In the period before World War I, French liberals faced a daunting challenge: how to re-found the relations between the individual
and society on the one hand and between society and the state on the other. These were hardly new issues and could be traced
back to the dawn of Western political thought. But political upheavals during and after the French Revolution and the evolution
of ideas spread during the Enlightenment – which Marcel Gauchet calls the ‘sortie de religion’ – had given these ancient problems
a newfound urgency.
1 In France, the justification of the social and political order based on the teachings of religious tradition and doctrine
was losing its authority. Initially, philosophy had made an attempt – while not presenting itself as a substitute for religion
– to fill this gap, which was beginning to worry the educated classes. When it became clear that philosophy was not up to
the task, the emerging field of sociology was called upon to stand in its stead. This ‘sociological turn’, which took place
in the early decades of the Third Republic, would not provide the solutions its makers promised, but it nonetheless retains
its relevance for contemporary discussion of these issues.
2Both philosophy and sociology saw as their major social utility the presumed ability to furnish a new basis for moral obligation
in an age of increasing individualism. They both sought to found this obligation on reason and science, replacing the role
previously played by revealed religion. With the advent of the Third Republic they both sought to move
from theory to practice by reshaping and amplifying the role of public education – both elementary education for the masses
and secondary education for the elites.
From Saint-Simon onwards, the anti-liberal social and political philosophies of the nineteenth century had for the most part
referred to themselves as ‘scientific’. What is more, they considered their scientific character to be a decisive challenge
to (philosophical) liberalism. Yet, it was not until the latter part of the century that liberals themselves began to fully
appreciate the danger of such a challenge and make a major effort to establish the scientific validity of liberalism as distinguished
from its philosophical truth. However, the decline of the prestige of philosophical thought throughout the nineteenth century,
whether justified by the achievements of scientists or not, was a fact of intellectual life. In order to gain acceptance as
scientific, liberalism would have to become more closely identified with the new intellectual currents of the century, especially
evolutionism and, in France, positivism.
3 By enacting a so-called ‘sociological turn’, French liberals tried to do just that. This chapter will examine the main features
of the ‘sociological turn’ in French liberalism as demonstrated by the work of some major philosophers (the Eclectics, Renouvier,
Fouillée) and sociologists (Espinas, Durkheim, Bouglé).
The focus of philosophical liberalism in nineteenth-century France was on how to defend individual liberty against what were
seen as its three major enemies: the state, religious orthodoxy and the passions of the masses. While the concept of the value
of the individual clearly had roots in Christianity, some eighteenth-century thinkers had nonetheless tried to dispense with
God and religion in the philosophical defence of the individual. But the upheavals of the French Revolution encouraged nineteenth-century
liberals to hope that religion, the state and freedom could at last be reconciled. This hope was embodied in the work of Victor
Cousin (1792–1867) and his followers, known as the Eclectics.
4 The Eclectics argued that liberty needed the state and the church to defend it
against the passions of the mob and the tyranny of dictators, but only a state and church purged of their absolutist claims
would be compatible with liberty.
A leading Eclectic, the philosopher and politician Jules Simon (1814–96), summed up the conditions necessary for political
liberty in three principles: ‘first, written law replaces arbitrary authority in all matters; second, law consecrates and
respects the natural and inalienable rights of man; and third … government never regards itself as having rights and interests
of its own’, but serves the general interest.
5 Simon’s emphasis on written law reflected the Enlightenment’s illusion that all political problems could be resolved by devising
the right constitution and the right laws. This preference for the legislative over the executive would persist in French
liberalism through the Third and Fourth Republics, and separated the Eclectics from their contemporary François Guizot (1787–1874)
whose liberalism stressed the role of the executive.
The philosophical character of the Eclectics’ political philosophy showed itself most clearly in their devotion to the concept
of ‘natural and inalienable rights of man’. They were the direct heirs of the philosophy of the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of the Citizen.
