1 Sciences Reduced to Their Object?
In order to understand fully the rich structuring of Education and training sciences (ETS), let us proceed here with an international comparison. In France, from the outside, they are sometimes confused with pedagogy. The success of well-known figures such as Philippe Meirieu has undoubtedly contributed to this image. On other occasions, ETS have been associated almost exclusively with teacher training or even disciplinary didactics, because of the strong presence of this sub-field in the French teacher training colleges. However, these shortcuts are reductive, for the structuring of ETS is much richer, in that it is based on more numerous disciplines, including sociology, psychology, history, economics and philosophy.
In Great Britain, education sciences have made a major institutional contribution to teacher training for professionalisation purposes. In Germany, an academic trend towards the development of didactics, in a different sense from the French one, has remained strongly linked to the teaching of hermeneutic, speculative philosophy, leaving little room for social sciences (Malet, 2021). The French ETS are more integrative. They do include didactics, which find their main institutional raison d’être in the preparation of teacher entrance examinations (didactics of mathematics, history, physics, etc.), however the choice was made to found, from 1967, full-fledged departments of educational sciences, strongly associated with the development of other human and social sciences.
This contributes to the strength of ETS in France, which are not reducible to their professionalising mission, but also generate an identity problem: what distinguishes them from their contributory disciplines, except their object (which they do not monopolise) and their propensity for interdisciplinarity (that they are not the only ones to develop)? The answers to these questions are variable, but they take into account three needs: institutionalising ETS, defending them against criticism, and giving them their own identity through epistemological reflection. This last mission is less successful, because it is the most difficult. Indeed
(Fabre & Lang, 2021, p. 36)
Can we define a science by an object as vague as that of education? […] It is the same with education as it is with language. […] Linguistics can only be constituted as an object of science by taking – on a set of phenomena – a given point of view (for example, that of the structure) – and by giving oneself a particular method (for example, the structural method).
However, ETS do not have such a “particular method” or specific perspective outside of what the contributing disciplines can provide. Admittedly, original studies exist, as Claude Lessard points out by taking socio-didactic works as an example: “among others, Bautier and Rayou’s research on learning inequalities and school misunderstandings is a fine example of a successful amalgam between sociology, didactics and teaching analysis” (Lessard, 2019, p. 204). Nevertheless, the author emphasises that this type of work remains infrequent, with most researches remaining attached to one or more disciplines, without systematically leading to an articulation that would sign, in a way, the trademark of ETS. This is not a problem in itself, but opens up a question that needs to be taken seriously, in order to extract its potential.
2 A Field Reduced to Its Contributory Disciplines?
Let us mention in this regard a neighbouring discipline, also constituted by its object: political science. Is its originality institutional, epistemological, or both? Its prestigious character (grandes écoles, etc.) makes it less vulnerable than ETS to accusations of not being a full-fledged science, endowed with its own epistemology. However, political science has also been ferociously criticised by some. Pierre Bourdieu considered it as an “official science”, unable therefore to claim scientificity: “far from contributing to the objective science of the ‘political’ universe, it works on its own legitimation by taking over the division of the pre-constructed object” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 87). In addition to its own definition, political science, just like ETS, benefited from a favourable institutional situation, illustrated by its state support in France in the second half of the 20th century. In this capacity, it has been used to train senior civil servants, just like ETS have contributed to the training of teachers and educational executives.
The parallel is therefore striking between ETS and political science. The two disciplines (or sets of disciplines) are clearly distinguished, externally, from those that come from a founding epistemological gesture, inseparable from
The Durkheimian Takeover under Debate
To the extent that this work claims a Durkheimian approach in ETS, let us illustrate some ambiguities of the French founder of sociology. They are numerous but the most debated and, therefore, the most salient undoubtedly concern Suicide, published in 1897. In an answer entitled Suicides, published in 1975 with a preface by Raymond Aron, the sociologist Jean Baechler accused Durkheim of meaning that it is not individuals who commit suicide, but society that commits suicide through certain members. Charles-Henry Cuin admits that some of Durkheim’s sentences are, at the very least, unfortunate, for example when he assimilated suicide currents to “electric currents” to legitimise their reality on the model of natural sciences (Cuin, 2018). However, Philippe Besnard replied to Baechler that suicide motifs are statistical regularities that can be explained without taking into account the intimate psychological motives of individuals.
The content of the dispute is that through this particular object of study, Durkheim wanted to go further by defining social facts as things, with their own existence, independent from its individual manifestations and exerting a constraint on the individual. This collectivist motif, deployed on several fronts without the necessary distinctions always being established (for example, why would constraint be the ultimate indicator of the existence of a social fact?), polarised the discussions and controversies that have structured French sociology from an epistemological point of view. They are also linked to Durkheim’s difficulty in separating his roles as a sociologist, a citizen, a public intellectual and a teacher trainer. That being said, these tensions have also provided demarcations for social sciences, as disciplines where moral, political and scientific concerns constantly intersect (Déloye, 2018).
rewarding professional field(s) that, though it is scientifically substantiated, still runs the risk of becoming ancillary with expertise, advice and training activities that can take the lead over activities of documentary research, empirical investigation and theorisation.
