for individual (in the sense of idiosyncratic)
representations. All members of society tend to have the same world-
views 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,” .
43 “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., .
 chapter four

substantial.46 Collective, uniform practices fade away and collective

beliefs lose both their intensity and their specificity, becoming increas-
ingly general and abstract.47 Durkheim described this process as a retrac-
tion 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 soci-
ety 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 there-
fore the average wealth of society, and triggers a virtuous circle of grow-
ing 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 man-
ual 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 resent-
ment against society: the division of labour may well have “dispersive
effects”.50 For this reason, a mere awareness of the advantages of coop-
eration 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 Ibid., Book II, chap. .

47 Ibid., –; tr., –. See also ; tr., .
48 E.g. ibid.: ; tr., –. See also: –; tr., – and ; tr., .
49 Ibid., Book II, chap. .
50 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 depen-
dence in which he finds himself ”.53 However, Durkheim noted, mod-
ern 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 an-
other, except in cases where their behaviour was determined by physical
needs, each one of them becomes a spontaneous source of activity. Individ-
ual 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 indi-
viduals, 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 prin-
ciples, 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 individ-
uals. Manners and beliefs inculcated in the course of education acquire
such strength that they can be taken to be independent from the individ-
uals themselves. This independence is especially visible when such pre-
cepts 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 grad-
ually 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 empha-
sise the dimension of heterogeneity of the social vis-à-vis individual con-
sciousness: social facts, to quote again a famous passage already repro-
duced 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 individu-
als. 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., .

62 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, ), .

 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 vis-
à-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., .

67 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.
 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 de-
scribed, which is expressed particularly clearly in the Rules, to be Durk-
heim’s definitive one.71 For instance, Georges Gurvitch criticised Durk-
heim for his belief in “the transcendence of collective consciousness”,
which had forced him to imagine a “supra-temporal Spirit” whose exis-
tence 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.

71 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 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

 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 conscious-
nesses”);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., .

77 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 indepen-

dent study. Some indications can be found in Susan Stedman Jones, Durkheim Recon-
sidered (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 col-
laborators 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.
 the location of society 

and external to individual consciousness.81 Durkheim was clear, how-

ever, that one should not consider as equivalent the individual uncon-
scious and collective consciousness.82 On the one hand, he believed that
some social facts are indeed characterised by their unconscious charac-
ter. 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, collec-
tive rules and practices ought to inhabit the consciousness of individu-
als. 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 prac-
tices 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 world-
view.86 In the Elementary Forms, Durkheim suggested that even tradi-
tional 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 conscious-

ness 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, how-
ever, 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 occu-
pies 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 collec-
tive, 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 conscious-
nesses 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., .

88 Cf. Gianfranco Poggi and Giuseppe Sciortini, “Emile Durkheim,” in Incontri con il
pensiero sociologico (Bologna: Il Mulino, ).
89 Schmaus, Rethinking Durkheim, .
90 Division, ; tr., .
 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 individ-
ual mind in order to make it more consonant with the central features
of his sociology. In his later writings, he described in detail how individ-
ual minds are made of two separate regions; how individual “represen-
tations”, 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 sensibil-
ity”; 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, knowl-
edge, reflection, obligation, and religious feelings.93 Durkheim, more-
over, needed to show that the seat of collective representations exerts
an authority upon the individual, and that not all representations con-
tained 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., .

92 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,” –. Al-

ready 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
 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 defini-
tion, the individual and the social are separate; once constituted, col-
lective representations produce combinations and associations indepen-
dent 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 representa-
tions” 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 efferves-
cence”.96 The fundamental assumption of this theory is that the individu-
als 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 fas-
cination which forces individuals, if so commanded or induced, to act in
a certain way, regardless of their own particular feelings, habits, prefer-
ences, 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 impres-
sion 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 com-
mon 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 represen-
tations 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 col-
lective 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 insti-
tutions. These elements spring from collective practices in which the con-
sciousness 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 so-
cial 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 shortcom-
ings of his previous attempts. Whereas in the Division of Labour his read-
ing 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 author-
itative representations. Durkheim, however, never made this claim quite
that explicitly.
But even without speaking of a region of the mind Durkheim (not-
withstanding 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 Ele-
mentary 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 inter-
pret it in an adequate manner, but at least we cannot fail to be conscious
of it.”102