6 Like the authors of the Declaration they recognized that rights were not absolutes, but needed to be domesticated to the
needs of civil society. Their error was to assume that the civil society of their time was mature, and indeed ‘natural’. Nature
had given men – and only men of property and education – the qualities needed for public life; their rights were thus necessarily
superior to those of the propertyless and to those of women and children. Although a restricted suffrage seems in contradiction
with the Eclectics’ ideal of the free and responsible individual, it was deemed necessary because the majority, even of males,
remained uneducated and ignorant. Nonetheless, because democracy clearly had its roots in the liberal ideal of equal rights,
the Eclectics were better able than Guizot, who saw suffrage as a function, not a right, to accept a gradually broadened franchise.
7Like Guizot and the
Doctrinaires, the Eclectics believed in the importance of property rights and a free economy. They did not, however, share the laissez-faire
economists’ blind faith in the justice and efficiency of the
market.
8 Unfortunately for French liberalism, the Eclectics’ individualism did not provide a strong bulwark against an economic libertarian
interpretation of individual rights. The Eclectics’ roots in Judeo-Christian ethics and the historical French tradition of
social regulation gave birth to a liberalism attentive to what seemed possible in their society, but they were unable to reconcile
it with their philosophical individualism. Hence, the Eclectics’ philosophical liberalism remained an effective basis on which
to attack the authoritarian rule of Napoleon III, but seemed anachronistic in the face of the social conflicts of the Third
Republic.
The sociologists of the Third Republic would reject the Eclectics’ attempt to establish a doctrine of human rights founded
on the presumed nature of the individual person. Instead they proposed that rights should be founded on the nature of society
as it had evolved in modern times. But before this sociological approach could become dominant there was a period of transition
in which philosophers attempted to give the philosophical defence of liberty a more solid and ‘scientific’ foundation than
the Eclectics had achieved. This effort reached its pinnacle in the work of Charles Renouvier (1815–1903) and Alfred Fouillée
(1838–1912).
Renouvier set out to build a comprehensive philosophical system based on his heterodox version of Kant’s critical philosophy.
He believed in the possibility of constructing a system of morals, both public and private, that would not only compel intellectual
acceptance, but also influence behaviour. Like Kant, he believed that morality was meaningless without free will. And in his
attempt to demonstrate that free will really existed, despite the doctrine of universal determinism proclaimed by contemporary
science, Renouvier examined the social and psychological forces that seem to constrain freedom of thought and action in order
to find those interstices where free will might live. Human beings, he observed, are born into a world that already exists;
the formation of their minds is shaped by genetic inheritance, but even more powerfully by a social inheritance. Our ideas
of right and wrong, at all levels, from the individual to international relations, are shaped by what we are taught and by
what we observe (which often contradicts what we are taught). Some people, however, at specific times in their lives, are
able to transcend these
determining forces. If this were not the case human society would have stagnated long ago. Human decisions, free not predetermined,
have been able to alter the course of individual lives and, in some cases, that of the larger society. This analysis of free
will (much more sophisticated than I can show here) shaped Renouvier’s approach to social and political questions, and was
the foundation of his liberalism.
9After the failure of the 1848 Revolution, Renouvier turned away from the utopian hopes of his youth and devoted himself to
rebuilding the intellectual foundations of liberalism. Liberals, he thought, had long been content with the question-begging
doctrine of the automatic harmony between individual desires and social good. Renouvier concluded that the solution to the
problem of the relations between the individual and society was to be found in moral philosophy, for which he attempted to
provide a more solid foundation in his
Science de la morale.
10 His goal was to develop a moral philosophy independent of any religious creed or metaphysical doctrine – one that stood on
reason alone.
Renouvier thought that any practical morals or politics had to rest ultimately on sound theory, even though that theory could
never be directly applied to everyday life. Theory was necessary to guarantee the validity of our highest aspirations as well
as to serve as a yardstick of our progress towards achieving them. The gap between the ideal and the real could never be closed
because, in contrast to the faith of utopians and revolutionaries, we can never cut ourselves free from the past. While the
sociologists believed that the scientific study of present society would satisfy both our practical needs and higher aspirations,
Renouvier was persuaded that humans needed a transcendental ideal and that it was possible to find that transcendence within
immanence, that is, without reference to anyone or anything outside of nature.
