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Le projet
Le projet du LabEx COMOD consiste à analyser – dans un esprit résolument interdisciplinaire et en s’appuyant sur les différentes méthodes de l’histoire des idées – ce que l’on pourrait désigner comme la plateforme civique des démocraties européennes.
PLAQUETTE DU LABEX COMOD
La plupart des idées, des institutions et des pratiques politiques concernant le « vivre ensemble » s’appuient sur un certain type de rationalité à l’œuvre, notamment dans la politique et dans les rapports entre pouvoir et citoyens, Etat et religions, souveraineté et expertise. Cette rationalité, issue en grande partie de ce que l'on a appelé la Révolution scientifique, s’est constituée de façon complexe au cours des derniers siècles. Elle s'est formée depuis l’humanisme, à travers un certain nombre de textes classiques et par la formation d’un consensus autour de quelques principes. Ce consensus a formé une « plateforme civique », sur laquelle nos démocraties européennes se reposent.
Le prix à payer pour ce consensus est une série d’effacements : celui des situations de conflits où sont apparus ces principes, celui des restrictions de leurs champs d’application, celui du rôle des minorités dans leur production. Ces effacements aboutissent à un résultat paradoxal : ce qui paraît le plus évident est en même temps le plus ignoré.
Cette rationalité est actuellement en crise et l’une des conditions de cette crise – ainsi qu’un des obstacles majeurs à sa résolution – est cette opacité. Seul un retour sur son histoire rend possible de comprendre les divers aspects de cette crise.
Le projet du LabEx COMOD consiste à reconstituer la généalogie de cette situation. Il cherche à en décrire à la fois les tournants-clefs et les effacements successifs, qui ont fini par produire une version mythologique de cette histoire, donnant l’illusion d’un développement linéaire d’idées qui seraient aujourd‘hui un bien commun. Cette approche rend possible l'analyse des difficultés actuelles de la plateforme civique commune aux pays européens.
Le projet détaillé - version française
La conception du monde partagée actuellement par les Européens s’appuie sur un certain nombre de notions : liberté individuelle, tolérance, souveraineté de l’Etat, égalité des citoyens, séparation entre politique et religion, conception de la religion comme relevant de la sphère privée, liberté de la recherche scientifique.
Bien que les institutions des différents pays européens soient issues d’histoires différentes, il existe une sorte d’accord général sur ces concepts, dont le flou permet des variations assez larges. Ils forment en quelque sorte ensemble comme une plateforme de rationalité civique, à l’intérieur de laquelle peuvent se définir d’ailleurs des attitudes fort variées et un échantillonnage de positions politiques très diverses – ceux qui avaient paru les contester n’ont souvent fait que réclamer leur plus grande extension ou leur concrétisation. Le paradoxe de ce socle commun est que sa cohérence et sa solidité étaient jusqu’à il y a peu à la fois largement assumées et généralement ininterrogées alors qu’il a été constitué par une histoire extrêmement conflictuelle.
Cette adhésion, plus souvent implicite qu’explicite, se légitimait par ce que l’on pourrait appeler une mythologie historique : celle de la « naissance de la modernité ». Cette mythologie, élaborée pour l’essentiel au XIXe siècle, se fondait sur l’idée d’une histoire linéaire des siècles précédents, marquée par les progrès de l’individualisme, de la démarche scientifique, et de la tolérance, ainsi que par une réduction progressive du rôle des religions. Au fond la modernité se confondait avec la marche irrésistible de la Raison, aussi bien dans les champs religieux et politique que dans le champ scientifique. Même si chacune des sciences humaines était souvent amenée à corriger ce schéma dans son propre domaine, il demeurait le plus souvent à la base de nombreux discours politiques et de représentations idéologiques.
Cette doxa se heurte violemment, depuis quelques décennies, à un certain nombre d’apories : le « retour du religieux » qui met en cause les rapports de l’Etat et des religions, mais aussi la confiance dans la rationalité scientifique; les nouvelles formes de rapports entre Etat et citoyens ; le rôle croissant des experts et simultanément la critique de l’expertise qui renvoient eux aussi à la fois à une transformation de l’exercice de la souveraineté (une part de plus en plus grande du pouvoir confiée à des spécialistes au nom d’une rationalité technique) et à une critique de la raison parfois identifiée à cette rationalité technique. On citera, à titre d’exemples, un certain nombre d’ « affaires » concernant des traditions religieuses et remettant en cause le modèle archétypal des « sociétés modernes » et « nations sécularisées » ; la montée en puissance des sectes et nouveaux mouvements religieux ; l’expansion du créationnisme et de la lecture littérale des textes sacrés ; les critiques de la « société de surveillance », les initiatives dues à la société civile et le « contrôle par en bas » lié à internet et aux réseaux sociaux, avec toutes ses possibilités mais aussi toutes ses dérives.
Autrement dit, la plateforme de rationalité civique commune, à quoi l’on identifiait la modernité, semble se lézarder. Dès lors plusieurs attitudes sont possibles. La première consiste à nier purement et simplement la crise intellectuelle qui se présente et à s’exposer au retour d’une réalité qui ne rentre pas dans ce schéma établi ; une autre consiste à mythifier la cohérence et l’éternité de ce socle contesté (en oubliant par exemple que certaines des « valeurs » qu’il contient sont très récentes et que certaines ne sont même pas encore complètement réalisées), et à en faire une sorte de bouclier opposable en bloc à la fois aux « archaïsmes », aux autres civilisations et à l’ennemi de l’intérieur qui pourrait en contester la légitimité. Dans la forme extrême, on parlera d’un combat de la Raison contre l’irrationalisme ou d’un « choc des civilisations ».