101 Ibid., ; tr. (modified), .

102 Ibid., ; tr., . Durkheim further suggested that individuals often fail to identify
the social origin and nature of this powerful voice speaking inside themselves. They
 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 promi-
nent 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 coopera-
tive movement, on war, on the nation and internationalism.1 In this chap-
ter, 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 pre-
occupy him, as his publications attest.2 In fact, in the early nineteen thir-
ties, 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 col-

lectives et diversité des civilisations, vol.  of Œuvres (Paris: Minuit, ); tr., “Civilisa-
tions. 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 mate-

rial 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 transforma-
tion 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 inter-
nationalism. 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 interna-
tional 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 (–), repro-

duced 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,” Socio-
Anthropologie  ().
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 polit-
ical 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 politi-
cal 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 Simi-
larly, as Durkheim explicitly argued, one should not hope to find guid-
ing 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. Depend-
ing on the way in which society is organised, certain developments could
be described as detrimental to the social fabric, and therefore patholog-
ical. 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 empir-
ical 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 world-
views 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 soci-
ologique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France-Quadrige, ); tr., The Rules of Socio-
logical 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 institu-
tions 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 kin-
ship 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 polit-
ical 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 sub-
type under this category.16 Mauss mentioned, among others, the exam-
ples 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 institu-
tions” (to take up Maurice Hauriou’s famous expression), i.e. an organi-
sation 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 “La nation,” .

14 Ibid., .
15 Ibid., –.
16 Ibid., , .
17 Ibid., .
18 Ibid., .
19 Ibid., .
20 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, mechani-
cally 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 “dis-
cipline” 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 publi-
cation, 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 sub-

type 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 spe-
cific and quite rare and recent form of social organisation, typical of West-
ern 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 “em-

pires” 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 indi-
viduals 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 subjec-
tively 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 cit-
izens 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 deci-
sions, 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 princi-
ple 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 qual-
itatively 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 sub-
ject and the object, the responsible agent of social life. What he was uncon-
sciously, 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 tech-
niques.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 interna-
tionally, 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 nation-
state. 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 exist-
ing 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., .
39 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
 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 interme-
diate 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 evolu-
tionism 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 displace-
ment as an indication of Mauss’s political intent. He was tacitly interven-
ing here to orient the development of nations toward certain political
forms that, in his view, were better suited to particular social configura-
tions.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 charac-
ter.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 anthro-

pologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), ; tr., “Real and practical rela-
tions 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, with-
out 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 con-
structed 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 in-
stance, 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 soci-
eties, not as the fusion of societies into one—a utopia he called cos-
mopolitanism. Rather, he believed that it should take the form of an in-
creasing 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., .
55 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, ).
 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 inte-
gration.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 interso-
cial 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 (eco-
nomic, 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 rela-
tions 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 espe-
cially 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 internation-
alised:
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., .
64 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., .
 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 interna-
tional morphology Mauss meant, following a Durkheimian inspiration,
the material basis (such as roads) and the social structure (communi-
ties of merchants, etc.) which made international phenomena possible.
Mauss’s aim was to show that the existence of similar practices in dif-
ferent 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 “cir-
culation”, 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 some-
one.”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 Ibid., .
73 “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 inter-
national morphology is a theory of “dispersed people” (peuples disper-
sés).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 pop-
ulations, of which Mauss mentioned the “Gipsies”).80 Mauss also spoke of
other internationalised groups, more professional in nature, such as mer-
chants, 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 mor-
phological 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, .

75 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
 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 activi-
ties 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 opposi-
tion between two social wholes: very often, only smaller portions of soci-
ety are involved. Especially common in archaic communities is the mil-
itary action of a group against a single individual from another group.89
By contrast, according to Mauss, only modern nations know the phe-
nomenon 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 inter-
national 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, Boud-
dhism, with their universalist concept of the human being.94 However,
Christianity betrayed its own values when it passed an alliance with sec-
ular 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 sol-
idarity and backed instead their national governments, as proved by the
experience of the First World War.98 More generally Mauss, while recog-
nising 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 polit-
ical 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 institu-
tions, 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 “Les phénomènes idéaux,” typescript, .