Without a rational measure of moral truth – a rational absolute – human beings would risk sinking into a relativism that accepts
whatever is as right. But moral philosophy had also to provide practical guidance for ordinary people, an applied right viable
in the ‘state of war’, as Renouvier called any society that ever existed or could exist, in contrast to the ideal but unrealizable
‘state of peace’, in which all men behaved rationally. Moral autonomy à la Kant was unattainable, but the individual could
at least seek to preserve as much of her own autonomy and
as much respect for the autonomy of others as the real world permitted. Renouvier called these practical morals the ‘right
of defence’. Liberalism required a kind of political casuistry parallel to this casuistry of ‘defence’ required by practical
morals.
One element of the right of defence is the right of property, which was essential both to outer liberty and inner autonomy.
Renouvier thought that the most pressing social problem of his time was the question of how to extend the benefits of property
to the mass of society without undermining existing property rights. Collectivism would destroy hard-won existing rights without
safeguarding the workers’ inner autonomy. Society had an obligation, however, to limit the growth of inequalities and to create
social guarantees which would provide workers with a kind of security equivalent to that provided to the bourgeoisie by property.
Like most liberals, Renouvier placed his hope in the work of voluntary associations and worried about using the coercive power
of the state.
In considering the state, Renouvier applied the same approach he had used to questions of private morality. At the level of
theory persons were morally obliged to obey only that government which had their rational consent, but in practice such a
requirement would lead to the dissolution of society. For Renouvier the form of government that most closely approximated
the requirement of individual consent was the liberal democratic republic.
11 Majority rule was the best that could be achieved in real societies, and the form most likely to let individuals develop
their inherent possibilities. Majorities could be oppressive, but the right of resistance to that oppression was conditional,
not absolute. In the long run, the best one could do was to try to educate majorities to respect the rights of minorities,
but also to teach the rich minority to respect the rights of the poor majority. None of this would be easy – it would take
generations – but it would give the republic a moral purpose which transcended the individual egoism of its citizens. Renouvier’s
individualist philosophy thus recognized the individual’s obligation to participate in the collective purposes of society.
For Renouvier, the success of liberalism in contemporary French politics depended on a sound theoretical foundation capable
of resisting the traditional criticism of authoritarian religion and modern criticism, including that of the socialists, which
purported to rest on the discoveries
of science. In his effort to show that liberal philosophy could be adapted to the socio-economic realities of contemporary
society, Renouvier tried to defend liberalism from within the traditions of Western philosophy. But that philosophical inheritance
constantly risked falling into an almost solipsistic individualism. Renouvier thought that while Kant’s categorical imperative
pointed the way out of this risk and towards the effective accommodation of liberty and community, it remained inoperative
in real social life. By linking philosophy to sociological considerations explicitly, Renouvier prepared the way for the rise
of a sociological liberalism. Durkheim would be his truest heir among the sociologists.
Liberalism would perhaps have fared better in the twentieth century if it had taken the lesson of Renouvier’s understanding
of free will more seriously. People will always be free to choose the wrong as well as the right, and because they do not
make those choices in a vacuum but in society, the wrong can always be propagated and society can regress as well as progress.
Philosophy was often criticized for rehashing the same questions over and over again without being able to resolve them. Science
seemed to be providing enduring answers, permanently erasing old errors. It was not surprising that at the turn of the century
many believed that the accomplishments of the natural sciences could be replicated by the social sciences. Yet many efforts
to create a social science were far from liberal – those of Comte and Marx, for example. And, on the liberal side, there were
several divergent paths, drawing on different foundations. One of the more remarkable projects was that of Alfred Espinas,
who drew on the novel science of evolutionary biology.
Biology was the rising science of the nineteenth century and it was natural that many would attempt to build a social science
on its basis. The idea that life was a biological struggle for survival fuelled the rise of Social Darwinism and racism, but
French liberals by and large preferred to look to biology for models of cooperative organization. They were particularly concerned
to repair the widening cleavages in French society – regional, religious, and socio-economic. Because no social unity seemed
possible on religious or metaphysical grounds, the sociologists believed that only a science grounded in social facts could
secure universal assent. Scientific sociology would demonstrate how the rights of the individual and the interests of society
could be reconciled and how class conflict could be
overcome. But first sociology would have to free itself from the authoritarian direction given it by Auguste Comte, who was
generally regarded as the founder of French sociology.