Notre choix consiste au contraire à reprendre l’histoire réelle de ces concepts pour en analyser la véritable genèse historique, les contradictions, les limites ainsi que les conditions de leur positivité effective.
Face à ces constatations, il nous apparaît qu’il faut rompre avec cette mythologie de la « naissance de la modernité » pour effectuer une série d’études qui dégagent les grands axes et les points nodaux de la constitution effective et conflictuelle de cette modernité. Nous ne pensons pas ici aux aspects économiques, sociaux et politiques, qui ne sont pas notre domaine, mais à un niveau qui, bien que lié à ceux-ci, mérite d’être considéré pour lui-même : l’histoire intellectuelle – celle de l’élaboration des doctrines, de leur réception, de leur mise en œuvre. Il s’agit d’interroger ce qui se passe depuis l’humanisme et la Révolution scientifique et qui change l’Occident en trois ou quatre siècles à travers à la fois des auteurs et des courants ou écoles et des institutions. Notre projet articule la recherche sur les grands auteurs et sur le tissu constitué à la fois par les minoritaires et par les pratiques institutionnelles (politiques, religieuses). C’est pourquoi il implique non seulement des études monographiques mais aussi des éditions critiques et des traductions commentées : il s’agit à la fois d’élargir le corpus des œuvres disponibles et d’outiller ce corpus. Notre expérience de l’édition de textes et de la constitution de bases de données doit contribuer à produire un autre regard sur cette histoire.
Nous partons de l’hypothèse que les constituants de ce conglomérat ont été mis en place à chaque fois dans des conditions particulières, autour de textes déterminés (dont la rédaction même est tout sauf transparente) et que seul un processus d’effacement a pu en dissimuler les aspects irréductibles pour les faire apparaître comme autant de jalons sur un chemin unifié. Pour redresser cette erreur d’optique, il faut donc relire les textes autrement, repenser les argumentations, reconstituer les milieux et les contextes. Sinon, on continuera à s’étonner que le Traité de la tolérance de Locke exclue athées et catholiques du bénéfice de celle-ci, ou que de supposés tenants de la laïcité comme Hobbes ou Spinoza réclament pour l’Etat le droit d’excommunication.
Des idées comme celles de liberté ou de tolérance n’ont pas été produites exclusivement par les quelques grands penseurs dont l’histoire a mis les noms en valeur : elles ont été portées par des courants multiples, dont certains clandestins, dont les interprétations étaient divergentes – et ce qu’on en retient finalement est la version qui a triomphé des autres. Il s’agit d’une histoire conflictuelle en deux sens : d’une part la forme rituelle du traité ou du manuel est trompeuse ; ce qui semble se déduire d’axiomes ou de principes universels (et s’en déduit réellement, à un certain niveau) est un instrument et, indissociablement, un produit de combats intellectuels souvent acharnés ; d’autre part, au sein même de ceux qui défendent une certaine conception, plusieurs versions s’affrontent, et le plus souvent l’histoire ultérieure ne retient que celle qui l’a emporté. Clandestins, libertins, hétérodoxes ont leur place dans cette histoire d’idées minoritaires devenues majoritaires, mais qui ont eu un prix à payer pour le devenir.
Ecrire l’histoire de cette constitution, comme nos laboratoires ont commencé à le faire chacun dans son domaine, c’est aussi reconstituer les effacements successifs qui ont donné au socle idéologique de la modernité son aspect illusoirement cohérent et éternel : effacement des conflits entre doctrines par réduction de leurs problématiques spécifiques ; effacement des liens entre situations historiques données et contenus des doctrines ; effacement des extensions difficiles, voire inachevées, qui ont conféré une forme universelle à des principes originairement restrictifs. On en donnera pour exemple la fondation de la souveraineté sur la représentation qui n’a pas toujours impliqué le suffrage universel et la longue restriction de celui-ci au suffrage masculin (l’émancipation des femmes étant d’ailleurs un excellent exemple de signe souvent revendiqué comme marque de distinction entre l’Occident et les autres civilisations, alors qu’elle est récente et loin d’être achevée).
Ce projet s’appuie sur une évaluation des méthodes utilisées jusqu’ici dans l’histoire des idées et, dans une certaine mesure, sur une réflexion sur le statut de cette discipline elle-même.
En effet, l’histoire des idées est longtemps apparue, en France notamment, comme le parent pauvre de plusieurs disciplines plus légitimes, et elle n’a souvent pu se développer que dans les marges de ces disciplines. En philosophie par exemple, elle a été systématiquement marginalisée par rapport à l’analyse des systèmes, qui rejetait dans la « doxographie » tout ce qui ne relevait pas de quelques doctrines centrales fortement charpentées. La seule exception était l’histoire des sciences, qui avait su construire un champ, des méthodes et des paradigmes qui lui assuraient autonomie et reconnaissance. Il a fallu les efforts de quelques chercheurs ces dernières années pour faire perdre à l’histoire des idées son aspect descriptif et cumulatif et aborder le problème de la construction de ses concepts. Les efforts de ces chercheurs ont rencontré ceux de collègues issus de disciplines littéraires ou linguistiques qui cherchaient aussi à mettre au point des méthodes d’analyse rationnelle de l’évolution intellectuelle. Ils ont pu étudier les méthodologies mises au point à l’étranger, comme les théories de la réception ou la recherche des « constellations », converger avec ce que les historiens comprenaient comme « histoire sociale des idées », et élaborer eux-mêmes de nouvelles démarches adaptées à leurs objets.
