Introduction
Pluralism has come to occupy an important place in the political language of our time. Major political philosophers of the postwar period have identified pluralism as one of their central commitments: they include preeminent liberal theorists such as Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls and distinguished communitarian critics of liberalism such as Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor. Pluralism means many different things. Sometimes it signals a normative commitment to the coexistence of different sets of values in the public realm. Sometimes it conveys a recognition of organized groups, and not just the sovereign state, as sources of legal norms. Often it is an affirmation of the free expression of a range of points of view as the precondition for the operation of democratic institutions. In public discourse, it has become particularly important as a way of conceptualizing the relationship between different faith groups and the public realm in a multicultural society, and that issue is certainly not receding. The rhetorical power of pluralist language has been intensified by the struggle against populism, which writers such as Jan-Werner Müller have defined as fundamentally opposed to pluralism.Footnote 1 But unlike most of the keywords that dominate our political and social vocabulary—such as liberty, equality, justice, democracy, and rights, as well as nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—“pluralism,” in anything like a recognizably modern sense, is of quite recent provenance, being less than a century old. The story of how it has come to exercise rhetorical power remains largely unwritten. We know a good deal about the emergence of political pluralism, but relatively little of how the concept came to acquire a wider resonance.
Moreover, the history of pluralist thinking has been written overwhelmingly in Anglo-American terms, with the result that it can easily be assumed that that history is overwhelmingly an Anglo-American history.Footnote 2 There are several distinguished studies of English political pluralism, including those by David Nicholls, Paul Hirst, and David Runciman, as well as Anglo-American studies by Marc Stears and Mark Bevir.Footnote 3 The continental European presence in this story is usually limited to Otto von Gierke, who earns a place as a key source of pluralist ideas through his influence on the legal historian F. W. Maitland.Footnote 4 Even Jan-Werner Müller's Europe-wide study of twentieth-century political ideas depicts the pluralists as “English gentlemen-scholars.”Footnote 5 The one major study that moves beyond the focus on Britain and the United States is Cécile Laborde's excellent comparative study of Franco-British pluralism in the era of guild socialism. However, it does not pretend to be historically comprehensive, and, importantly as far as this article is concerned, it ends before the point at which French terms such as pluralisme and pluraliste decisively acquired a sociopolitical as opposed to a purely philosophical sense.Footnote 6
The growing importance of pluralism in political discourse today is far from being an Anglo-Saxon peculiarity. In France, Pierre Rosanvallon is the foremost example of a public intellectual for whom pluralism is both a normative commitment and a key analytical tool. This is, perhaps, the unifying thread running through his writings over more than three decades.Footnote 7 Indeed, there is a good case for saying that the language of pluralism is significantly more prominent in French political debate than it is in Britain or the United States. Politicians in the ‘Orleanist’ tradition, such as Giscard d'Estaing and François Bayrou, have made particular efforts to appropriate the language of pluralism, but it enjoys a much wider currency.Footnote 8 Both François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac appealed to the value of pluralism in their investiture speeches, and it was widely invoked in the wake of the murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris on 7 January 2015, including by President François Hollande, indicating its power in political argument in France.Footnote 9 More recently, President Emmanuel Macron has placed the recognition of pluralism in public life at the centre of his government's agenda, or at least of its rhetoric.Footnote 10
In fact France occupies an intriguing place in the intellectual history of pluralism. Usually that place is represented purely as a negative one: France was a dystopia for pluralists, and in particular for the the British pluralists, among whom the key figures after Maitland were the Anglican priest and historian J. N. Figgis and the socialist theorists G. D. H. Cole and Harold Laski. Their pluralism was crucially shaped by encounters with the French state, and with the dominant strain of French republicanism, which they understood to be antagonistic towards intermediate assocations between “Man” and “State.”Footnote 11 But, on the other hand, even for the British pluralists France was more than simply a dystopia. The French state might have been, in their eyes, the enemy of a plural civil society, but France, perhaps more than any other country, had also nurtured an articulate intellectual resistance to the Jacobin state. Some of the British pluralists, particularly Cole and Laski, actively set about rediscovering a pluralist tradition in French political thought. Laski wrote about the contributions of such diverse thinkers as the counterrevolutionary Louis de Bonald, the Ultramontane priest turned radical democrat Félicité de Lamennais, the liberal parliamentarian Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, and among his own contemporaries the jurist Léon Duguit. These were thinkers who, he believed, were working against the grain of the dominant political tradition in France; but, perhaps because they were faced with such a clearly defined Jacobin tradition, they articulated pluralist ideals with special clarity.Footnote 12 For his part Cole, unlike most guild socialists in Britain, immersed himself in the theory and practice of French syndicalism, on which he assembled an impressive library.Footnote 13
