"It is not the case," Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, "that men first stopped believing in God and in the authority of the Church, and then subsequently started behaving differently. It seems clear that men first of all lost any overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together, and so ceased to be able to make sense of any claims to moral authority."1 Religious faith and moral order thrive, MacIntyre tells us, on robust social bonds. This insight rests upon an implicit premise: to believe in religion-"in God and in the authority of the Church"-is to believe in society-that is, an "overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together." Though MacIntyre states this claim with particular succinctness, he is far from alone in making it. His fellow communitarians, who value religion for fostering social cohesion, frequently endorse normative versions of this argument, while sociologists of religion have employed it to explain, for instance, the impact of social differentiation on religious belief. Yet this assimilation of religion with its social function belongs to a much longer intellectual tradition-one in which the history of modern France has played a leading part. During the revolutionary decade that closed the eighteenth century, theocrats such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald excoriated the Jacobins' brazen anticlericalism, ridiculing the blindness with which they felled the pillar of faith upon which the social edifice rests. That conservatives daunted by revolution's satanic specter would insist that society-that is to say, their society, the estate-based order of the ancien regime-could not survive an assault on religion-in other words, their religion, Roman Catholicism-is understandable. The eagerness with which certain republicans and socialists, their most obdurate ideological opponents, emphasized the intimate bond between religion and the social order is, however, more puzzling.2 Yet in the 183Os, one finds, for example, Pierre Leroux, a philosopher of impeccable republican pedigree, lamenting, in terms that echo Maclntyre's, that "religious atheism has brought about social atheism."3 Over the course of the long nineteenth century, the Catholic republican Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez, the philosopher and moralist JeanMarie Guyau, and Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology, made similar pronouncements. While generally sympathetic towards republican institutions, these thinkers nonetheless occupied a distinct ideological space on the French left, defined by the conviction that republicanism required a far denser conception of society than that which could be elicited from the social contract or individual rights alone. Leroux and Buchez, for example, unrelentingly proselytized for the idea of "association," while Guyau and Durkheim concurred in placing solidarity at the heart of their understanding of the social order. The belief that republicanism was in need of a sociological correction thus defines the identity of these thinkers as much as their efforts to persuade mainstream republicans to give religion a second look.4 Viewed together, their arguments reveal an alternative religious tradition within French republicanism, distinct from the anticlericalism embraced by many of their contemporaries, one deeply concerned with religion's modern fate-provided, however, that religion was grasped as a primordially social phenomenon.Why were these social republicans so eager to conflate "society" and "association" with "religion" ? These concepts, I argue, provided a vocabulary for conceptualizing the nature of social cohesion in a post-revolutionary world. In the social imaginary of the old regime, religion had been harnessed to the concepts of order and corps, a connection that underpinned its vision of society as an organism formed by unequal yet complementary estates. This organicism invoked the traditional Christian belief that Christ, in addition to a physical body, possessed a mystical body, a corpus mysticum constituted by the Catholic Church. …

The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope

The mystical body of society: religion and association in nineteenth-century French political thought.

It is as true of the human sciences as of the sciences of nature that, by and large, only the most recent formulations of their overriding principles are deemed worthy of scientific scrutiny. The rudiments of physical anthropology and then biology and linguistics around the end of the eighteenth century, followed by sociology and social statistics in the early nineteenth century, and economics and political science in the early twentieth century, were characteristically sketched by pioneers whose fresh perspectives were in each case designed to free themselves of the excess baggage of their precursors. In virtually all disciplines, each major step is portrayed as if it were a new beginning, marking a conceptual revolution which relegates antecedent approaches to the defunct realm of the history of ideas.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity

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Capitalism, politics, and railroads in Prussia, 1830-1870

Throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century, French urban workers developed literacy practices—specific acts of writing and reading—that encouraged socially-oriented forms of self-reflection. By examining the letter writing, reading, and circulation practices and the autobiographical writing practices of several distinctly different groups of French urban workers, this essay presents a comparative analysis of forms and practices of writing and reading most often associated with the personal realm. In these literacy practices, French workers cultivated forms of socially-mediated reflection in which acts of self-disclosure and claims of authority were directly tied to their relations with others and their identifications with particular groups—such as their families, friends, and their fellow workers. The ways that literacy developed such complex, heterogeneous selves for French urban workers in the nineteenth century ultimately challenge the argument that links literacy, and writing in particular, to the formation of an individualist self, as part of the social transformations that lead to the formation of modern society in France.

Writing Modern Selves: Literacy and the French Working Class in the Early Nineteenth Century

At their inception, in the wake of the French Revolution, the social sciences entered into a problematical relationship with the past and with the challenge of representing historical knowledge.’ To some extent unresolved, those difficulties remain relevant to the goals and procedures of social scientific disciplines even today.’ Obviously, such ’sciences’ were proposed in Enlightenment and developed in post-Revolutionary France in order to enhance the understanding of society (Head, 1982; Moravia, 1980). But several scholars have convincingly argued that the early sciences of society were also means for containing the cataclysmic changes brought about by the Revolution (Wallerstein, 1991:126, 129). According to Philip Abrams:

The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope

Citations

The mystical body of society: religion and association in nineteenth-century French political thought.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity

Capitalism, politics, and railroads in Prussia, 1830-1870

Writing Modern Selves: Literacy and the French Working Class in the Early Nineteenth Century

The historical imaginary of social science in post-Revolutionary France: Bonald, Saint-Simon, Comte: