The uses and abuses of ‘secular religion’: Jules Monnerot's path from communism to fascism

From starting his intellectual career as a surrealist, communist and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, Jules Monnerot (1911–95) ended it as a candidate for the Front National in 1989.In this article I offer an explanation for the unexpected trajectory of this thinker whose work is little known in the English-speaking world. Without overlooking the idea that the infamous College encouraged such tendencies, I argue that the notion of ‘secular religion’, as Monnerot developed it in his Sociology of Communism (1949), goes some way to explain his gradual radicalization from Cold Warrior to fascist, a path that otherwise seems unlikely for a French intellectual after World War II. In order to emphasize the unusualness of Monnerot's case, I contrast it with that of his erstwhile collaborator, Georges Bataille. I show that accusations of fascism often levelled against Bataille should be more accurately directed at Monnerot, indeed that the fascism inherent within the College of Sociology was brought out not by Bataille but by Monnerot. Monnerot's case is unsettling first because his definition of ‘secular religion’ contributed to his pro-fascist stance; and second, because it forces us tore think what is meant by ‘philosophy after Auschwitz.’ This term usually brings to mind scholars such as T.W. Adorno, Emil Fackenheimor Emmanuel Levinas. Monnerot provides a rare example of a thinker whose fascism only developed after the Holocaust, a shocking response that demands the attention of all those interested in the relationship between religion and politics.     

‘The Bond of Civility’: Roger Williams on toleration and its limits

In this article, I examine the meaning of the concept of ‘civility’ for Roger Williams and the role it played in his arguments for religious toleration. I place his concern with civility in the broader context of his life and works and show how it differed from the missionary and civilizing efforts of his fellow New English among the American Indians. For Williams, civility represented a standard of inclusion in the civil community that was ‘essentially distinct’ from Christianity, which properly governed membership in the spiritual community of the church. In contrast to recent scholarship that finds in Williams a robust vision of mutual respect and recognition between co-citizens, I argue that civility constituted rather a very low bar of respectful behavior towards others entirely compatible with a lack of respect, disapproval, and even disgust for them and their beliefs. I show further that civility for Williams was consistent with—and partially secured by—a continued commitment on the part of godly citizens to the potential conversion of their neighbors. Williams endorsed this ‘mere’ civility as a necessary and sufficient condition for toleration while also delineating a potentially expansive role for the magistrate in regulating incivility. Contemporary readers of William who conflate civility with other good things, such as mutual respect, recognition, and civic friendship, slide into a position much like that he was trying to refute.     

Missing links: W. V. Quine, the making of ‘Two Dogmas’, and the analytic roots of post-analytic philosophy

This essay argues that post-analytic philosophy finds its origins not only in an invented tradition—that of ‘analytic philosophy’—but also in an invented dilemma: namely, the response to the allegedly overweening dominance of ‘positivism’ in American philosophy. I begin by surveying the problems with the folk wisdom about positivism and analytic philosophy. This pervasive narrative locates the emergence of post-analytic philosophy after a period of hegemony for logical positivism and cognate philosophical subfields. Taking seriously evidence indicating a distinct overlap in the construction of the analytic and post-analytic traditions, I return to the founding moment of American analytic philosophy in the years immediately following World War II. What we see, I suggest, is not a reaction against a clearly defined and powerful logical positivist mainstream, but the careful, piecewise co-ordination of what would become characteristic ‘analytic’ modes of argument, problematics, and tool kits. Willard Van Orman Quine played a central role in this process, and for this reason I focus on the circumstances in which his field-defining 1951 article, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ was written and received. I conclude with the claim that both analytic and post-analytic philosophers relied on a peculiar image of the failure of logical positivism, and of the opportunities that failure presented.     

‘Eternity's commissioner’: Thomas Carlyle,the Great Irish Famine and the geopolitics of travel

In 1846 and again in 1849 the Scottish born historian and social critic, Thomas Carlyle, travelled Ireland accompanied by the Irish nationalist Charles Gavan Duffy. Significantly, these dates profile the beginning and the deadly culmination of the Great Irish Famine. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that Carlyle's published memoirs of his travels and his various pamphlets on Ireland have merited little scholarly attention. As well as addressing this oversight this paper attempts to place Carlyle's travel writing within the ideological contours of the Great Famine and, to this end, I outline a specific example of what I call the ‘geopolitics of travel’. Principally this paper offers an empirical and theoretical analysis of how powerful political rationalities are produced at the ‘contact zone’ of two cultures. I consider Carlyle's shift from being a critic of laissez-faire to being a defender of property and argue that this parallels his propensity to qualify what amounts to human value through environmental and racial readings of the Famine. Finally, I briefly suggest that such calculations take us into the domain of ‘governmentality’ and capitalist political economy, perhaps the two most powerful forces directing the course of the Irish Famine.     