Parmi les questions essentielles se situe celle du rapport aux textes. Certes, la mythologie de la modernité s’appuie sur des textes : d’une part des textes de « grands auteurs » censés être les fondateurs des idées libérales et républicaines (sans que l’on s’interroge toujours sur leurs contradictions, ni sur le fait que l’on projette sur eux des questionnements actuels qui n’étaient pas nécessairement les leurs), d’autre part des textes institutionnels (codes, constitutions, déclarations). Une telle approche néglige le contexte et les processus de constitution des problématiques, ainsi que la façon dont les individus, gouvernants et gouvernés, s’approprient le contenu des textes. On a alors souvent l’impression que le développement intellectuel se fait de cime en cime, sans l’intervention des multiples réseaux et médiations qui sont ceux de l’histoire réelle.
Notre projet prend appui sur l’expérience de nos laboratoires, à la fois en termes de contenus et de méthodes. Nous avons une expérience dans différents domaines de l’histoire des idées (religieuses, politiques, juridiques, scientifiques et philosophiques) appuyée sur des méthodes telles que la prosopographie, l’histoire des controverses, la technologie des systèmes de pensée, la philologie politique, l’histoire de la réception, l’histoire sociale des idées et la Konstellationsforschung.
Nous avons en particulier appris à analyser les relations entre les grandes pensées théoriques (systèmes philosophiques, doctrines politiques, sommes théologiques) et les courants d’habitude jugés minoritaires, marginaux ou en apparence rétrogrades. Nous avons également appris à articuler l’histoire raisonnée des idées et l’édition des textes, qui en est la condition première.
Bien entendu, l’histoire réelle de la modernité, c’est aussi l’histoire politique, économique et sociale. Mais, comme on l’a dit, ce n’est pas notre objet direct ici : nous travaillons sur la réfraction de ces niveaux dans l’histoire des idées. Ce n’est même pas l’ensemble de l’histoire des idées : c’est seulement – et c’est ce qui le rend gérable – l’étude d’un certain nombre de points nodaux permettant de comprendre les tournants, les contradictions, les réseaux d’élaboration et de diffusion des idées qui ont constitué notre modernité. L’essentiel du projet consistera à étudier la transformation de la politique, de la religion et de leurs relations. Il s’agit au fond d’analyser les nouvelles formes de rationalité – politiques et religieuses. Notre travail ne porte pas immédiatement sur l’histoire des sciences mais plutôt sur leur effet sur religion et politique, et éventuellement sur la façon dont religion et politique les considèrent. Il s’agira aussi de la conception de l’individu qui se transforme dans un tel cadre. Il s’agit d’analyser de nouvelles formes de rationalité et leurs supports tels qu’ils apparaissent dans un certain nombre de crises typiques.
Notre projet présente deux caractères essentiels, qui le distinguent des autres entreprises du même type :
1°) Nous souhaitons ne pas isoler les questions religieuses, qui sont sans doute parmi les plus spectaculaires dans la crise actuelle du dispositif civique, des autres problèmes que nous avons désignés et notamment des conditions politiques de leur émergence.
2°) Outre les aspects politiques et religieux de cette crise, il nous paraît impératif d’interroger en même temps un troisième aspect : la façon dont les hommes construisent des modèles pour penser leur situation, font usage de références, établissent des règles pour déterminer ce qui est valide dans leur conduite et celle des autres – autrement dit les formes de rationalité et de leurs variations historiques.
La représentation usuelle de la modernité pense volontiers celle-ci à partir de l’Etat, de sa puissance et de ses limites, dans un double rapport à sa souveraineté. D’une part, il aurait repoussé et modifié les réquisits des religions, en conduisant celles-ci à une sorte de privatisation – chacun demeurant libre de pratiquer des rites, d’avoir une croyance ou non, ou encore d’en changer, et les Eglises se reconvertissant en guides éthiques ; d’autre part, le même Etat, en supprimant les formes anciennes de communauté, aurait peu à peu transformé les sujets en citoyens et, par sa propre démocratisation, aurait garanti leurs droits, leur aurait reconnu la liberté – et notamment la liberté de conscience –, l’égalité juridique, le droit à la représentation. Il va de soi que ces processus ne sont pas complètement dissociables, puisque les fidèles des Eglises sont aussi les sujets ou les citoyens des Etats – même si d’un côté certaines Eglises s’étendent au-delà des frontières de tel ou tel Etat, et si, d’un autre côté, de plus en plus de citoyens vivent avec un rapport minimal, hostile ou simplement indifférent à la foi des religions.
Dès lors, notre démarche implique plusieurs programmes de travail, regroupés en trois axes. D’autres programmes pourront s’y ajouter par la suite, dans le même esprit : il s’agira toujours de recherches sur ces trois dimensions historiques du socle civique commun pour éclairer leurs difficultés actuelles à la lumière de leur procès de constitution et de ses conflits.
1°) la constitution réelle de la rationalité moderne et ses impensés.
La « Raison » n’est pas une instance immuable : ses formes se construisent dans des pratiques historiquement déterminées, celles des sciences notamment mais aussi celles de la politique, de la religion, etc. – qui apparaissent sous des formes indissociablement théoriques, pratiques, institutionnelles. Une crise politique peut produire des instruments de réflexion aussi bien que l’importation d’un paradigme scientifique – et elle peut conditionner le choix des paradigmes à importer. La raison n’est pas non plus une instance purement individuelle : ses formes s’édifient à travers des réseaux porteurs d’idées, de modèles et de savoirs empiriques. Aussi avons-nous choisi dans un premier temps d’étudier deux types de modèles (le modèle scientifique et ce qu’il diffuse comme idéal de connaissance ; le modèle historique et doctrinal antique dont la réception joue un rôle majeur dans la modernité) ; un moment productif-conceptuel décisif (l’Italie de la période qui suit l’invasion française : la « qualité des temps » forge une inventivité théorique nouvelle) ; enfin une structuration en réseau.