Alfred Espinas (1844–1922) believed that Comte had failed to establish sociology on a scientific basis and turned for his
inspiration to Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary biology. While he rejected Spencer’s extreme individualism, Espinas agreed that
philosophy and sociology had to develop out of biology if they were to become scientific.
12 The principle which bound biology and sociology together was that of evolutionary development: differentiation and organization.
Societies, like other organisms, were products of evolutionary development out of simpler forms. The science of society had
to begin by retracing this development. Espinas set out to do this in his celebrated thesis
Des sociétés animales (1877), in which he argued that all organisms beyond the simplest are really societies, and higher organisms are societies
of societies.
13 An individual of a higher species was really a society of lesser individuals, and the society of higher individuals was itself
an individual.
For Espinas the individual consciousness is a sort of conscience collective, which lacks the absolute unity and distinctiveness attributed to it by philosophy. The defence of liberty could not, therefore,
be based on the concept of the autonomous individual. Strongly contested in its day, this view of the human mind gained considerable
support a century later. His idea that society itself possesses a conscience collective has encountered a more durable resistance because of its elitist assumption that this consciousness was physically resident
in society’s intellectual elite, society’s ‘brain’. Espinas thought this a necessary consequence of evolutionary development,
forgetting perhaps that similar views were to be found as far back as Plato. That modern societies possess a higher degree
of differentiation and a more complex form of organization than their pre decessors was hard to dispute, but the consequences
of this evolution for freedom were less evident and subject to much dispute.
The sociologists, and Espinas prominent among them, rejected the economists’ efforts to reduce the complexity of society to
the concept of the division of labour and to reduce liberty to the liberty of commerce.
That complexity was to be found in the whole mass of mental relations – intellectual, religious, moral, aesthetic – which
humans have with each other. Espinas’s sociology was not designed, like Spencer’s, to give the ruling classes a good conscience
about their privileged position and wealth, but rather to show them that they were not self-created. The benefits of individual
freedom could only be realized and preserved if people recognized that freedom was not inherent in the individual soul. Liberty
was not the source of modern societies, as political philosophers had imagined; it was the product of those societies. Human
society has biological roots, but the evolutionary emergence of consciousness made possible a social order in which biological
determinism gave way to a new form of relationship that we call freedom. This argument is the central contribution of sociology
to the evolution of liberalism, and here, as in other areas, Espinas is seldom given the credit he deserves for showing that
sociology could support liberal politics.
At a time when liberalism was increasingly under attack from many directions – socialism, nationalism, religion, caesarism
– philosophical liberalism no longer provided a credible defence. By giving liberalism a scientific foundation Espinas believed
it might be saved. Yet sociology would begin to find its way forward only when it succeeded in breaking free from its roots
in biology. Human society would then be viewed as sui generis and not to be explained by looking at animal societies.
Rather than abandon philosophy for sociology, Alfred Fouillée (1838–1912) believed that it was possible to extract what was
true from humanity’s whole intellectual past, arguing that humanity is headed towards an era in which the theological, philosophical
and scientific ages would be synthesized.
14 He set out confidently to show that Comte, Darwin, Spencer, Kant and Hegel could be reconciled. The key to his synthesis
was the concept of ‘
idée-force’ which he employed to analyse all the major philosophical questions in the Western tradition. Fouillée believed that all
ideas contain elements of volition and emotion, and are inseparable from action, but
idées-forces are special cases – ideas like beauty, justice, freedom – which drive humans to realize them.
Fouillée separated himself from Renouvier by arguing that it was not necessary to show that freedom is inherent in human nature
and the phenomenal world since the idea of freedom is a sufficient basis for morals. He used the concept of evolution to introduce a teleological element into his
understanding of freedom, but it was a finalism whose origin lay within humanity, not in the subjective consciousness of the
individual, since self-consciousness is inseparable from the consciousness of others like ourselves. The idées-forces of reason and freedom were present in all humans and made truly human society possible.