(Albero & Barthes, 2022, p. 236)
This book is based on the conviction that ETS can accompany the transformation of the educational action (praxeological dimension of ETS), driven by a political concern, not in the sense of an opinion but of a political philosophy. In order to do this, it is necessary to come back to sociology and reflect on it as a science that has precisely bared, since its inception, a concern of this order: that of providing individuals with the conditions of their autonomy. We just have to evoke how Durkheim envisaged organic solidarity, both as an explanatory principle and as a principle of individuation that, according to him, risked being hindered by unwanted forms of division of labour, anomic and constrained, in modern societies. This political concern to promote the autonomy of individuals could appear, at first glance, as an objective that is less scientific than marked by Durkheimian positivism (optimistic or even naive). Yet even a quick glance over the history of social sciences is enough to realise that this political concern is also present, in other forms, in Bourdieu’s work destined to unveil mechanisms of domination, or in Boltanski and Thévenot’s work, who in On Justification admit their liberal pluralism.
Ultimately, the question will not be so much whether ETS, because of their purpose or institutional configuration, have more or less of a political purpose than other areas; but rather to grasp how they contribute to this common movement within human and social sciences, although they focus on a particular object. Because, having “for a long time appealed to interdisciplinarity and to the indexing of research in human and social sciences on professional contexts and fields”, ETS “foreshadow in some respects the future of disciplinary worlds, in a stronger relationship with each other, less marked by an ideal of fencing them off” (Malet, 2021, p. 86). Thus, ETS have the means to contribute, with their own resources but in a shared academic environment, to sociology and philosophy, among others.
3
The intention here is to approach ETS from two disciplines simultaneously, whilst also questioning how they are approached. This re-evaluation of reciprocal positions has been underway for a long time. Among the quantity of existing studies, three paths can be highlighted:
- –Philosophers seeking to clarify the insights of classical sociologists (Descombes 2000; Gilbert, 2013; Pettit, 2014);
- –Sociologists renewing their theoretical equipment by directly and explicitly using philosophy (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, 2022; Lemieux, 2012);
- –Sociologists seeking, in a more epistemological perspective, to better define their discipline’s place in relation to philosophy, by taking into account their respective evolutions (Kaufmann, 2011; Callegaro & Giry, 2020).
This leads to three general questions:
Are the conceptual resources provided by classical sociologists sufficient to think of major social phenomena such as beliefs, collective entities, domination, nation, state, citizenship?
If sociological approaches engage disputed questions (social ontology, relationship to politics), does that imply that they might benefit from being put into perspective via an external philosophical view?
What legitimacy does sociological work have, which commonly claims an epistemological rupture, even though the discipline was constituted, throughout the 20th century, in close relationship with the ideals – liberal, Marxian, socialist1 – of modernisation of society?
3.1 Comparative Education and Modernisation of Society
And in comparative education, the same questions arise, such as the relationship to politics: “The project of founding a comparative science of education, from the very beginning of the field of study, can only be understood by putting into perspective the philosophical and political modernity program” (Malet, 2005, p. 169).
Comparative education indeed includes a program, accompanied by Durkheim among others, loaded with the belief in a correlation between scientific progress and social progress. In the second half of the 20th century, this made room for a pragmatic project oriented towards an ideal of pacifying international relations, so that one can identify, according to Malet, a comparative tradition in education that takes the political form of reformist liberalism. More recently, a critical approach has emerged: sometimes with postcolonial
The complexities of comparative education, therefore, cannot be severed from central currents of sociology: first marked by a scientist ideal, quite visible in Durkheim’s work;2 then depending on a state request, more pragmatic when it came to democratising and modernising institutions, through studies on access rates to different levels of education, on school effect, etc. In short, ETS are an integral part of human and social sciences because they face the same types of questions and the same challenges. Embedded in social affairs, more or less dependent on a political power, they are conducted to develop a policy, as is the case in sociology. Their political aspect is more or less strong, depending on the objects investigated and the methods used; it is also more or less explicit, depending on the researches’ level of reflexivity. However, ETS are an institutional anchor from which one can question, in a privileged way because it is external (therefore autonomous), the relations between sociology and philosophy.
On questions of citizenship, the explicit articulation between (normative) political philosophy and (descriptive) sociology ensures the avoidance of too many prescriptive considerations. Indeed political philosophy is not intended to be immediately prescriptive: it proposes a reflection on norms, their coherence, their assumptions, making it possible to explain criteria of thought that everyone can then accept or refuse, having a better understanding of them. In this spirit, a critical republican point of view is taken in this book, a ‘preference’ prone to being considered and exceeded, in the service of a research posture that is as clear and explicit as possible. Thus, it is necessary to involve the work of philosophers who have been trying, for decades, to demonstrate the conceptual and empirical coherence of critical republicanism: Philip Pettit, Cécile Laborde, among others.
3.2 Clarifying the Registers of Discourses in the Social Sciences
In short, if the norms forming the framework of this book are just considered norms among others in pluralistic societies, their coherence must however be identified. This is a way of seeking a solution to the problem raised by Pierre Demeulenaere, according to which sociological works, although often rigorous in the treatment of data, remain little formalised in the articulation and
We can consider that the task of social sciences is descriptive, explanatory and normative. The description merely describes what is, the explanation tries to account for why that is, and finally normative positions assess what exists and propose action plans. Admittedly, this third task is fundamentally problematic (yet not necessarily unacceptable) from the point of view of a scientific undertaking, we will not come back to it here. Suffice it to say that, in fact, most prestigious or modest social scientists do not hesitate to take all kinds of normative positions within the frame of their scientific work. A systematic reflection on the epistemological bases of this attitude remains to be undertaken.