2°) l’Etat et les religions
Les Etats et les sociétés modernes ont mis en place une série de relations complexes avec le domaine religieux, indiqués par des termes comme confessionnalisation, sécularisation, pluralisme religieux, laïcité. Nous avons donc déterminé comme points d’ancrage de notre recherche d’une part ce qui a pu ébranler les marqueurs de validité de la religion (les nouveaux points de vue sur les textes sacrés ; les attaques des libertins et des clandestins – ce qui permet de faire apparaître le rôle des minoritaires dans la promotion des idées) et d’autre part les différentes variations du rapport entre société civile, Etat et diversité religieuse (confessionnalisation, sécularisation, « paix des religions »).
3°) l’Etat et les citoyens
En même temps que les Etats nationaux affirmaient de différentes façons leur autonomie à l’égard des Eglises, ils avaient à redéfinir leurs relations avec leurs propres sujets ou citoyens. Or l’équilibre péniblement obtenu au bout de plusieurs siècles (et dont la généalogie est effacée dans la conscience commune) est remis en question par de nouveaux phénomènes politiques. Nous avons donc choisi d’une part de reprendre sous un autre regard les thèses traditionnelles sur la souveraineté et le pacte social ; d’autre part d’analyser les ébranlements révélateurs de la citoyenneté.
L’ensemble de ces travaux doit fournir les instruments pour une vision plus cohérente et plus efficace des problèmes de la citoyenneté au sens large, dans leur ancrage historique.
Project description - English version
Summary
The Labex project involves analyzing, from a multidisciplinary perspective and using various methods from the history of ideas, what we can call the civic platform of European democracies – its historical roots, its current difficulties and its forms of rationality.
Most ideas, institutions and practices in the sphere of “living together” are indeed based on a certain type of rationality at work, namely in politics and in the relationship between those in power and citizens, the State and religions, sovereignty and expertise. This rationality, to a large extent the result of the Scientific Revolution, has been built up in complex ways over the course of recent centuries, from the times of humanism, namely through a certain number of classic texts and the forming of a consensus around a few principles. The receipt and updating of ancient models, transformations in the reading and use of sacred texts, the pressure of exceptional circumstances such as foreign invasions, civil wars, religious conflicts and the construction of national States also contributed to the building of this civic platform that was nearly unanimously accepted until recent decades.
The price to pay for this consensus was a series of items “erased” from historical memory: the series of conflicts where these principles appeared, the series of restrictions on their fields of application, and that of the role of minorities in their production. These erased events have led to a paradoxical result: what appears to be most evident is at the same time what is most ignored. Most citizens confusedly imagine this shared foundation as timeless, or at best as the result of continuous progress, highlighted by a series of victories over archaism. Ideas such as those of a free conscience, toleration, equality amongst citizens, guaranteed individual rights and sovereignty based on representation of the people seem to go without saying and involve no historical construction.
Yet, this rationality is currently in crisis and one of the conditions of this crisis – and one of the major obstacles to resolving it – is this opacity. Only by looking back on its history can we understand the various aspects of this crisis. Without any such understanding, all sorts of ideologies - either irrationalist or relativist or purely reactional - develop. A historical analysis of this civic framework, of its complex formation and of the aspects that have not been considered can, on the contrary, provide the necessary tools for thinking about the issues involved.
The LabEx project thus involves reconstituting the genealogy of this situation, by describing at once the key turning points of this history and the successive erasures that have made a mythological version of it, giving the illusion of a linear development of ideas that is today believed to be a common good. The importance lies in precisely understanding the current crises of the citizenship model that had heretofore been recognized.
Description of the project
The conception of the world currently shared by Europeans is based on a certain number of notions: individual freedom, tolerance, sovereignty of the State, equality of citizens, separation of politics and religion, the concept of religion as a private affair, and the freedom of scientific research.
Though the institutions of the various European countries are the result of different histories, there is a sort of general consensus in the concepts, whose vagueness allows for rather broad variations. They form a sort of platform of civic rationality within which we can see strong differences in attitude and a highly diverse sampling of political positions – those who had appeared to oppose them were often in fact only asking that they be further extended or made concrete. The paradox of this common foundation is that its consistency and solidity were until very recently widely accepted and generally unquestioned though it had been constituted by an extraordinarily conflict-ridden history.
This support, more often implicit than explicit, was legitimized by what could be called a historical mythology: that of the "birth of modernity". This mythology, developed mainly in the 19th century, was founded upon the idea of a linear history of the previous centuries, highlighted by the progress of individualism, science and tolerance, as well as by the progressively diminishing role of religions. At heart, modernity was mixed up with the unstoppable march of Reason, in the fields of religion, politics and science alike. Although each of the human sciences was often led to correct this schema in its own sphere, it most often remained a cornerstone of many political speeches and ideological representations.
For several decades, this doxa has violently clashed with a certain number of aporia: the "return of religious values", which calls into question the relationship between the State and religions, as well as the trust in scientific rationality; the new forms of relationships between the State and citizens; the growing role of experts and the simultaneous criticism of expertise which themselves also reflect both a transformation in sovereignty (a greater and greater share of power granted to specialists in the name of technical rationality) and a criticism of reason sometimes identified with this technical rationality. Examples include a certain number of "controversies" concerning religious traditions and calling into question the archetypal model of "modern societies" and "secularized nations"; the increasing power of cults and new religious movements; the expansion of creationism and the literal reading of sacred texts; criticisms of the "surveillance society", initiatives due to the civil society and "control from below" linked to Internet and social networks, with all of their possibilities as well as all of their potential dangers.