This paper aims to uncover the process by which “pluralism”—the concept and the associated vocabulary—was assimilated into French political discourse. There have been a number of studies of the variety of doctrines and programmes that contributed to the critique of the centralized “Jacobin” state from the 1890s onwards: regionalism, syndicalism, electoral reform, administrative reform.Footnote 14 Equally, a series of studies have evoked the “social” quality of republican citizenship, especially as reshaped by solidarism, and it is now understood that the movement for the “reform of the state,” though it sometimes took antirepublican forms, originated within republicanism.Footnote 15 Pluralist doctrines, broadly conceived, emerged in this context. But what this article adds is a specific focus on the emergence of the language of pluralism: primarily the words pluralisme (pluralism) and pluraliste (pluralist), used in a sociopolitical sense. It asks what a lexical history can tell us about the route by which pluralist ideas entered French political discourse. Were they imports from Britain and America? Or did they have indigenous roots? If the latter, what were those roots?
These are questions of conceptual history, and they are addressed here with the methods of lexical history, or word history.Footnote 16 Conceptual history and word history are thus understood analytically as distinct pursuits. Needless to say, there is a distinction between a concept and a word, and hence between the history of a concept and the history of a word. Several distinct concepts may be denoted by the same word. Equally, one and the same concept may be denoted by more than one word even in the same language: that is broadly true of “liberty” and “freedom” in English. Still, lexical changes are pointers to conceptual change, and indeed it is difficult to see how one can write a properly historical conceptual history which does not attend closely to the shifting use of language. As Quentin Skinner has observed, “the surest sign that a group or society has entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept is that a corresponding vocabulary will be developed.”Footnote 17 Moreover—following Skinner's Wittgensteinian insistence that concepts should be understood as weapons—it is clear that a new and innovative vocabulary can sharpen the effectiveness of key concepts in the war of ideas. In this case, the acquisition of the terms pluralisme and pluraliste made it possible to conceptualize the connectedness of a cluster of apparently diverse movements and causes. What did reform of the Senate have to do with associational freedom, or proportional representation with the cause of Catholic trade unionism? All were promoted by identifably pluralist arguments in the era when the language of pluralism was starting to take shape, and that language thus helped bring together and to valorize a range of proposals aimed at establishing a new kind of republic. It certainly makes sense to label as “pluralist” some thinkers who did not and could not have described themselves in this way: in the French case, Proudhon and Tocqueville are two obvious examples, and an intellectual history of French pluralism would certainly include them.Footnote 18 But this paper posits that the acquisition of the word makes an important difference.
The invention of pluralist discourse
The first step in the pursuit of this lexical project was to assemble a corpus of uses of the words pluralisme and pluraliste in French texts from the period from 1915 to 1955 using a number of readily accessible electronic databases: chiefly the Gallica database at the Bibliothèque nationale, which includes a wide range of periodicals from the time, but relatively few books.Footnote 19 This was complemented by the holdings of Google Books and JSTOR. This corpus was then sifted to distinguish the older philosophical senses of the terms (the antitheses of monism and monist) from emergent sociopolitical senses. The latter usages were then subjected to conceptual and contextual analysis. There were technical difficulties: the Gallica search engine is only weakly able to distinguish between pluraliste and pluralité and hence produced an unrealistically large number of hits. But, once a process of sifting had been undertaken, some striking patterns emerged. One was chronological: prior to 1933, the terms pluralisme and pluraliste were used almost exclusively in the philosophical sense. Thereafter, the rate of occurrence more than doubled in the period from 1933 to 1940, and sociopolitical usages were now numerically preponderant.Footnote 20 More importantly, the sociopolitical use of pluralist language was overwhelmingly the preserve of Catholic intellectual circles at this time. In particular, the key figures were Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and the personalist movement that formed around Mounier's journal Esprit, which was founded in 1932. In addition to Esprit itself, the main fora where pluralist language flourished in the 1930s were Sept, a Dominican weekly founded in 1934 and dissolved in 1937, together with the Semaines sociales, the summer schools devoted to the exploration of social issues from a Catholic point of view.Footnote 21 It was from this overwhelmingly Catholic base that pluralist vocabulary gradually came to permeate wider political discourse in the postwar period.