In defence of his view of a free society, Fouillée carried out a devastating critique of Marxist socialism, unrivalled in
his time and perhaps not surpassed in ours.
15 Historical materialism led to overstating the role of material and unconscious factors in history and provided no means to
measure their true role; class struggle doctrine led to the illusion that changing institutions would transform human beings;
the labour theory of value simply repeated the errors of the liberal economists. Socialist utopianism would thus inevitably
lead to tyranny. Where socialism was closer to the truth than the individualist philosophers of liberalism was in the stress
it laid on the social nature of human beings. But their materialism prevented the socialists from giving an adequate explanation
of this social nature. Importantly, Fouillée believed that the idealism of the philosophical liberals also failed this test.
Fouillée called his own political synthesis a libéralisme réformiste. He believed that it offered a reconciliation of individual freedom and social necessity which rested on a scientific understanding
of human being and society and which at the same time responded most directly to pressing present needs. Reformist liberalism
would rest on the intellectual base of a sociologie réformiste, which was the application to the study of society of his philosophy of idées-forces. The mere fact of social solidarity – stressed by socialists and sociologists – was an inadequate ground for political and
social obligation and indeed dangerous because it undervalued the individual and took a mechanistic view of society. Reformist
liberalism embodied the idée-force of social solidarity more as an aspiration than as a reality; it was an expression of human moral interdependence and could
thus furnish a needed ground of obligation.
Fouillée believed that society transcends the individual and yet is within him. Individual wills do matter, and yet society
is not simply the
aggregate of individual wills as so many philosophers and economists claimed. Society is a sort of ‘
organisme contractuel’. Fouillée’s concept of the ‘quasi-contract’ implied that the individual had obligations to society by virtue of belonging
to it.
16 Social welfare programmes were thus compatible with individual liberty. He also offered a defence of the nation against the
internationalism of both the economic libertarians and the socialists. The national state was not an enemy of liberty; society
is not a zero-sum game in which everything gained by the state is a loss for the individual and vice versa. People are freer
in advanced societies. He offered an updated version of Adam Smith’s view on the proper role of the state: ‘Intervention by
the state is therefore justified in those cases where private initiative and voluntary association show themselves radically
impotent to assure the exercise of individual rights or to perform an indispensable work of social justice and collective
social interest.’
17 This observation is clearly sociological and reflects Fouillée’s conviction that public policy cannot be a simple matter
of deduction from philosophical principles, but has to take into account the actual evolution of society.
One of the problems with philosophical liberalism was that its atomistic individualism was incompatible with its practitioners’
resistance to democracy. While liberals largely agreed on the need for a moral and intellectual elite to guide democratic
government, they struggled to provide a rationale for that elite which would appear acceptable to the majority who did not
belong to it. Though conscious that sociology was a rather young science to be claiming to offer solutions to contemporary
social and political problems, Fouillée believed that it could nonetheless show the direction to follow while counselling
the need for gradual steps and the avoidance of utopian solutions. Like many sociologists he argued that the mode of representation
needed to be modified so that government could be more representative of society. While such remedies were popular in intellectual
circles in France, they never (with the exception of proportional representation) gained much ground in political circles,
which would become increasingly divided between individualist and collectivist parties. Unfortunately for French liberalism,
Fouillée’s synthetic approach would appear too philosophical to the sociologists and too sociological to the philosophers.
The efforts of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) to convert sociology into an academic discipline are well known, but his role in
the rise of a sociologically based new liberalism is less familiar.
18 Durkheim rejected traditionalist conservatism, laissez-faire liberalism, and collectivist socialism, and much of his thought
was occupied with the main problem of the new liberalism: how to combine adequate social integration with individual freedom.
He aimed to produce a science of society which would support liberal values. Like Renouvier, he believed that the new urban,
industrial, democratic and individualist society that was emerging in France needed a new science of morals. Durkheim recognized
the achievements of the philosophers, but found them ineffective in changing human behaviour because they believed in a timeless
and universal moral code. Sociology, he believed, would show that morals are historically variable and must be relevant to
present conditions. He did not think this would lead to moral anarchy, but rather would bind individuals to their society
more effectively than philosophy could.