In other words, the platform of common civic rationality, which enabled us to identify modernity, seems to be cracking. Several attitudes can be adopted. The first involves purely and simply denying the intellectual crisis at hand and being exposed to the return to a reality that no longer fits in with this established schema. Another involves mythologizing the consistency and eternity of the contested foundation (forgetting, for example, that some of the "values" that it contains are very recent and that some have not even been fully achieved yet), and make it into a sort of shield that can be used to protect against "archaism", against other civilizations and against the enemy from within who could oppose its legitimacy. In the extreme form, we can speak of a battle between Reason and irrationalism or a "clash of civilizations".
Our choice, on the contrary, involves looking back at the real history of these concepts in order to analyze the true historical genesis, the contradictions, the limits and the conditions for their effective positivity.
Faced with these observations, it appears that we must break with this mythology of the "birth of modernity" in order to carry out a series of studies that bring to light the major trends and nodal points of the effective, conflicting constitution of this modernity. Here, we are not thinking of the economic, social and political aspects, which are not our field, but rather of a level that, although linked to it, is worthy of considering in itself: intellectual history – that of building doctrines, receiving them and implementing them. This involves asking questions on what has been happening since humanism and the scientific revolution and has changed the West in three or four centuries through authors, currents, schools and institutions. Our project combines research on major authors and on the fabric created by both (political and religious) minorities and institutional practices. For this reason, it involves not only monographic studies but also critical works and commented translations: it involves both enlarging the corpus of works available and marking up this corpus. Our experience in publishing texts and building databases will help us to produce a new perspective on this history.
We start from the hypothesis that the constituents of this conglomerate were always put in place in special conditions, based on determined texts (written in a style that is anything but transparent) and that only a process of erasure has been able to hide the indomitable aspects and make them appear as milestones on a unified path. To correct this vision, we must thus read these texts in a different way, rethink their argumentation, and rebuild the environments and contexts. Otherwise, we will continue to be amazed that Locke's Letter on Toleration excludes atheists and Catholics from its benefits, or that supposed upholders of secularism such as Hobbes or Spinoza demand the right of excommunication for the State.
Ideas such as liberty or toleration were not produced exclusively by the few great thinkers whose names have gone down in history: they were brought about by multiple currents, some of which were clandestine, whose interpretations diverged – and what we remember in the end is the version that won out over the others. It is a conflicting history in two senses. On the one hand, the ritual form of the treatise or manual is misleading; what seems to be deduced from universal axioms or principles (and is truly deduced from them, at a certain level) is an instrument and, at the same time, a product of often fierce intellectual battles. On the other hand, within the very ranks of those who defend a certain conception, several versions come into conflict and most often history only remembers the version that won out. Clandestines, libertines and heterodoxies have their place in this history of ideas held by a minority that came to prevail, but had a price to pay in order to be accepted by the majority.
Writing the history of this constitution, as each of our laboratories has begun to do in its field, also involves reconstituting the successive erasures that gave the ideological foundation of modernity its illusory consistent, eternal appearance: erasing conflicts between doctrines by reducing their specific problems; erasing the links between given historical situations and the content of doctrines; erasing the difficult, or even uncompleted, extensions that gave a universal shape to principals that were originally restrictive. For example, the foundation of sovereignty over representation that did not always involve universal suffrage and the long restriction of it to male suffrage (the emancipation of women was also an excellent example of a sign often claimed to be a sign of distinction between the West and other civilizations, though it is recent and far from being achieved).
This project relies on an evaluation of the methods used so far in the history of ideas and, to a certain extent, in thinking about the status of this discipline itself.
Indeed, the history of ideas has long appeared, namely in France, as the poor relation of several more legitimate disciplines, and it has often managed to develop only at the fringes of these disciplines. In philosophy, for example, it was systematically marginalized compared to systems analysis, which rejected into the "doxography" anything that did not come from several highly structured core doctrines. The only exception was the history of science, which had managed to build a field, methods and paradigms that ensured it autonomy and recognition. In recent years, the efforts of several researchers have been required to help the history of ideas lose its descriptive and cumulative aspect and to address the problem of the construction of its concepts. The efforts of researchers combined with those of colleagues from literary or linguistic disciplines who were also looking to develop rational methods for analyzing intellectual evolution. They were able to study methodologies developed abroad, such as receipt theory or the theory of the search for "constellations", to converge with what historians understood as a "social history of ideas" and to develop their own new processes tailored to their aims.
One of the existential questions concerns the texts. Of course, the mythology of modernity is based on texts: on the one hand the texts of the "great authors" who were supposed to be the founders of liberal and republican ideas (without ever being questioned as to their contradictions, or to the fact that we project onto them contemporary questions that were not necessarily their own) and, on the other hand, institutional texts (codes, constitutions and declarations). Such an approach neglects the context and the processes for building problems, as well as the way that individuals, governing and governed, appropriate the content of the texts. We thus have the impression that intellectual development is accomplished from peak to peak, without the intervention of the many networks and mediators that are part of the real history.
Our project relies on the experience of our laboratories in terms of both content and methods. We have an experience in various fields of the history of ideas (religious, legal, scientific and philosophical) based on methods such as prosopography, the history of controversies, the technology of thought systems, political philology, receipt history, the social history of ideas and Konstellationsforschung.
In particular, we have learned to analyze the relationships between major theoretical ideas (philosophical systems, political doctrines and theological summa) and currents generally deemed to be minor, marginal or retrogressive in appearance. We know that the reasoned history of ideas must be linked with the publishing of texts, which is the primary condition for it.
Of course, the real history of modernity is also political, economic and social history. But, as we have said, that is not our primary aim here: we are working on the refraction of these levels in the history of ideas. It is not even all of the history of ideas: it is only – and this is what makes it manageable - the study of a certain number of nodal points that enable us to understand the turning points, the contradictions, the networks for developing and spreading the ideas that make up our modern world. The project mainly consists of studying the transformation of politics, religion and their relationships. At heart, it involves analyzing new forms of political and religious rationality. Our work does not immediately focus on the history of science but rather on the effect on religion and politics, and perhaps on the way that religion and politics consider them. It also involves the conception of the individual who changes within such a framework. We must analyze new forms of rationality and their various forms of support as they appear in a certain number of typical crises.