(Demeulenaere, 2012, p. 75)
In this context, one path consists in using Max Weber’s advice, who invited researchers to explain their relationship to values, on which is based the choice of objects treated. For example, when one tries to study the link between ‘freedom’ and ‘the French Revolution’, it is because the question concerns one as a researcher belonging to a given society, at a given time where and when the value of political liberalism is posed, contested, debated. The question remains of whether this is sufficient to provide an analysis that is free of value judgments, which according to Weber must be ‘suspended’ by researchers. Yet this depends on the subject matter: it is easier to suspend judgment about a work of art, as Nathalie Heinich (2012) did by mobilising the sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot, than about the principle of non-discrimination for instance.
In other words, to decree the researcher’s axiological neutrality is all the more difficult since the values at stake (on citizenship, secularism, non-discrimination, freedom of conscience) are also actual legal and regulatory practices; while aesthetic values, for example, are not standardised in legal terms – at least in liberal countries – beyond state support for one artistic trend, considered more legitimate than another, or beyond landscape preservation regulation. Essentially, it is impossible to eliminate the axiological content of certain scientific categories, because “the mere fact of comparing, in a purely factual way, the functioning of a political regime to its displayed ideals is a value judgment” (Pranchère, 2021, p. 761).
In fact, it sometimes happens that the axiological framework underlying researches is implicitly conveyed through supposedly comparative analyses, presented as only descriptive. This is not a problem in itself, but it is worth explaining this axiological framework. Thus, we find anthropologists
Max Weber gives us a hard time when he considers that “the recognition of empirical facts” and the “evaluative position of the scientist who exercises a judgment on facts” are “two sets of simply heterogeneous problems” that must “absolutely” be distinguished. This is why another, more pragmatic, of his advices to scholars, will retain our attention here: “to bring scrupulously […] to their own conscience and to that of the readers, what the standards of value are that are used to measure reality and those from which [scholars] derive their value judgment” (Weber, 1965, pp. 133, 416). Weber illustrated his epistemological position by commenting on the recruitment of an anarchist as an academic in a law school. Far from being an obstacle, the anarchist’s relation to values provides a distance from the law, allowing for better scrutiny of its arbitrary character. Hence, there lies a potential gain of knowledge, compared to other perspectives oriented by different relations to values … as long as the anarchist manages not to impose his values in the analysis. The challenge in this book will be not to impose3 a close relationship to republican values in the analysis.
4 Why Religion?
As has been said, circumscribing republicanism, as a rethought version of political liberalism, requires taking stock of religion and secularism. It is necessary here to clearly explain the incompatibility of the republican approach with several syntheses on European secularism, in particular that of Jean-Paul Willaime (2015), which is nevertheless authoritative. Indeed, it seems wrong to say, as Willaime does, that Europe, especially in its relations with public schools, is ‘secular’. There is no sufficiently broad meaning of this word to make it correspond to different empirical realities, unless the term is diluted to such
In fact, the thesis of a European secularism is plausible if we select liberal and secularised countries, but is much less so if we seriously consider EU member countries such as Ireland, Poland, Greece, or even Italy and Germany. It is therefore worth shifting our focus, including towards the countries of Eastern Europe, insufficiently taken into account. This requires an enlightenment via political philosophy, because the hypothesis of a European secularism as a vague “secularism of recognition” – or even a “secularism of recognition and dialogue” as Willaime also defines it – becomes an opportunity for some sociologists to question the French secular model, considered too strict, in order to make way for a flexible model, legitimised today, among others, by the figure of Jürgen Habermas after his theological turning point. Of course, the French model of secularism is questionable and it will be criticised in this book. But that is not to say that the theological entryism favoured by certain intellectuals from Debray to Habermas to Willaime, should be a basis for this criticism. For as Pettit, Joppke and Laborde have underlined it, secular liberalism is universalisable.
5 Symmetrising Religions
In France, strongly marked by jihadist attacks, the question of secularism oscillates between conservative exploitation on the one hand, secularism being perceived as a bulwark against radicalism, and, on the other hand, dilution of religious radicalism under the pretext of highlighting other parameters, such as social deprivation. This second posture describes the ‘nothing-to-seeism’ (rien-à-voirisme), according to Jean Birnbaum’s expression (2016), of some academics and politicians (including President Hollande) claiming that the jihadist attacks on European soil had nothing to do with religion, but that they were due to psychopaths, barbarians, victims of the economic crisis, the internet, etc. Thus, on January 11, 2015, after the triple attack in Montrouge, Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher kosher supermarket siege, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said, “I said in the clearest possible way – and we can never repeat it enough – that this has nothing to do with Islam; Islam is used as a pretext by these cheap heroes”.4
5.1
This desire is commendable, consisting in not playing into the hands of right-wing extremists who, on the contrary, overexploit the link between these events and Islam for the purpose of stigmatising an entire population. On the other hand, how can we ignore the ideology guiding these acts, echoing the increasingly strict legislation of certain Muslim countries on blasphemy and the idea of an Umma as a political community beyond states? Violent extremism is unfortunately the current disease of Islam, writes John Tolan, and there is no other way out than to face it. Saying and repeating that Islam is fundamentally a ‘religion of peace’ which has nothing to do with religious fanaticism is not a solution. Nonetheless, let us say that “If we are to face the disease, we must also recognise the vital forces within Islam that are struggling to remedy it” (Tolan, 2022, p. 302). The recent knife attack in 2022 against Salman Rushdie and the reactions (scandalised or approving) of the various states to this event recall the reality of the doctrinal stakes, in Iran as in the Sunni world.