93 Ibid., –.
94 Ibid., –, .
95 Ibid., .
96 Ibid., –.
97 Ibid., .
98 Ibid., .
99 Ibid., –.
 the national and the transnational 

collective convictions regarding the vital importance of durably secur-

ing 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 inter-
dependence [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 pri-
mary social unit, and the most important one, is the “tribe, the people,
the nation, the city, the modern state”, in other words the “political soci-
ety.”102 At first sight, thus, “national life is the highest form of collec-
tive 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 impossi-
bility 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,” .

101 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.
 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, com-
merce, fine arts, techniques, tools, languages, words, scientific knowl-
edge, 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, reli-
gious ones, could be exported and imported as well. By contrast, “phe-
nomena 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 geo-
graphic 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 circu-
late 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 polit-
ical and moral authority upon them) cannot exist.

105 Ibid., ; tr., .

106 Ibid., –; tr., –.
107 Ibid., ; tr., .
108 Ibid., ; tr., .
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid.
 the national and the transnational 

Mauss eventually divested his own definition of the concept of civili-

sation 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 eigh-
teenth and nineteenth century. Cosmopolitanism indeed rests on a con-
ception 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 tran-
scends 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 pub-
lished 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 continu-
ously 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 tech-
nical formulations which reveal, incidentally, his belief that the social is

112 “La nation,” .

113 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,” .
 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 com-
posing part: “Nothing proves that the division of labour within nations
and between nations, which will be the principle of tomorrow in eco-
nomic, 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 (individu-

118 Ibid., ; tr., .

119 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.
 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 con-
scious 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 civilisa-
tion 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 pre-
fer 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 methodolog-
ical 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., .

124 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 /).
 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 return-
ing 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. More-
over, Durkheim’s initial position was itself quite far from nineteenth-
century deterministic and naturalistic nationalisms. The fact that for
Mauss the position of  needed to be further radicalised is an indica-
tor 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 “interac-
tion” (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, –.

126 “Essai sur le don,” ; tr., .
127 Ibid., ; tr., .
128 “La nation,” .
129 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

), .
 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 embed-
dedness 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 soci-
eties 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 linguis-
tics, 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, lan-
guage 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 influ-
ences 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, trans-
formed, 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 commu-
nion 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 rep-
resentations, 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 sig-
nify 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 mean-
ing. 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 trans-
formations are more likely to occur and may often take more surprising
forms. In other words, it supports a vision of the social as more trans-

133 “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 pos-
sess a certain understanding of the symbolic conventions of their society,
it is obvious that the entire system of relations and interconnections can-
not be present at the same time in consciousness. For this reason, indi-
viduals 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 lan-

guage. 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 themati-
sation 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 prin-
ciples and on the will was a central component of political thought at
the moment of constitution of the language of the social. For this rea-
son, one further characteristic of the latter is a tendency to use the epi-
thet “political” within the context of a description of false views on soci-
ety. 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” any-
thing 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 politi-
cal and formal understanding of human relations, which he called “polit-
ical 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 com-
mon. 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 abstrac-
tion 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 author-
ity 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 deci-
sions 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 indepen-
dence of the legislative institution. They both suggested that the peo-
ple 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 popula-
tion.
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 France-

Quadrige, ), ; 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 move-
ments. For instance, Mauss believed that the realisation of the kind of
democratic socialism he supported would require a greater popular con-
trol over economic institutions, for instance through the social owner-
ship of industries and their management by professional associations.
However, this could not occur via mere administrative fiat, as the Bolshe-
viks had wrongly assumed. Rather, such a transformation would need to
be preceded socially by a diffusion of the idea and practice of coopera-
tion 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 alterna-
tive 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, success-
fully 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 assump-
tions and recognising similar problems as central, are not primarily char-
acterised 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 char-

acter”, “nature” or “state”. Lastly, and importantly, some prominent con-
cepts 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 insuffi-
ciently 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 philoso-
phy 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 cri-
tique 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 man-
ifestation 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 negli-
gible, 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 philos-
ophy 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 contempora-
neously with, and contributed to reinforce, the process of a disenchant-
ment of the world.12 This phrase means here more than just secularisa-
tion, 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 fami-
lies, 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 Nine-

teenth 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 sta-
bility 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 nomi-
nalist 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 rela-
tions. 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 soci-
ety. On this basis, he argued that God was a distorted, fetishised rep-
resentation 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 the-
ological (indeed Christian) to boot. On this account, the sweeping norma-
tive 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 pre-
rogatives. 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 dif-
ferent notion of nature, most scholars belonging to the later develop-
ments 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 follow-
ers, 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 cru-
cial 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 dis-
tinction between two “sub-languages” or dialects of the social. The con-
servative 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 volun-
tary social change, and on the other hand, theorises the necessary clo-
sure of societies and the incompatibility of their characters. Moreover,
it typically endorses a negative anthropology and a pessimistic sociol-
ogy which de-emphasise the role of ideal aspirations as factors capa-
ble 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 prob-
lem of the articulation of the social and the political by affirming that a