Our project has two basic characteristics that distinguish it from similar types of undertakings:
1°) We wish not to isolate religious questions, which are without any doubt amongst the most spectacular in the current crisis of the civic program, from other problems we have designated, namely the political conditions within which they emerged.
2°) Beyond the political and religious aspects of this crisis, it appeared to us imperative to explore a third aspect: the way in which humans build models in order to think about their situation, use references, make rules to determine what is valid in their conduct and that of others – in other words the forms of rationality and their historical variations.
The usual representation of modernity gladly considers it as starting from the State, its power and its limits, in a dual relationship with its sovereignty. On the one hand, it is believed to have fought off and modified the requisites of religions, leading them to a sort of privatization – each remaining free to practice rites, to believe or not, or even to change, with the Churches converting into ethical guides. On the other hand, the same State, by eliminating the older forms of community, is thought to have gradually transformed subjects into citizens and, by its own democratization, guaranteed their rights and recognized their freedom - and namely the freedom of conscience - legal equality and the right to representation. It goes without saying that these processes are not completely separable, as the faithful of the Churches are all subjects or citizens of the State – even if on the one hand some Churches extend beyond the borders of a given State, and if, on the other hand, more and more citizens have a minimal, hostile or simply indifferent relationship with religious faith.
In light of this, our approach involves several work programs, brought together in three core areas. Other programs may be added at a later time, in the same philosophy: the research will always involve these three historical dimensions of the common civic foundation in order to shed light on their current difficulties in view of their process of constitution and its conflicts.
1) The real constitution of modern rationality and its previously unconsidered aspects.
“Reason” is not unchanging: its forms are built in historically determined practices, those of the sciences as well as of politics, religion, etc. – which appear in inseparably theoretical, practical and institutional forms. A political crisis can create instruments for thinking as well as lead to the importing of a scientific paradigm – and it can condition the choice of the paradigms to be imported. Nor is Reason is purely individual: its forms are built through networks that bring ideas, models and empirical knowledge. Thus, we have chosen to first study two types of models (the scientific model and what it spreads as an ideal of knowledge; and the historical and ancient doctrinal model whose receipt is playing a major role in modernity); a decisive productive-conceptual moment (Italy during the period following the French invasion: the “quality of time” forges a new theoretical inventiveness); and finally, organization in a network.
2) The State and religions
States and modern societies set up a series of complex relationships with the religious world, indicated by terms such as confessionalization, secularization and religious pluralism. We have thus chosen as the key points of our research that which undermined religion’s markers of validity (the new points of view on the sacred texts; the attacks by libertines and clandestines – which helped bring to light the role of minorities in promoting ideas) and the diverse variations in the relationship between civil society, the State, and religious diversity (confessionalization, secularization and the “peace of religions”).
3) The State and citizens
At the same time as national States stated their autonomy from the Churches in various ways, they had to redefine their relationships with their own subjects or citizens. Yet, the balance obtained with great difficulty after several centuries (and whose genealogy has been erased from the popular conscience) is being called into question by new political phenomena. We have thus tried to take a new look at the traditional theses on sovereignty and the social pact and to analyze the revealing ways in which citizenship was undermined.
All of these projects will provide the tools for a more consistent, more effective vision of problems of citizenship in the broad sense, in their historical roots.
The Labex project involves analyzing, from a multidisciplinary perspective and using various methods from the history of ideas, what we can call the civic platform of European democracies – its historical roots, its current difficulties and its forms of rationality.
Most ideas, institutions and practices in the sphere of “living together” are indeed based on a certain type of rationality at work, namely in politics and in the relationship between those in power and citizens, the State and religions, sovereignty and expertise. This rationality, to a large extent the result of the Scientific Revolution, has been built up in complex ways over the course of recent centuries, from the times of humanism, namely through a certain number of classic texts and the forming of a consensus around a few principles. The receipt and updating of ancient models, transformations in the reading and use of sacred texts, the pressure of exceptional circumstances such as foreign invasions, civil wars, religious conflicts and the construction of national States also contributed to the building of this civic platform that was nearly unanimously accepted until recent decades.
The price to pay for this consensus was a series of items “erased” from historical memory: the series of conflicts where these principles appeared, the series of restrictions on their fields of application, and that of the role of minorities in their production. These erased events have led to a paradoxical result: what appears to be most evident is at the same time what is most ignored. Most citizens confusedly imagine this shared foundation as timeless, or at best as the result of continuous progress, highlighted by a series of victories over archaism. Ideas such as those of a free conscience, toleration, equality amongst citizens, guaranteed individual rights and sovereignty based on representation of the people seem to go without saying and involve no historical construction.
Yet, this rationality is currently in crisis and one of the conditions of this crisis – and one of the major obstacles to resolving it – is this opacity. Only by looking back on its history can we understand the various aspects of this crisis. Without any such understanding, all sorts of ideologies - either irrationalist or relativist or purely reactional - develop. A historical analysis of this civic framework, of its complex formation and of the aspects that have not been considered can, on the contrary, provide the necessary tools for thinking about the issues involved.
The LabEx project thus involves reconstituting the genealogy of this situation, by describing at once the key turning points of this history and the successive erasures that have made a mythological version of it, giving the illusion of a linear development of ideas that is today believed to be a common good. The importance lies in precisely understanding the current crises of the citizenship model that had heretofore been recognized.