Constantin Frantz and the intellectual history of Bonapartism and Caesarism: a reassessment

The conservative German publicist and political theorist, Constantin Frantz (1817–1891), occupies an ambiguous place in German intellectual history. Some, such as Friedrich Meinecke, located him within the rich intellectual tradition of German federalism, highlighting his hostility to the idea of the “nation-state” and the traditions of nationalism, Realpolitik and militarism. Others, by contrast, have situated him within a long genealogy of German fascism, identifying his remarkable 1852 work, Louis Napoleon, as a kind of precursor or antecedent of twentieth-century fascist ideology. This interpretation raises broader questions about the historiography on Bonapartism and Caesarism, which has often been motivated by an interest in the intellectual origins of modern fascism. The present article supplies a reinterpretation of Frantz’s thinking about Bonapartism (Napoleonismus) and Caesarism by focusing on a much broader range of his intellectual output and by tracking the development of his view of Bonapartism’s significance between 1851 and the early 1870s. The main outcome is not just to question Frantz’s place in the “prehistory” of fascism, but also to show how deeply nineteenth-century debates about Bonapartism were connected to concerns about liberalism, democracy, nationalism and imperialism.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

The general will beyond Rousseau: Sieyès’ theological arguments for the sovereignty of the Revolutionary National Assembly

Cultural history's recent treatments of Sieyès’ political theory have understood his political writings in their convergences with and divergences from Rousseau's political theory. By sketching a thoroughgoing analogy between the ecclesiological arguments in Malebranche's Entretiens sur la Métaphysique et sur la Religion (1688) and the arguments that Sieyès offers on the floor of the National Assembly concerning the nature of representation, I suggest that we should recontextualize Sieyès’ speeches vis-à-vis the broader discourse of the ‘general will,’ which was theological at its root. That is, the arguments Sieyès offers for the sovereignty of the National Assembly, separately and in combination, appear to have been shaped by a malebranchiste ecclesiology that grew out of the particular context of the Jansenist challenge to the Church. This argument has ramifications not just for our understanding of Sieyès and revolutionary political theory but also for what have been called the “religious origins of the French Revolution.”     

Post-Enlightenment sources of political authority: Biblical atheism, political theology and the Schmitt-Strauss exchange

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such.     

Thomas Fitzherbert's reason of state

Thomas Fitzherbert's two-part Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (1606, 1610) was a rebuttal of unidentified Machiavellians, statists or politikes and their politics and policies. The work was apparently still well-regarded in the following century. Fitzherbert's objections to ‘statism’ were principally religious, and he himself thought the providentialist case against it unanswerable. But for those who did not share his convictions, he attempted to undermine Machiavellism on its own ground. Like both ‘Machiavellians’ and their opponents, he argued by inference from historical examples, but with a particularly copious knowledge of historians ancient, medieval and modern to draw on. Equally, however, he deployed the principles of speculative (principally Aristotelian) ‘political science,’ as well as theology and jurisprudence, to demonstrate that the kind of knowledge that Machiavellians required to guarantee the success of their ‘reason of state’ policies was simply unobtainable. A particularly striking strategy (perhaps modelled on that of his mentor and friend Robert Persons) was Fitzherbert's attempt to demonstrate, on the Machiavellians’ own premises, that they advocated policies which were very likely to fail, and would be visited with divine punishments sooner as well as later, whereas policies that were compatible with faith and morals were also much more likely to succeed, even judged in purely human and ‘statist’ terms.     

The institutionalisation of ‘colonial geography’ in France, 1880-1940

Between 1880 and 1900, the conjunction of the development of higher education in France with the renewal of colonial expansion resulted in the creation of the ‘colonial sciences’. ‘Colonial geography’ played a key role in the development of these new disciplines, alongside ‘colonial history’, ‘ethnology’, ‘colonial economics and legislation’ and ‘colonial psychology’. This paper considers the social history of this field and of the institutions in which colonial geography was formed. This involves examination of the study of the teaching of ‘colonial geography’ in the universities and French grandes écoles, the gradual professionalisation of scholarship, and the increase in the number of doctoral theses and book publications, which all serve to demonstrate the vigour of the subdiscipline, leading to the emergence of a veritable research community. Under the Third Republic, ‘colonial geography’ in the universities was characterised by great diversity, irreducible to a single or homogenous ‘colonial discourse’.     