Maritain and Mounier both invoked the normative value of pluralism in their works of the 1930s and were key figures in the dissemination of this new political vocabulary. Mounier, a young Sorbonne graduate and disciple of Charles Péguy, was involved from the end of 1928 in a discussion group of mostly Catholic intellectuals that met on Sunday afternoons at the home of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain at Meudon outside Paris, and it was from that group that he recruited many of the contributors to Esprit: not just Maritain himself, but the Russian exile Nicolas Berdyaev and the German Jewish convert to Catholicism, Paul-Ludwig Landsberg. Maritain—one of the preeminent Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century—was at this point on a political trajectory that took him from being an early supporter of Charles Maurras's far-right Action française to one of the principal intellectual architects of the postwar international order after 1945. He remained an acerbic critic of the parliamentary system, of liberal individualism, and of bourgeois industrial civilization, which he thought were rooted in a soulless materialism, but like Mounier he now sharply distinguished his critique from that propounded by the right-wing enemies of the Third Republic. Intellectually he had abandoned a staunch though nuanced antimodernism and was now engaged in working out a philosophical reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the modern world.
Maritain was the first to deploy the language of pluralism, initially in a series of works in 1933–4, and his collected works include thirty-two uses of the words pluralisme and pluraliste in the period from 1933 to 1939, all in a political sense. Pluralist language was pivotal in two of his major works of the period: first in his Du régime temporel et de la liberté, closely followed by his Humanisme intégral (“True Humanism” or “Integral Humanism,” 1936), which began in the form of six lectures given in August 1934 at the University of Santander.Footnote 22 These two books together account for seventeen usages of pluralist language and they therefore merit close attention to see the work that this language was doing in Maritain's writing at this time. In both these works, Maritain developed an extended contrast between medieval and modern society, and articulated a vision of a Christian order for the modern state. This would find radically new ways of capturing what was best in medieval Christendom, which was a long-standing reference point for Catholic political thinkers, including the early Maritain. The relationship between medieval and modern polities and societies was central to Maritain's thinking about pluralism. The modern social order, as Maritain envisaged it, would be founded on principles of pluralism, corporate organization, and authority, just as the medieval order was.Footnote 23 The Middle Ages were a common motif in the work of pluralist thinkers, from Gierke and Maitland onwards, who found there the epitome of a pluralist social order. Maritain likewise saw a certain kind of pluralism at the heart of medieval society: in particular, he thought it manifested itself in the multiplication of often overlapping jurisdictions, something that the modern state sought to eliminate.Footnote 24 But the medieval order, as Maritain understood it, was a “sacral” order in which the temporal had been subservient to the spiritual. That sacral or consecrated quality would be impossible to reconstitute in the modern world, and was antagonistic to pluralism. The new Christian order, he wrote, would possess “an organic structure implying a certain pluralism—much more developed than that of the Middle Ages.”Footnote 25 What he meant by that, he explained, was “an organic heterogeneity in the very structure of civil society,” whether in terms of economic structures or of legal and institutional structures.Footnote 26 It would be a secular order (he used the adjective “profane”) in which temporal matters would be autonomous in relation to the spiritual. He went on to draw a contrast between the currently fashionable totalitarian conceptions of the state and the idea of a pluralist polity (cité pluraliste), which, possessing an organic unity, would also recognize a range of different groups and social structures that embody positive liberties. “Civil society,” he maintained, “does not consist solely of individuals, but of the particular societies they form,” and a pluralist polity would grant these particular societies as large an autonomy as possible.Footnote 27