Description of the project
The conception of the world currently shared by Europeans is based on a certain number of notions: individual freedom, tolerance, sovereignty of the State, equality of citizens, separation of politics and religion, the concept of religion as a private affair, and the freedom of scientific research.
Though the institutions of the various European countries are the result of different histories, there is a sort of general consensus in the concepts, whose vagueness allows for rather broad variations. They form a sort of platform of civic rationality within which we can see strong differences in attitude and a highly diverse sampling of political positions – those who had appeared to oppose them were often in fact only asking that they be further extended or made concrete. The paradox of this common foundation is that its consistency and solidity were until very recently widely accepted and generally unquestioned though it had been constituted by an extraordinarily conflict-ridden history.
This support, more often implicit than explicit, was legitimized by what could be called a historical mythology: that of the "birth of modernity". This mythology, developed mainly in the 19th century, was founded upon the idea of a linear history of the previous centuries, highlighted by the progress of individualism, science and tolerance, as well as by the progressively diminishing role of religions. At heart, modernity was mixed up with the unstoppable march of Reason, in the fields of religion, politics and science alike. Although each of the human sciences was often led to correct this schema in its own sphere, it most often remained a cornerstone of many political speeches and ideological representations.
For several decades, this doxa has violently clashed with a certain number of aporia: the "return of religious values", which calls into question the relationship between the State and religions, as well as the trust in scientific rationality; the new forms of relationships between the State and citizens; the growing role of experts and the simultaneous criticism of expertise which themselves also reflect both a transformation in sovereignty (a greater and greater share of power granted to specialists in the name of technical rationality) and a criticism of reason sometimes identified with this technical rationality. Examples include a certain number of "controversies" concerning religious traditions and calling into question the archetypal model of "modern societies" and "secularized nations"; the increasing power of cults and new religious movements; the expansion of creationism and the literal reading of sacred texts; criticisms of the "surveillance society", initiatives due to the civil society and "control from below" linked to Internet and social networks, with all of their possibilities as well as all of their potential dangers.
In other words, the platform of common civic rationality, which enabled us to identify modernity, seems to be cracking. Several attitudes can be adopted. The first involves purely and simply denying the intellectual crisis at hand and being exposed to the return to a reality that no longer fits in with this established schema. Another involves mythologizing the consistency and eternity of the contested foundation (forgetting, for example, that some of the "values" that it contains are very recent and that some have not even been fully achieved yet), and make it into a sort of shield that can be used to protect against "archaism", against other civilizations and against the enemy from within who could oppose its legitimacy. In the extreme form, we can speak of a battle between Reason and irrationalism or a "clash of civilizations".
Our choice, on the contrary, involves looking back at the real history of these concepts in order to analyze the true historical genesis, the contradictions, the limits and the conditions for their effective positivity.
Faced with these observations, it appears that we must break with this mythology of the "birth of modernity" in order to carry out a series of studies that bring to light the major trends and nodal points of the effective, conflicting constitution of this modernity. Here, we are not thinking of the economic, social and political aspects, which are not our field, but rather of a level that, although linked to it, is worthy of considering in itself: intellectual history – that of building doctrines, receiving them and implementing them. This involves asking questions on what has been happening since humanism and the scientific revolution and has changed the West in three or four centuries through authors, currents, schools and institutions. Our project combines research on major authors and on the fabric created by both (political and religious) minorities and institutional practices. For this reason, it involves not only monographic studies but also critical works and commented translations: it involves both enlarging the corpus of works available and marking up this corpus. Our experience in publishing texts and building databases will help us to produce a new perspective on this history.
We start from the hypothesis that the constituents of this conglomerate were always put in place in special conditions, based on determined texts (written in a style that is anything but transparent) and that only a process of erasure has been able to hide the indomitable aspects and make them appear as milestones on a unified path. To correct this vision, we must thus read these texts in a different way, rethink their argumentation, and rebuild the environments and contexts. Otherwise, we will continue to be amazed that Locke's Letter on Toleration excludes atheists and Catholics from its benefits, or that supposed upholders of secularism such as Hobbes or Spinoza demand the right of excommunication for the State.
Ideas such as liberty or toleration were not produced exclusively by the few great thinkers whose names have gone down in history: they were brought about by multiple currents, some of which were clandestine, whose interpretations diverged – and what we remember in the end is the version that won out over the others. It is a conflicting history in two senses. On the one hand, the ritual form of the treatise or manual is misleading; what seems to be deduced from universal axioms or principles (and is truly deduced from them, at a certain level) is an instrument and, at the same time, a product of often fierce intellectual battles. On the other hand, within the very ranks of those who defend a certain conception, several versions come into conflict and most often history only remembers the version that won out. Clandestines, libertines and heterodoxies have their place in this history of ideas held by a minority that came to prevail, but had a price to pay in order to be accepted by the majority.
Writing the history of this constitution, as each of our laboratories has begun to do in its field, also involves reconstituting the successive erasures that gave the ideological foundation of modernity its illusory consistent, eternal appearance: erasing conflicts between doctrines by reducing their specific problems; erasing the links between given historical situations and the content of doctrines; erasing the difficult, or even uncompleted, extensions that gave a universal shape to principals that were originally restrictive. For example, the foundation of sovereignty over representation that did not always involve universal suffrage and the long restriction of it to male suffrage (the emancipation of women was also an excellent example of a sign often claimed to be a sign of distinction between the West and other civilizations, though it is recent and far from being achieved).
This project relies on an evaluation of the methods used so far in the history of ideas and, to a certain extent, in thinking about the status of this discipline itself.