For if secular liberalism has a meaning, it is to be able to consider all religions equally. Let us therefore return, by broadening our perspective, to this eminently political idea that actions carried out in the name of a religion nevertheless have nothing to do with it. Can we say today that the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion in the United States, in 2022, has ‘nothing to do’ with Catholic and evangelical Christianity? That authoritarian nationalisms raging in Central and Eastern Europe have nothing to do with Christianity, especially Catholic and Orthodox? Let us recall in this regard the reaction of Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov to the worldwide commented beheading of Samuel Paty. Keen to avoid upsetting ‘orthodox religious sentiments’, he declared: “It is unacceptable to insult the feelings of believers, and it is unacceptable to kill people. Both are absolutely unacceptable” (The Moscow Times, 2020). The assumed equivalence between a decapitation and a drawing has a religious meaning. Indeed, the Russian fundamentalist orthodox are allied in the ‘fight against blasphemy’ with the most radical Muslims, and the Kremlin underlines that a newspaper like Charlie Hebdo could not exist in Russia as a nation whose ‘fundamental religion’ is Christianity.
Certainly, many jihadist attacks require, on the part of the ones who commit the murderous act, a strong exculturation, to refer to the famous analysis of the Holy ignorance offered by Olivier Roy. In this strict sense, we are faced with a standardised religion, portable, that can be rapidly mobilised and allows quick conversions in very different places. In other words, a religion so exculturated that it has little in common with what we call or would like to call ‘religion’. We can even go further in this direction, by considering that the Islamic State is a pure mafia, the religious device being intended only to camouflage the
5.2 Islamophobia and Christophobia
Beyond the question of terrorist attacks, and returning to the more ‘daily’ functioning of the courts in connection with the more or less liberal European laws, the recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Rabczewska v. Poland, in September 2022, is particularly interesting in terms of symmetrising religions. The ruling condemns the Polish state’s decision to punish a singer who claimed in a major newspaper that the Bible was written by a guy drunk on wine and smoking some kind of weed (jakiś napruty winem i palący jakieś zioła). But Austria was not convicted, in E.S. v. Austria, for punishing a woman who claimed, in a political reflection seminar, that Mohammed had practices that could be described as paedophile because, according to the hadits, his favorite wife was very young.
Although this differential between Christianity and Islam can be explained by the different contexts of enunciation (Christian majority in Poland, Muslim minority in Austria), a European judge, by virtue of his dissenting opinion, openly lamented that Europe was unjust because it would protect Islam from denigrating religious doctrines, but not Christianity, which he said should also be treated favourably (in the name of fairness …). The judge’s arguments are fragile overall: they do not hide his ideological preference for Christianity. Nonetheless, he does identify important points. Is a newspaper with a large circulation (Rabczewska v. Poland) not more ‘public’ and more likely to have an impact on consciences than a political reflection seminar (E.S. v. Austria), which few people attended?
If violence in the name of a religion – whether physical or more symbolic in the form of intimidation and illiberal laws – often has something to do with that religion, it is simply because religion does not exist outside of what humans and human groups do. This is what makes symmetrising interesting: if people describe a drawing from Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo as ‘Islamophobic’ – knowing that this word often includes an accusation of immorality or even of a criminal offence – then it is enlightening to compare this accusation with that of ‘Christophobia’ in Poland. It is formulated by intellectuals and political leaders about relatively similar images, though the contexts and the characters drawn differ: Mohammed, Jesus, Mary. We can, then, grasp the limits of certain anthropological theories that focus almost exclusively on Islam in favour of postcolonial perspectives, and do not see the (illiberal) conservative exploitations of the theme of ‘wounded religious sensibilities’, a new line of attack by
6 Political Liberalism and Critical Republicanism
Yet is it possible to consider religions as equal under a common criterion (liberal principles), while taking into account their differences? Some argue that liberalism is a ‘western’ invention, more adapted to Christianity than to other religions such as Islam (Asad, Brown, Butler, & Mahmood, 2013). However, authors who present themselves as ‘liberals’ discuss this judgment, such as Christian Joppke (2017), Cécile Laborde (2017), Andrew March (2019) and Aziz Al-Azmeh (2020). According to these authors, liberalism (and its republican variant) is susceptible of being adopted everywhere, provided it is sufficiently adapted by taking into account the contemporary mutations of religious expressions, ideals of individual autonomy, market processes, national attachments and international relations. It is a broad program, and the hope here is to at least clarify its issues.
Therefore, the question of religions, already crucial for John Rawls and Philip Pettit, cannot be avoided here. Indeed, if the Republic, a Durkheimian and Pettitian ideal, carries today the principle of secularism, which includes the right of freedom of conscience that itself took shape on a historical religious ground, then a question to ask is to what extent this or that form of secularism is in affinity with certain religions and not others. This is a question asked by anthropologists Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, accompanied by Wendy Brown and Judith Butler (Asad, Brown, Butler, & Mahmood, 2013). Yet, these very influential authors tend to confuse social sciences and political theory.
Certainly, Asad and Mahmood shed light on empirical data and this is crucial for any reflection on republicanism and more generally political liberalism. Why do Muslims feel hurt by drawings from Jyllands-Posten or Charlie Hebdo? Among other things because they have a mimetic faith, consisting in holding their prophet Mohamed for a companion and a model of daily life. Comparing with wounded Polish Catholic sensibilities, this model of mimetic faith is illuminating: just as Muslims feel they are Mohamed’s companions, so
Nonetheless, in terms of political theory, the post-colonial anthropology of Islam, that of Asad and Mahmood, is eminently questionable. Firstly, these authors do not take into account the political shaping of what is named in France the ‘case of the caricatures’ (l’affaire des caricatures) via embassies and international relays. Secondly, they confuse history and political theory. The fact that religions are not in affinity with European legislation on freedoms of conscience and of expression does not mean that we should adapt this legislation or the supposedly ‘Judeo-Christian culture’ that supports it. For if this were the case, it would be necessary to consider that the wounded Polish Catholic sensibilities, which function in a similar way to those of the Muslims highlighted by Asad and Mahmood, should also be considered. Do we truly want to associate ourselves with the denunciation of Western liberalism by the far right parties of Central Europe, who do so by using arguments similar to those that Asad and Mahmood invite us to take into account?
That being said, we must reflect on our use of the word ‘religion’ because of the rather particular history of freedom of conscience, as an essential element of political liberalism. Cécile Laborde’s strategy of disintegration holds our attention here. It consists in taking note of the fact that religion should not enjoy a particular status in liberal societies: it should not benefit from privileges, but neither should it suffer from contempt. In this vision, it is not necessary for example that State and Church be separated, if the latter is not a source of division, is not accessible to reason, and not all-encompassing.
This strategy is secular and republican. Admittedly, it leads to a criticism of the prohibition in France of ostensibly wearing religious symbols in public schools. Nevertheless, Laborde recognises that the hijab, for example, is very often an instrument of domination of men over women. Because, on a more general level, this disintegration is methodological, for the purposes of legal judgments (and not ontological). Laborde, unlike the anthropologist Daniel Dubuisson for example, is against the argument of giving up the word ‘religion’, which though it is not easily definable, is nevertheless identifiable. The theory of disintegration is set out below because it allows us to draw a parallel with social sciences, which also tend to reduce religion to its particular components even when they call themselves holists. Durkheim thus considered that religion is the expression of social forces: in short, the believer feels a collective moral pressure that exceeds him. We see here how much sociological holism joins the neo-republican political philosophy.
6.1
The hybrid approach of Laborde and Joppke, in the sense that they are both liberal but refer to the republicanism of Philip Pettit, invites us to recall an important point: the boundaries between liberalism and republicanism are not watertight, including in France. Apart from its conservative manifestations (Dominique Schnapper, Pierre-André Taguieff), republicanism can be understood as a particular version of political liberalism (Spitz, 2005), and more broadly as a path among others to analyse negative freedom according to Isaiah Berlin: freedom from rather than freedom to.
While Berlin favoured freedom from interference, the Republican Philip Pettit, wary of the neo-liberal consequences of this type of definition, conceptualises the freedom not to be dominated, which is still a negative freedom. In this sense, the Pettitian approach is very different from the (French) communitarian versions of republicanism that value the ‘community of citizens’ as a positive freedom, by confusing it with a non-reflective culture of secularism.5
That being said, Pettitian republicanism is not fully liberal. Indeed, if we were to make a distinction between republicanism and liberalism, by typifying positions, we would say that liberals think that the antonym of freedom is interference, whereas critical republicans believe that the appropriate term is domination. However, this precisely only works if one typifies these positions. By softening the perspective, we note with Kymlicka that a ‘liberal’ such as Rawls considered the conditions necessary for self-respect as a ‘primary good’; that is to say the conditions that provide a person with the firm conviction that their conception of property, their life project deserves to be implemented (Kymlicka, 1995).
The question therefore is about the conditions of non-domination, or even of recognition: every person needs other people and institutions to recognise that his or her life project deserves to be executed. For this reason, Pettit would say that this person must not be dominated; in other words, no arbitrary interference can be exercised, even in the future, on the formation of his or her life plans.
It remains to be seen whether certain life projects, though chosen with full knowledge of the facts and providing a sense of personal fullness, do not deserve to be executed as much as others. To what extent should the life project of a prestigious Harvard mathematician who decides to count all the blades of grass on an island for the rest of her life – instead of putting her talents to the benefit of the community – be seen as a primary good? Rawls offered this example, and it was widely discussed. Kitcher, for example, thinks that the grass counter’s way of life is not an authentic primary good, because she does not direct it towards the community.
Essentially, liberalism and critical republicanism come together in their criticism of positive freedom, which Isaiah Berlin was already dismissing as the freedom of the Ancients, in his influential Two Concepts of Liberty of 1958. On the contrary, the promotion of positive freedom is clear today in authors as different as
- –political scientist Tariq Modood, promoting the recognition of religion by the state to better integrate Muslims;
- –the jurist Joseph Weiler, defending the presence of crucifixes in public schools on the grounds that secularity is a political position that divides society and manifests itself, in particular, by class walls free of religious signs;
- –the sociologist John Holmwood, criticising the very principle of a teaching about religions that would put too much distance between the complete religious personality of children (whole selves) for the benefit of a secular majority that is not respectful enough, according to him, towards minority ethnic identities (Urbanski, 2022b).
But the promotion of positive freedom is not necessarily religious. So-called republican thinking, in its secular version that, for instance, orders the prohibition of the wearing of ostensible religious symbols by parents accompanying school trips, also consists in promoting a positive (state) freedom, requiring these people prove their adherence to republican culture before they can contribute to public affairs (res publica). Thus, political liberalism’s criteria do not apply to a particular religion or ideology. And this is crucial: liberal principles have certainly found a particularly successful elaboration in European and North American law, but they are nonetheless appropriable by everyone.
6.2 Universalisable Principles
To say otherwise would be perilous. Indeed, this would amount to attributing to the inhabitants of a particular cultural area the responsibility of political principles. This is difficult, since the place of incubation of the latter in a given space does not change the fact that each one of us is “no more or less than an heir likely to join or reject them” regardless of geographical location (Avon,
The goal, of course, is not to minimise the geopolitical stakes that play a part in the more or less assured acceptance, depending on the regions of the world, of the principles of political liberalism. As Dominique Avon explains in his book La liberté de conscience (The liberty of conscience) published in 2020, the history of this idea and this right, diversely accepted among religions and different cultural areas, does not prevent us from grasping the power games between states, or the unequal economic flows. Nor is it a question of reducing the elements of social criticism, available outside religion, which foster a sense of illegitimacy of liberal nations: criticism of the responsibility of European states in the war in Palestine, Libya or Yemen; questioning of the link between the Gulf monarchies and the Western empire led by the United States.
Finally, when public school and citizenship education are at stake, conceptual antinomies between republicanism and liberalism fade somewhat. Indeed, though republican thinking is originally centred on the state, whereas liberalism is centred on the individual, the question becomes more complicated as soon as the state carries an educational mission: links appear between the liberal aim, which seeks to “place the lives of persons as much as possible in the private domain, to protect them from public interference”, and the democratic aim that “concerns the public character of individuals […] and finds a strong expression in its desire for citizens to identify with the political community” (Levinson, 2002, p. 107). That is why school Republican secularism has a very special status:
If a secular regime of civic and inclusive equality presupposes a collective practice of public reason, this practice itself presupposes, to be effective, an education that trains individuals to its epistemic challenges. […] Here we find the reversal of the primacy of liberalism in the primacy of democracy: the liberal ideal introduced to the democratic ideal as to its logical consequence – but it turns out that democracy, or more precisely democratic socialisation, is itself the condition of existence of a liberal society.
(Pranchère, 2023, p. 139)
The boundaries between liberalism and republicanism (but also socialism, as we will see) are therefore real but not watertight (Laden, 2006). By
On migration, Islam, populism and activism, French academics too often rely on feelings, thus feeding the less rational political horizons […]. Multiculturalist slogans, memorial claims of all sorts, the feeling that France’s Muslims are persecuted: these phenomena cannot be associated in any way with the terrorist threat. The rejection of clericalism, which seeks to win back secularised Muslims, the rejection of competing memories, and the criticism of identitarism imposed on individuals: so many political positions present among democrats of all stripes and which do not fall under the ‘lepenisation’ of minds. […] We do not expect academics to let loose, but on the contrary to behave. Those who sneer at the appeal to decency today should nonetheless understand that it is a protection against an ultra populism that bides its time without saying a word. […] Let us not offer it fuel.
(Schaub, 2021, pp. 20–21)
7 Disaggregating Religion
Accordingly, when it comes to studying the specificity of phenomena commonly grouped under the label ‘religion’ which are of great importance to the liberal political tradition, the methodological challenge is to develop tools that allow one to not depend on a vague notion, rooted in a specific culture and developed by people (often in a position of religious authority) who have a vested interest in the existence of this category (Dubuisson, 2019). In order to do this, one must enter the field of law and political theory, which, in a liberal and/or republican regime, usually approach ‘religion’ through the use of non-religious categories (e.g., conceptions of the good life).
European law preferably captures religion through the notion of individual consciousness. From a strictly anthropological point of view, this posture could be seen as influenced by Christianity (Dumont, 1991), and one for which Islam, for example, would not be prepared because of a cultural distance (Asad, Brown, Butler, & Mahmood, 2013). Yet if we leave anthropology and enter the sphere of law, the following clarification is necessary:
The preference for a view of religious freedom that favours individual choice in matters of religion over more communal ideas of religion is the inevitable result of the fact that the European Convention on Human
(McCrea, 2018, p. 152)Rights is a text committed to the protection of liberal values and that signatory states are committed to being liberal societies that value liberal principles.
The point is not to play liberal principles against religious currents that value orthopraxia, and are therefore less accustomed to the more Christian centrality of notions of conscience and individual choices. Rather, it is a matter of prioritising stakes, by taking into account the constraints of any large-scale society, such as those European nations that signed the European Convention on Human Rights.