Comparative sociological study convinced Durkheim that what all moral systems had in common was the obligation they imposed
on the individual to obey rules of conduct whose source transcended her individual interests or will. Morals and religion
both expressed an awareness that there is something that transcends the individual. Science could not banish the importance
of transcendence in people’s lives; it could only lead us to understand that what transcends us, the source of the obligations
that shape our moral lives, is not some God, but society. Sociology was thus the heir of both religion and philosophy, and
could in the future play the role they had played in the past. Sociology would not replace biology and psychology, but neither
could it be derived from them. Like other sociologists, Durkheim saw society as a being sui generis, distinct from the individuals that composed it, but at the same time inseparable from them. Society had to be studied directly,
and the science that did so would be a science of the spirit and not of matter.
The mental relations which bind persons together in modern society were much more complex, indeed of a different kind, than
those of earlier times. Durkheim characterized the solidarity of modern societies as
‘organic’, in contrast to the solidarity of primitive societies, which was ‘mechanical’. It was a solidarity at once more
powerful and more fragile. Societies of organic solidarity were characterized by the growth of individualism which, like all
growing things, could grow normally or hypertrophy. It could become anarchy which would lead to the domination of the strongest
and the end of liberty. The social scientific knowledge of the origins, nature and problems of modern individualism was essential
if the liberty which Durkheim valued highly was to be preserved.
Society was thus for Durkheim both the empirical source and the moral foundation of individual liberty. All attempts to base
a doctrine of liberty on the individual were therefore bound to fail in the future as they had in the past. The liberal tradition
had tended to see the rights of the individual and of society as engaged in a kind a zero-sum game, while at the same time
recognizing the importance of both. This contradiction could only be overcome by recognizing that social solidarity is one
of the prerequisites of individual freedom. The rise of individualism was not caused by the rise of rationalism: rather, they
were parallel growths having the same causes. The increasing variety of human experiences that resulted from the division
of labour made the dictates of the conscience commune less and less imperative; people in ‘organic’ societies had to call on their reason for the guidance that had once come automatically
from the group mind.
The nation loomed larger in sociological liberalism than in philosophical liberalism. Durkheim considered the nation to be
the largest intelligible unit of social organization that had ever emerged, and therefore the main unit of study for sociology.
This continuing importance of the nation was one reason why the new liberalism had to focus its attention on the role of the
state, the only social institution which embraced the entire nation. The main problem of the existing French state in Durkheim’s
view was the lack of intermediate bodies between the state and the individual.
19 While the state had played the key historic role in freeing individuals from the oppressive power of intermediate bodies
like the church and the guilds, it was not an adequate instrument of social solidarity, despite the valuable role of public
education. What were needed were new intermediate bodies adapted to the character of modern society, which Durkheim thought
should take the form of professional and occupational ‘corporations’.
Durkheim was concerned that the evolution of French society had produced a dangerous combination of atomistic individualism
and emotionally charged egalitarianism which could easily lead to a tyranny of the majority. By founding rights in the nature
of the individual, the philosophers had produced a weak defence of individual liberty. Only countervailing social forces could
defend the individual against the state. Much liberal practice in the last half of the twentieth century was based, consciously
or otherwise, on the action of groups standing between the individual and both society and the state, even if this pluralism
emerged in different forms from those Durkheim had envisaged.
20Durkheimian sociology also showed liberals one way that acceptance of the apparent course of history could be combined with
the determination to shape human existence through the pursuit of ideals. Durkheim was far from thinking that what
is is right. He could with consistency describe the growth of the division of labour as a natural, inevitable, and indeed largely
beneficial, social process and at the same time denounce the way that process had been going on in France and in the industrial
West generally, as abnormal, as pathological. The Durkheimian effort to find a scientific bridge between the is and the ought
was given its fullest expression in the work of his collaborator, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), but the whole effort remained
more philosophical than either would have liked.