Indeed, the history of ideas has long appeared, namely in France, as the poor relation of several more legitimate disciplines, and it has often managed to develop only at the fringes of these disciplines. In philosophy, for example, it was systematically marginalized compared to systems analysis, which rejected into the "doxography" anything that did not come from several highly structured core doctrines. The only exception was the history of science, which had managed to build a field, methods and paradigms that ensured it autonomy and recognition. In recent years, the efforts of several researchers have been required to help the history of ideas lose its descriptive and cumulative aspect and to address the problem of the construction of its concepts. The efforts of researchers combined with those of colleagues from literary or linguistic disciplines who were also looking to develop rational methods for analyzing intellectual evolution. They were able to study methodologies developed abroad, such as receipt theory or the theory of the search for "constellations", to converge with what historians understood as a "social history of ideas" and to develop their own new processes tailored to their aims.
One of the existential questions concerns the texts. Of course, the mythology of modernity is based on texts: on the one hand the texts of the "great authors" who were supposed to be the founders of liberal and republican ideas (without ever being questioned as to their contradictions, or to the fact that we project onto them contemporary questions that were not necessarily their own) and, on the other hand, institutional texts (codes, constitutions and declarations). Such an approach neglects the context and the processes for building problems, as well as the way that individuals, governing and governed, appropriate the content of the texts. We thus have the impression that intellectual development is accomplished from peak to peak, without the intervention of the many networks and mediators that are part of the real history.
Our project relies on the experience of our laboratories in terms of both content and methods. We have an experience in various fields of the history of ideas (religious, legal, scientific and philosophical) based on methods such as prosopography, the history of controversies, the technology of thought systems, political philology, receipt history, the social history of ideas and Konstellationsforschung.
In particular, we have learned to analyze the relationships between major theoretical ideas (philosophical systems, political doctrines and theological summa) and currents generally deemed to be minor, marginal or retrogressive in appearance. We know that the reasoned history of ideas must be linked with the publishing of texts, which is the primary condition for it.
Of course, the real history of modernity is also political, economic and social history. But, as we have said, that is not our primary aim here: we are working on the refraction of these levels in the history of ideas. It is not even all of the history of ideas: it is only – and this is what makes it manageable - the study of a certain number of nodal points that enable us to understand the turning points, the contradictions, the networks for developing and spreading the ideas that make up our modern world. The project mainly consists of studying the transformation of politics, religion and their relationships. At heart, it involves analyzing new forms of political and religious rationality. Our work does not immediately focus on the history of science but rather on the effect on religion and politics, and perhaps on the way that religion and politics consider them. It also involves the conception of the individual who changes within such a framework. We must analyze new forms of rationality and their various forms of support as they appear in a certain number of typical crises.
Our project has two basic characteristics that distinguish it from similar types of undertakings:
1°) We wish not to isolate religious questions, which are without any doubt amongst the most spectacular in the current crisis of the civic program, from other problems we have designated, namely the political conditions within which they emerged.
2°) Beyond the political and religious aspects of this crisis, it appeared to us imperative to explore a third aspect: the way in which humans build models in order to think about their situation, use references, make rules to determine what is valid in their conduct and that of others – in other words the forms of rationality and their historical variations.
The usual representation of modernity gladly considers it as starting from the State, its power and its limits, in a dual relationship with its sovereignty. On the one hand, it is believed to have fought off and modified the requisites of religions, leading them to a sort of privatization – each remaining free to practice rites, to believe or not, or even to change, with the Churches converting into ethical guides. On the other hand, the same State, by eliminating the older forms of community, is thought to have gradually transformed subjects into citizens and, by its own democratization, guaranteed their rights and recognized their freedom - and namely the freedom of conscience - legal equality and the right to representation. It goes without saying that these processes are not completely separable, as the faithful of the Churches are all subjects or citizens of the State – even if on the one hand some Churches extend beyond the borders of a given State, and if, on the other hand, more and more citizens have a minimal, hostile or simply indifferent relationship with religious faith.
In light of this, our approach involves several work programs, brought together in three core areas. Other programs may be added at a later time, in the same philosophy: the research will always involve these three historical dimensions of the common civic foundation in order to shed light on their current difficulties in view of their process of constitution and its conflicts.
1) The real constitution of modern rationality and its previously unconsidered aspects.
“Reason” is not unchanging: its forms are built in historically determined practices, those of the sciences as well as of politics, religion, etc. – which appear in inseparably theoretical, practical and institutional forms. A political crisis can create instruments for thinking as well as lead to the importing of a scientific paradigm – and it can condition the choice of the paradigms to be imported. Nor is Reason is purely individual: its forms are built through networks that bring ideas, models and empirical knowledge. Thus, we have chosen to first study two types of models (the scientific model and what it spreads as an ideal of knowledge; and the historical and ancient doctrinal model whose receipt is playing a major role in modernity); a decisive productive-conceptual moment (Italy during the period following the French invasion: the “quality of time” forges a new theoretical inventiveness); and finally, organization in a network.
2) The State and religions
States and modern societies set up a series of complex relationships with the religious world, indicated by terms such as confessionalization, secularization and religious pluralism. We have thus chosen as the key points of our research that which undermined religion’s markers of validity (the new points of view on the sacred texts; the attacks by libertines and clandestines – which helped bring to light the role of minorities in promoting ideas) and the diverse variations in the relationship between civil society, the State, and religious diversity (confessionalization, secularization and the “peace of religions”).
3) The State and citizens
At the same time as national States stated their autonomy from the Churches in various ways, they had to redefine their relationships with their own subjects or citizens. Yet, the balance obtained with great difficulty after several centuries (and whose genealogy has been erased from the popular conscience) is being called into question by new political phenomena. We have thus tried to take a new look at the traditional theses on sovereignty and the social pact and to analyze the revealing ways in which citizenship was undermined.
All of these projects will provide the tools for a more consistent, more effective vision of problems of citizenship in the broad sense, in their historical roots.