Navigation – Plan du site
La Lettre n° 68 | Échos de la recherche
par Nicola Marcucci

Immanence and social normativity. Spinoza and the invention of sociology in France and Germany, 1871-1918

Nicola Marcucci vient d’obtenir une bourse Marie Curie (nternational Outgoing Fellowship), il passera deux ans à la New School de New York et un an à l'EHESS. Son référent est Bruno Karsenti.

My project will focus on the uses of Spinoza’s thought in French and German sociological literature from the last three decades of the 19th century up to the end of the First World War. It was in these countries and this period that sociology was progressively institutionalized as an academic discipline. Sociology’s claim for institutional and epistemological autonomy provoked an inevitably tension with political philosophy. The quest for a different conception of normativity was at the core of this querelle. In opposition to the classical conception of political normativity, sociologists posited that moral and legal norms were not imposed by legislators or established by philosophers, but should be analysed as the historical effects of the society’s power to self create.

Classical sociologists aimed to describe the inner rationality of moral and legal phenomena. In their view the ‘discovery’ of society allowed them to de-transcendentalize modern science, thus overcoming the centrality of subjective consciousness and escaping the spiritualization of reality imposed by idealism. Society was considered the immanent power constituting the inner rationality of law and morality. In this way, both the autonomy of law (transcendence) and that of moral consciousness (transcendentalism) were denied. Norms were neither instituted by authority nor represented by subjects, but rather constituted by society. Immanence was a universal principle and sociology represented its proper hermeneutic, concretely explaining the diverse forms of normativity (such as those imposed by opinion, legitimized by customs, justified by history or sanctioned by law).

Spinoza was a crucial reference for the early sociologists Tönnies and Worms, Simmel and Tarde and their endeavor to provide a theoretical foundation for the new discipline. Interestingly, however, this reference progressively disappears from the sociological debate from the 1890s onwards, and Spinozism was replaced by normative and Neo-Kantian approaches, as, partially, in Durkheim or definitely in Weber. Only in recent years have attempts been made to revive Spinoza’s social concepts in the realm of the social sciences and of economics. In this project I intend to provide a rigorous historical investigation of Spinoza’s uses in classical sociology, thus offering a new paradigm for the philosophy of social sciences. My project aims to answering two sets of questions: 1. Why were classical sociologists drawing on Spinoza? What theoretical devices did Spinozism provide and how did these conceptual tools match the theoretical and epistemological expectations of classical sociology? 2. How are we to interpret the fact that Spinozism was defeated by Kantianism? How can Spinoza and Kant be considered as supporting alternative conceptions of social normativity shaping the realm of classical sociology and how does this alternative still operate in contemporary debates on the philosophy of social sciences?

Historians of sociology have often promoted: longue durée approaches, to problematize the embeddedness of social concepts in moral and political modernity; or disciplinary approaches more concerned with shorter historical frames and national contexts. The former have largely emphasized the continuity of sociological knowledge within the history of modern moral and political conceptions, while the latter have generally underlined the autonomy of sociological knowledge in relation to prior moral and political conceptions of society. My approach to the history of sociology aims to bring together these two aspects, placing the history of sociology in the longue durée philosophical history of Spinozism and therefore of modern moral and political conceptions, but equally interrogating the peculiarity of the uses of his thought to characterize the sociological debates in France and Germany. Thus my project aims to offer a truly interdisciplinary approach that links the history of Spinozism, the history of sociology, and the theory of social sciences.

I intend to furnish an exhaustive discussion of the historical and intellectual reasons for Spinoza’s centrality. Spinoza’s presence in classical sociology will be historically reconstructed through an analytical survey of the main sociological sources at that time.

My historical hypothesis identifies and distinguishes two distinct periods:

  • A. A first period of reception, in which authors manifested an ambition to justify sociological knowledge by direct reference to philosophical literature. The reference to Spinoza’s philosophy in sociological theory was central at that time, as I will show by analysing classical sociological works in both Germany and in France.
  • B. A second period represented by the consolidation of Durkheimism in France and by the methodological primacy of Weberism in Germany. In this period, sociological epistemology affirmed its autonomy by all kinds of philosophical enquiries, and reference to Spinozism and his radical immanentism became controversial and were even seen as explicitly opposed to the scientific ambitions of the discipline.

Since the first attempts to establish a science of society during the 1870s, sociology’s main goal was to invent a science of moral life. Instead of reducing morality to an epiphenomenon of biological or physical forces, classical sociology aimed to establish its own domain—one that affirmed the autonomy of moral life while refusing the abstractions of moral and juridical philosophy.

Both moral philosophy and legal theory consider the law as a transcendent entity with regard to actual human reality, whereas Spinoza’s immanentism was a powerful theoretical tool to legitimize an autonomous epistemology of moral life based on social regularities rather than moral or legal codes. Spinoza’s interpretation of nature as an immanent power (potentia) expressing the internal rationality of morals and laws was seen as an important example to follow. Immanence represented an opportunity for a scientific theory of society, and Spinoza was largely acknowledged as the first and most consequential philosopher to have defended this concept.

Moreover, Spinoza’s naturalism - as largely shown in the years of his sociological reception - doesn’t deny the autonomous construction of moral and political reality but, unlike Hobbesian nominalism, it doesn’t consider this construction as a top-down process legitimized by the sovereign, positive law or other authority, but instead sees it as a bottom-up natural process. Without attributing immutable qualities to humanity, Spinoza re-naturalizes the realm of sociality. As my research aims to explain analytically, it was exactly this Spinozist separation, of natural constructivism from modern political nominalism that was first used by the new science of society before being partially rejected by Durkheim and definitively by Weber.

In contrast to positivist legal concepts or to Neo-Kantian conceptions of values and morality, Spinoza’s conception of immanence offered a chance to interpret the social as a specific form of normativity, in contrast to a transcendent or transcendental foundation of norms and values. In doing so it also offered a way to explain obligation beyond liberal individualism or positivist reductionism.

The research will concentrate on the period commonly acknowledged as the moment of the rise and affirmation of classical sociology in France and Germany: 1871-1918. It will consider the main authors involved in this debate. The research will be done in a comparative way, analysing German and French sociological literature and putting it in relation to the philosophical debates on Spinozism. Instead of uncritically accepting the widely held idea of an opposition between French positivist legacy and German Geisteswissenschaften, my research will examine their confrontation via their common reference to Spinoza and their shared initial interest in and subsequent refusal of a radical immanentism.