Shortly afterwards, Maritain again appealed to pluralist values in his analysis of anti-Semitism. He regarded Nazism as an “absurd medievalist parody,” because it was grounded in a quest for unity that is unattainable in the modern world, and in opposition to it he articulated the case for a pluralist and personalist regime which would recognize the distinct ethico-juridical status of each spiritual family entering into the convivium (literally “common life”) of the temporal state.Footnote 28 Pluralist language would subsequently run through many of Maritain's wartime works, such as, notably, Les droits de l'homme et la loi naturelle (The Rights of Man and Natural Law) (1942) and Education at the Crossroads (1943).Footnote 29 The first of these was particularly important, because it was here that, in Samuel Moyn's words, “Maritain transformed into the philosopher of human rights that he had never been before.”Footnote 30 And a pluralist understanding of society was pivotal to his conception of rights. He identified four characteristics of a society of free men: it must be personalist, communitarian, pluralist, and theistic or Christian. It must be pluralist, he argued, in the sense that it rests on a recognition that the development of the human person normally requires a plurality of autonomous communities, each of which possesses its own rights, liberties, and structures of authority.Footnote 31
Mounier was close to Maritain in Esprit’s early years: the two men shared an insistence on the primacy of the spiritual over the material, although they had differences that subsequently led to political divergence.Footnote 32 Mounier picked up pluralist language very quickly, and in the course of 1934–5 it became a familiar part of Esprit’s political lexicon. It was typically used to denote what was intended to be a central pillar in the journal's political program: the formation of l’État pluraliste or, sometimes, la cité pluraliste (either could be translated as “the pluralist state”). In his editorial notes Mounier repeatedly informed his readers that a team was at work elaborating the principles of the pluralist state. And he typically made the point, at the same time, that the pluralist state was conceptualized in opposition to the liberal state on the one hand and to the totalitarian state on the other.Footnote 33
In 1935, Esprit advertised the preparation of collective volume to be entitled La cité pluraliste, or perhaps a special issue on the same subject.Footnote 34 Neither in the event appeared, but they were superseded by the appearance of Mounier's Manifeste au service du personnalisme (1936, translated as Personalist Manifesto, 1938). This was structured around sections headed “Pour un statut pluraliste de l’école” (For a Pluralist Organisation of the School), “Une économie pluraliste” (A Pluralist Economy), “Une société pluraliste” (A Pluralist Society), “De l’État d'inspiration pluraliste” (The Pluralist-Inspired State).Footnote 35 For Mounier and his circle, “pluralist” and “personalist” were more or less synonymous. Thus in the Personalist Manifesto Mounier moves without a blink from “the personalist state” to “the pluralist state,” and from “personalist democracy” to “the pluralist state.”Footnote 36
Other Catholic intellectuals quickly adopted the language of pluralism. It was in common use in another Catholic periodical with which Maritain was involved, the Dominican journal Sept. Though short-lived, Sept had a circulation of around 100,000 for its special issues.Footnote 37 Of notable importance there was the critic Pierre-Henri Simon, who was one of the journal's leading commentators on political and social questions. He expounded the “Principle of the Pluralist State” and “A Scheme for a Pluralist State” in articles in December 1936.Footnote 38 It was also taken up at the Semaines sociales. One of the most sustained discussions of pluralism occurred in Marcel Prélot's lecture on “Person and Political Society” at the Semaine sociale at Clermont-Ferrand in July 1937. There Prélot, an academic jurist who was also a leading activist in the Christian democratic Parti démocrate populaire, presented pluralism as the informing principle of the personalist order.Footnote 39 For Prélot, social pluralism was a bulwark of the democratic order. In particular, he thought that democracy required a pluralistic social organization which would allow public services to be run by stakeholders under the supervision, but not the direction, of the state.Footnote 40 Prélot, who would subsequently serve as a Gaullist deputy and senator, was to have an enduring importance in disseminating Catholic pluralism. Two decades later he published a history of political ideas that began with Herodotus and ended with Christian democracy: indeed, with Maritain, “one of the great contemporary philosophers.”Footnote 41