18 Ibid., .
19 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 concern-
ing 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 inter-
est or fear, but also ideal considerations, by a positive feeling of enthusi-
asm.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 Enlighten-
ment, 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 prob-
lems 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 republican-
ism with an elaborate critique of some aspects of the Enlightenment. In
Chapter , we saw that there was a sociological turn in French republi-
can thought during the early decades of the Third Republic. The schol-
ars 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 conser-
vatism, 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 “individualis-

tic 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 depen-
dence 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 pri-
vate 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, recog-
nised the individuality and distinctive value of each, and collectively exer-
cised 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 doc-
trine 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 re-
duction 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 condem-
nation 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 inter-
preted, so that even economic activities are embedded in thick cultural
significations. Thus individuals, in any of their activities and not just in

25 Sylvain Dzimira, Marcel Mauss, savant et politique (Paris: La découverte, ), .
26 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 economi-
cist 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., .
28 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, ).
 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 lan-
guage 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 cen-
ter, 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 individ-
uals. For instance, the emergence of political groups seeking to radically
transform society is possible only if a certain conception of time is avail-
able 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 polit-
ical: that which can be thought and done politically depends upon the
existing configuration of social relations. Moreover, the prevalent under-
standing of politics itself, as well as the identification of certain aspects of
human life as relevant for politics, are an effect of social discourses: “Dis-
course 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 par-
ticular, wide-ranging social transformations require in most cases deep
conceptual and categorial change. Mere decisions cannot bring this lat-
ter 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 Cen-
tury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Mag-
istra 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 Uni-
versity 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 pre-
sented 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 typ-
ical of mainstream social science. We have even seen how Durkheim,
despite being often criticised for his naturalistic, deterministic, and holis-
tic 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 analyti-
cal 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 politi-

cal action, can be conceptualised not only as an action aiming at impact-
ing 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.
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 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 interna-
tional), –, –, , ,

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, individu-
ality (see also consciousness, indi-
vidual), 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
peace, –, , , , , –
, , 
personality
individual personality, see individual
collective personality, , , ,
, , , –, –,
–, –, –
politics, concept of, ix–xii, xxiii–
xxviii, xxxi, , , , –,
, –
progress, progressive, , , ,
–, , , , –,
–
race, –, , –, –, ,
, , –, –, ,
, ,
religion, , , –, , , ,
, –, –, , ,
, , , 
revolution, xxiv, xxvi–xviii, –,
–, –, , , 
counter-revolution, –, , 
Rights of Man, see Declaration of the
Rights of Man
sociability, see society
social
concept of, ix–xxix, xxxi, , ,
, –, –, , ,
–, –, –
language of the, xxv–xxxi, , ,
–, , , , , ,
–
social change, see change
society
as a moral entity, see moral
as a natural entity, see nature
as person, see personality,
collective
boundedness of, xiv, xix, xxvii,
–, , 
concept of, xxii–xxiii, xxvii, xxxi,
, –, , –, –,
, , , –, –, ,
, –, , –,
, , –, , 

heterogeneity/homogeneity of,
, –, , , , –,
–, –, –, ,

human society, –, –,
–, –, –
location of, see substratum
openness of, xix, xxvii, , –
, –, –, 
stability/malleability of, see
change
sociology, discipline of, xxvi, ,
–, , –, , , –

solidarity, , , , , –
, , 
sovereignty, –, , , , 
national, , , , –, –
, 
popular, –, –, –, –
, 
soul of the people, see national
character
substratum of society, –
and the mental life of individuals,
–, , , –,

concept of, , –
material substratum, –,
–
supranational, see international
Third Republic, –, , –
tradition, traditionalism, , –,
, , –, –, –, ,
, –, 
transfer, see exchange
unity, political vs. social, –, , –,
, , , –
war, –, , , –
will, choice, free will, xvi, xxiv, xxvi,
, –, –, , –, , ,
–, –, , , , , –
, , 
 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, , , 