7.1 Genealogism, Community, Society
It is indeed at the junction between sociology, law, and political theory that the modalities of constitution and maintenance of groups are played out. For here, we are faced, as we said in the general introduction, with a problematic that is both ontological and political: if law informs modern ideology, sociology is a product of it. More precisely, it is the place of a nagging distinction between community and society, on two levels.
On a political level, community is often brandished by conservatives such as Romantic counter-revolutionaries, who see it as the remedy against the truly liberal disconnect. It is also claimed by nationalists such as French political parties invoking the homeland, who seek to counter neo-liberal deliberation and its new society, too anonymous and made of superficial links, guided only by an instrumental interest (Karsenti & Lemieux, 2017). Ontologically, the distinction between community and society is expressed a little differently. The societal bond is a posteriori: it unites beings only superficially and to the extent of their will; while the community bond is a priori: it does not belong to the will of its members, and it immerses them in a totality that shapes them through and through (Kaufmann, 2011).
The question then is what the respective places of community and society in modern times might be. In connection with the above, the following question must be asked: if the nation-states adhering to the European Convention on Human Rights thereby value a Christian conception of religion, is this a community sign that requires equalising the conditions of secular liberalism as other communities (in the sense of non-Christians) take up more and more space in Europe? This is what Asad, Brown, Butler and Mahmood (2013) suggest, insofar as they attribute the whole strength of their explanatory model to the genealogy of the notion and the right of freedom of conscience: this genealogy, according to them, is Protestant, meaning Western secularism would essentially be Protestant (they sometimes say: Judeo-Christian). The problem
If one follows Durkheim, there is a logic that is proper to social forms: community is possible – and desirable – only in “small groups”, in which “we can know each other intimately”. As social aggregates become larger, society weighs less heavily on the individual who finds himself naturally ‘emancipated’: social integration is no longer based on ‘status’ or function, but on a ‘contract’. The union and confusion of consciences, so “clumped that none can move independently from the others”, make way for the contractual rationalisation of conducts and for the division of labour, both being synonymous not of similarity, but of complementarity. […] The tension between the sociological perspective on the difference between ‘society’ and ‘community’ favoured by Durkheim and the subjective perspective proposed by Weber is entirely relevant here. If, as Weber suggests, subjective postures are not determined by social forms, however, they are more or less adjusted to their morphology or geometry. To extend, through the category-based imagination, the topology of the circle specific to reciprocal links and mutual obligations onto the large floating society of anonymous transgresses the law of quantitative determination of a group. In doing so, it exposes itself to real errors of category, but also of geometry.
(Kaufmann, 2023, pp. 72, 76)
This is where the social bond, of a community type, necessarily gives way to regulation and law. Not because of any arbitrary prevalence of the state, but simply because in a large society, one cannot have a communal experience with all its members: this type of experience must give way to category-based projections, on the model of the famous imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that are nations. Certainly, the latter are still likely to descend into artificialism. Nonetheless, this is not a sufficient reason to reduce society’s order, to that of the community: as Durkheim showed, modern societies evolve in their morphology and physiology far beyond the simple cultural genealogy staged by Asad, Brown, Butler and Mahmood (2013).
Therefore, it is by entering the sphere of political theory and of law as an impersonal third party, that the genealogical consequences of the postcolonial anthropology of Asad and Mahmood can be overcome. To do this, Cécile Laborde’s proposal, consisting in disaggregating religion in relation to actual legal practices in different countries, seems fundamental. In order to assess the
Of course all liberals, including liberal-communitarians like Charles Taylor, want to approach religion from secular categories. Thus, the latter wants to see religion as a conviction, sometimes so strong that it requires reasonable accommodations (such as allowing the wearing of the kirpan, a sacred Sikh knife allowed in Canadian schools), just as a secular conviction could legitimately require accommodation (for example pacifism, which is incompatible with military service). Nonetheless, by taking into account the strength of beliefs, Taylor gives less consideration to ritual collective practices, for example.
Instead of the strength of beliefs, Laborde prefers to consider the way in which religion has emerged in a particular society. This way, one does not need to wonder whether it is important for Muslims to go to the mosque; it is enough to note that in European societies, the majority religion has taken a prominent place in the form of holidays dedicated to the practice of Mass (on Sundays); therefore, it is fair to take into account the ritual practice of going to the mosque on Fridays, although the (historically Christian) calendar is not calibrated for this. Accommodation in the workplace must also be taken into account: not so much because of a strength of beliefs (a field that political liberalism is not well equipped to judge), but because of a historical differential between majority and minority religions.
By not specifying a particular dimension of religion, but rather leaving three possibilities open (conceptions of the good life, epistemic propositions, collective identities), Laborde’s republicanism does not depend on religious discourse: rather than posing a religion in itself, one studies its analytical dimensions. The genealogist pitfall of Asad and Mahmood is thus avoided and we have a road map to implement a significant political liberalism.
7.2 Liberalism and Public Arena
Let us clarify further what ‘liberalism’ means, because it must not be confused with market liberalism or neo-liberal regimes. Unlike neo-liberalism, which tends to impose its functioning on social spaces that should be preserved from it, liberalism is an “art of separation”, aiming to build “a world of walls”, each of them “creating a new freedom” (Walzer, 1984, p. 315).
- –The epistemic propositions it conveys are inaccessible to public reason. For example, “the embryo contains a soul because it is written in the Bible, and prescriptions contained in this sacred book apply to all humans since it was written under the action of the Holy Spirit, co-creator of the world”. This statement is unintelligible to anyone, even a practicing believer, who does not share the traditional dogmas of the religion concerned.