21Durkheim’s sociology offered democratic liberalism intellectual weapons against those socialists who sought to use the argument
of humans’ interdependence and debt to society as a justification for collectivism. It also offered a defence against those
conservatives who sought to promote the social value of the family over that of the individual, or who insisted on human beings’
need for guidance which transcended rational understanding. It enabled liberalism to separate itself more clearly from the
anarchism which held women and men accountable only to their own desires. And indeed sociology helped defend liberalism against
some of its own internal weaknesses: simplistic rationalism, the tendency to an exaggerated individualism, the neglect of
civic responsibility, a disregard for the fate of the less successful, a naive internationalism, a tendency to find reasons
to be content with the status quo. Most importantly of all, it compelled liberals to take a new look at society and to realize
that as society changed, so must liberalism change.
The liberal implications of Durkheim’s sociology are even more evident in the work of his mildly heterodox disciple Célestin
Bouglé (1870–1940). Bouglé devoted much of his work to demonstrating that a true science of society was not hostile to democracy.
22 He lamented that liberals, like others, readily appealed to science to validate their positions, but lacked a true idea of
science. One important role of education in a democratic society had to be to remedy this ignorance. ‘If you want to judge
whether egalitarian demands are well or ill-founded’, Bouglé argued, ‘the right question to ask is not “do they conform to
the laws of nature?” but “are they in conformity with the ends of society?”’
23 Natural law, whether conceived in traditional philosophical terms or modernized in an effort to explain society on the basis
of physical or biological laws, was not a sound foundation for a liberal-democratic society.
As the most successful activist of the Durkheimians in public affairs, Bouglé demonstrated that the practical implications
of modern sociology do not have to be centralist, elitist and anti-democratic. In adapting Durkheimian sociology to the needs
of public education under the Third Republic, as a professor at the Sorbonne and as director of the École Normale Supérieure,
he made use not only of those elements in sociology that promoted stability in a disturbed society but also those elements
that could help generate aspirations for a better future. He both promoted scholarly research into social questions and addressed
popular audiences on contemporary social and political issues.
Bouglé thought that the greatest threat to liberalism in his day was an attack on freedom of thought from both right and left,
made more dangerous by the inability of liberals to defend it on philosophical grounds. Frightened by the Dreyfus Affair,
the rise of anarchist violence and ultramontane extremism, too many liberals were ready to put new constraints on freedom
of thought. Most liberals had not seen the need to build any constraints on the exercise of liberty into liberalism itself;
unlike conservatives they lacked intellectual arguments against laissez-faire economics, or indeed against anarchism. Traditional
constraints on anti-social behaviour – often religious in origin – were an implicit part of the liberal vision of society,
but not well integrated into their theory. Bouglé
argued that only by recognizing the social foundations of liberalism could they learn how to reinforce the constraints that
were essential to society, while at the same time preserving the liberties proclaimed by philosophical liberalism.
It is to Bouglé’s credit that he was sceptical of some sociologists’ claims that a knowledge of social facts could furnish
a sure guide to social reform. Even so, through the intellectual support that it lent to the Solidarist movement in the early
twentieth century, sociology helped prepare the way for the post-World War II welfare state in France. Finding a way between
the spirit-crushing totalitarian impulse of communism and the equally soulless anarchy of laissez-faire capitalism was no
small contribution to the health of Western societies. Bouglé gave clear expression to a new liberalism which supported both
individual rights and the search for social justice.
24 Of course, sociology, like philosophy, had its inherent weaknesses as a foundation for liberalism. A degree of moral relativism
seems inherent in sociology, and, like the anarchism inherent in the old liberalism, is today no longer held in check as it
was in Bouglé’s day by the moral absolutes of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This was a consequence which Bouglé had not expected,
since he shared Durkheim’s conviction that the ‘unmasking’ character of sociology in relation to morals was not a practical
danger. Still, we are better off with a sociology that does not claim to have final answers to ultimate questions, and which
respects the stubborn intractability of the human condition. Sociological liberalism remains a valuable counter-weight to
the libertarian anarchism derived from philosophical liberalism. By raising a high standard for a science of sociology, it
strengthened liberalism’s defences against all sorts of pseudo-scientific doctrines – like biological racism – which ravaged
the twentieth century.