The Enlightenment and the church in the work of Franco Venturi: the fertile legacy of a civil religion

The first part of this essay examines the reasons why the relationship between Enlightenment and religion was central to Franco Venturi's studies on the eighteenth century. In part this came from his own strong secular convictions and from the tradition of secular utopian thought in which Venturi came to intellectual maturity in Turin in the first half of the century, but whose origins lay in the eighteenth century. The essay then explores how these interests guided Venturi's choice to themes and topics, and how his understanding of the relationship changed in the course of his life and writings. The second part of the essay considers Venturi's legacy specifically in relation to this central theme, and discusses the works of subsequent scholars (including the author) whose work has most directly taken up and developed Venturi's own concern to explore the origins of different forms of secular religion in the age of the Enlightenment.     

Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarian political spaces

There is now an emerging body of thought on the dynamics of de-politicization, the ‘disappearance of the political’, the erosion of democracy and of the public sphere, and the contested emergence of a post-political or post-democratic socio-spatial configuration. I situate and explore this alleged ‘post-democratization’ in light of recent post-Althusserian political thought. I proceed in four steps. First, I discuss the contested configurations of this post-politicization and the processes of post-democratization. In a second part, I propose a series of theoretical and political arguments that help frame the evacuation of the properly political from the spaces of post-democratic policy negotiation. This diagnostic is related to a particular interpretation of the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘polic(e)y/‘politics’. In a third part, I argue how emancipatory–democratic politics can be reclaimed around notions of equality, and freedom. In the concluding part, perspectives for re-vitalising the political possibilities of a spatialized emancipatory project are presented. The crux of the argument unfolds the tension between politics, which is always specific, particular, and ‘local’ on the one hand and the universal procedure of the democratic political that operates under the signifiers of equality and freedom on the other.     

What's in a name? Clerical representations of Parisian beguines (1200-1328)

This article examines how Parisian university clerics responded to the city's communities of beguines (uncloistered religious women), highlighting in particular the ways in which clerics employed the term ‘beguine’ in sermons and preaching material from thirteenth-century Paris. Because the beguines were not hidden behind convent walls but were instead a visible presence in the city, they were often the focus of Parisian clerics' ideas about religious women. Sermons preached, composed, and copied in Paris reveal the process by which Parisian medieval thinkers constructed, although not always consciously, a negative meaning for the term ‘beguine.’ Always poorly defined, ‘beguine’ evoked a wide variety of meanings and associations for clerical observers in medieval Paris. The varied ideas about and images of the beguine allowed the Parisian intellectual elite to include these women in discussions of their own position in society as clerics in charge of the religious instruction of the laity. Clerics used the beguine as an example of the contemplative life, often comparing their own intellectual approaches to religious knowledge with the beguines' mystical knowledge. These positive comparisons, however, were joined by negative accusations when clerics expressed concern that the beguine thought too highly of her spiritual gifts.     

The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past.     

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism,anarchism, and the Canadian state

For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.     

Montesquieu's anti-Machiavellian Machiavellianism

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, mentions Niccolò Machiavelli by name in his extant works just a handful of times. That, however, he read him carefully and thoroughly time and again there can be no doubt, and it is also clear that he couches his argument both in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and in his Spirit of Laws as an appropriation and critique of the work of the predecessor whom he termed ‘this great man’. In this paper I explore the manner in which the Frenchman redeployed the arguments advanced by the Florentine for the purpose of refuting the latter's conclusions.     

Crisis in consciousness: The thought of Ernst Troeltsch

This article examines the ‘revolutionary liberal’ outlook expounded by the young Italian journalist and intellectual, Piero Gobetti, immediately following the First World War. It considers the historical evolution of his ‘agonistic’ liberalism according to which conflict rather than consensus serves as the basis of social and political renewal. The article traces the formation of Gobetti's thought from his idealist response to the crisis of the liberal state through to his endorsement of the communist revolutionaries in Turin and his denunciation of fascism as the continuation of Italy's failed tradition of compromise. Whilst Gobetti's views presently resonate with a growing interest in the agonistic dimension of politics, it is argued that his elitism and his understanding of liberalism as a ‘civic religion’ reveal challenging tensions in his thought.