- –The conceptions of the good life that it promotes are encompassing. For example, if it is legitimate to organise optional religious courses in public schools, the state should still have a right to set certain criteria, especially if it finances them, to ensure that their content is compatible with the pluralism of liberal societies. Consequently, textbooks can be checked for compliance with ‘British values’ in Britain, and guidelines can be given to religious teachers in the Czech Republic so they are compatible with democratic pluralism. Without this type of control, religion can become encompassing, as is the case in Poland where religion courses in public school consist, among other things, in teaching that homosexuality is a sin, even though this falls within the conceptions of the good life that each citizen is entitled to choose or refuse.
- –The collective identities it transmits are divisive. For example, the Italian and Polish states force public schools to display crucifixes in classrooms, on the grounds that they embody, among other things, national identity. While non-Christian students may not be bothered by this practice, the fact is that this display publicly signals a hierarchy between two types of citizens, those who are Christian (valued by the state) and those who are not (Laborde, 2017).
If one of these three criteria is verified, then the liberal state is entitled to set limits to ‘religion’, without venturing into theological abysses since the
This point holds a central place in contemporary discussions in political theory, because devotees in all countries demand an increased state recognition of their religion, arguing that the state is not neutral when it subsidises certain sports, monuments, museums, culinary heritage (etc.) to the detriment of others. To answer that sort of argument, it must be broken down. Disaggregation does not offer ready-made answers, but it does provide guidelines to counter the genealogist objection described above, assimilating secularism to ‘Judeo-Christianity’, and more specifically to Protestantism.
7.3 Disaggregating Secular Ideologies Too
Nevertheless, the major interest of the disaggregating analysis is that it is not limited to religions. Here Laborde engages a debate with Will Kymlicka. Are religions, once diluted in culture, ipso facto less likely to challenge the principles of political liberalism? Kymlicka moves in this direction, but Laborde’s position is nuanced. Western-European far-right movements often value a culturalised Christianity, reduced to inheritance and tradition, expurgated from any proper religious reference (God, mysteries, etc.), but no less divisive with regard to immigrants, ethnic minorities or those who refuse to accept Christian cultural identity. This means that one of the three criteria mentioned above, in this case the last one, is not respected: it is not by bartering religion against culture that Christianity can be considered part of public reason.
The same goes for Dutch homo-nationalism, not particularly religious but that nonetheless stigmatises populations suspected of not being sufficiently acculturated to Christian-liberal frames, supposedly more gay-friendly. The example of a test of conformity to Dutch liberalism, between 2006 and 2008, intended for people wanting to acquire citizenship, is revealing. Though candidates from Canada, the United States or New Zealand did not need to pass it, nationals from other extra-European countries did: they were made to watch a video of same-sex people kissing in the street. The aim was to ensure that potential first-time citizens accepted this behaviour. While the attempt to
The method of disaggregation thus makes it possible to symmetrise religious and non-religious phenomena, all potentially vectors of the three aforementioned elements that political liberalism must qualify: epistemic propositions (non-accessible?), conceptions of the good life (comprehensive?), collective identities (divisive?). It is then possible to specify the dangers of homo-nationalism (e.g. Netherlands), religious nationalism (e.g. Poland), or French secularism expressed in the Chatel circular of 2012, which aims to prohibit accompanying adults on school trips from ostensible wearing of religious signs.6
Crucifixes displayed in the classrooms of public schools pose the same challenge as certain secular policies, such as the test of conformity to Dutch liberalism and the Chatel circular: all three gestures, be they religious or not, are divisive. Indeed, they send a public message that some students, accompanying parents or potential citizens have a higher status than others. The challenge is therefore not whether ‘religion’ in itself is insufficiently or too present in the public arena, but to identify its components – epistemic propositions, conceptions of the good life, identities – whose legitimacy in this arena must be judged according to the same criteria as their secular counterparts. Ultimately, if classical republicans marked by liberal thought, such as Catherine Kintzler, defend themselves against claims that they promote state atheism, and fight conservative secularism, the fact is that their tools for reflection are insufficient in the light of the republican tradition instigated, from an international point of view, by Philip Pettit, then developed by Cécile Laborde for liberalism and what she considers its condition: minimal secularism.
As ETS researchers, our main objective is not to provide a theory of the permissibility in the public arena of religion, or secularism or any system of beliefs. It consists in identifying tools, between philosophy and social sciences, which avoid the reification of these beliefs. Thus, through an interdisciplinary approach, we assume a renewed republican perspective to explore the relationship between culture and politics.
Notes
For France, by way of illustration, let us mention the typical figures of Raymond Boudon (liberal) or Pierre Bourdieu (Marxian).
What is at stake when rereading Durkheim’s work is to correct this aspect; besides Mauss had already discussed some of his uncle’s rather systematic statements.
The differences between Joppke and Laborde were initially significant: only the former approved the 2004 French law on ostensible religious signs in public schools. But these differences are reduced later and the irony is that Laborde, opposing the 2004 law, called herself a republican; while Joppke, favourable to this law, calls himself a liberal.
To be specific, the circular authorises its recipients, in this case head teachers and principals, to prohibit the wearing of these signs (Calvès, 2022, p. 21).