Liberal political thought whether philosophical or sociological seemed ill equipped to deal with the dogmatic certainties
of its opponents in the period after World War I. The disasters of the war had undermined the pre-war liberal faith in the
nation-state as an agent of progress. And this loss of confidence came at a moment when liberalism was confronted with the
authoritarian nationalism of Fascist Italy, the racial nationalism
of Nazi Germany, and the faux-internationalism of the Soviet Union. Even in its weakened condition, liberalism did help France
steer her own course during the crisis years of the 1920s and 1930s. The influence of the new liberalism shone most clearly
in the ephemeral triumph of the Popular Front.
The collapse of Marxism in both theory and practice after the death of Stalin led to a general collapse of ideologies and
a generally unsuccessful search for a new foundation for politics. It opened the possibility of a revival of politically liberal
thought in France, but also exposed the persistence of those tensions within liberal democracy that had been important in
the early Third Republic. The new politics of the 1960s and 1970s took the paradoxical form of an assertion of individual
rights against society and the state combined with a strong adherence to the benefits of the welfare state. Claude Lefort
has argued that the idea of rights is a necessary barrier against totalitarianism.
25 But Marcel Gauchet demonstrated that this new politics centred on the Rights of Man had the same weakness as the old philosophical
liberalism: exaggerating the individual at the expense of the community.
26 This contradiction remains a permanent feature of liberal democracy.
But what community was sufficiently attractive to counterbalance the appeal of individualism? Sociological liberals before
1914 believed that the nation-state was the community that had fostered individualism, but that smaller communities within
the nation were also necessary for social solidarity. Most philosophical liberals shared this view in practice, but their
belief that freedom stems from human nature rather than from the evolution of society meant that the logical context of individual
freedom is not the nation but humanity as a whole. While nationalism was discredited by two catastrophic wars in thirty years,
a globalization driven by economic rationalism also seemed to be a threat to the individual. Younger generations of French
men and women describe themselves as ‘Europeans’, but the European Union today evokes little loyalty. The conflicts generated
by substantial immigration, especially from non-European countries, has stimulated the widest variety of reactions from the
most extreme individualism to the most reactionary nativism. An effective liberalism would have to realize that for historical
reasons humanity is too diverse
to provide the common beliefs and common aspirations needed by any viable community.
While current French liberals have brilliantly demonstrated the utility of re-examining the Western past, including its great
political thinkers (Pierre Manent) and the deeper underlying trends of its mental evolution (Marcel Gauchet), it seems to
me that a new look at the discussion that went on between philosophical and sociological liberals in the early Third Republic
might still be of some utility in today’s crisis. Historical differences mean that the terms of a renewed discussion are necessarily
different in France and in the United States, but the underlying dilemmas of liberal democracy have much in common. Conservative
columnist David Brooks, writing about evolutionary psychology, unwittingly echoed Renouvier and Durkheim when he wrote: ‘individuals
are not formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the
particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second
by second.’
27 Both Renouvier and Durkheim grappled as mightily as anyone before or since with the paradox that we live in an individualistic
society – one which posits the supreme, indeed sacred, value of each individual – but individuals do not and cannot create
themselves: they are the products of the society into which they are born.
When I was writing
From Philosophy to Sociology in the 1980s, I was still thinking in the context of the conflict between liberalism and Marxism. Now in 2011, the greatest
threat to political liberalism appears to come from extremist economic liberalism, commonly dubbed ‘ultraliberalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’
28 by the French, though it is only a parody of liberalism. What has not changed in the last thirty-odd years is the relevance
of the discussion that went on between philosophy and sociology in late nineteenth-century France. Liberalism was born in
the conviction that women and men could undertake, through reason, the control of their own affairs. Sociology helped to restore
this original impulse by showing that the activities of society, led by, but not absorbed by, the state, could be expanded
without the diminution of individual freedom. Over the past century we have learned that both Marxist collectivism and laissez-faire
economism are simplistic, indeed utopian, efforts to cope with the
problems generated by the rise of modern urbanized, industrialized society. French liberals, both philosophical and sociological,
were committed to the search for a more nuanced understanding – one that would make it possible to uphold an ideal of human
freedom and to deal pragmatically with the problems raised by the effort to create a society that embodied that ideal.