What is clear, then, is that the language of political pluralism in France was an innovation generated by Catholic intellectual circles in the 1930s. In analyzing what these Catholic intellectuals understood by pluralism, it is important not to lose sight of one of the central characteristics of the concept as they used it: it was capacious and flexible, capable of joining together political and administrative decentralization, even a regionalist reform of the state; the institutionalized representation of interests through, for example, the reform of the Senate; the critique of the republican practice of laïcité; and a range of other causes. That said, we can identify some important distinctive features of French Catholic understandings of pluralism. It was, in the first place, an attempt to grapple with the question of how to conceive of a Christian social order in the modern world. On the one hand, pluralism appealed because it placed the different “spiritual families” on a level, and so entailed the abandonment of the goal of a Catholic reconquest of the state. At the same time, it valorized intermediate communities as constitutive of personal identities. A pluralist order would be “spiritual”—even “Christian”—because without privileging one faith group it would enable churches to speak in the public square. For Maritain and his circle, this marked a repudiation of the secular liberal individualism that they took to be the defining ideology of the Third Republic.
Sources and significance of Catholic pluralism
If pluralist language was brought into common usage by the Esprit circle, two questions arise. By what route, if any, did pluralist language reach these Catholic intellectual circles? And why did it prove so useful to them?
The British pluralists loom so large in the literature on the history of pluralist thought that it is natural to ask first whether pluralist language was borrowed from them. British political pluralism is usually traced back to the work of Maitland (1850–1906) and Figgis (1866–1919), but the term itself was introduced into Anglo-American political thought by the British political theorist Harold Laski. It was in 1915, in a lecture at Columbia, that Laski first used the term in an unambiguously political sense, and the lecture was soon afterwards published as the first chapter of his Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty.Footnote 42 The concept of pluralism started to take root in Anglo-American political science in the 1920s, where it came to be associated in particular with analyses of the political system in terms of interest-group politics.Footnote 43 Laski and his fellow pluralists were drawing on an older, strictly philosophical, usage of the term, the opposite of monism, and this sense of the term had been popularized by the American pragmatists who unleashed a renewal of interest in the pluralism–monism debate from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. In his 1915 lecture Laski self-consciously drew on the language of pragmatists such as William James, for example in embarking on a lengthy critique of what he termed the “monistic theory of the state.”Footnote 44
It might therefore be supposed that Laski was the agent for the transmission of the idea of political pluralism into France, but in fact this is unlikely. There is little evidence of any great interest in Laski's ideas in interwar France.Footnote 45 Mounier never cited Laski, or any of the English pluralists. Maritain recalled in his Man and the State (1951) that when he developed the pluralist principle for his own purposes, he had not encountered Laski's work; it was only later that he became aware of Laski and English pluralism—presumably during the Second World War, when he taught at Princeton and Columbia, where Laski was a frequent visitor.Footnote 46 The Jamesian sense of the word—the anti-monist sense—was already quite common in France in the early decades of the twentieth century, in the writings of thinkers such as Georges Sorel and Henri Bergson, who typically saw pluralism as the antithesis of determinism. Sorel, in applying Jamesian pluralism to the interpretation of the social world, began to anticipate the sense the word acquired in Laski and the other British pluralists.Footnote 47 Meanwhile Sorel's friend, the socialist Jean Bourdeau, based his critique of Durkheim's sociology on the proposition that society was “pluralist”—that is, composed of antagonistic groups and opinions—whereas Durkheim depicted the “social environment” as if it were homogeneous. Significantly, Bourdeau wrote extensively about contemporary thinkers, including James and Bergson, and it was almost certainly from James that he and Sorel picked up the term.Footnote 48 At more or less the same time we find the Durkheimian Célestin Bouglé using the term in a very similar way in his study of Proudhon's sociology. The complex movement of society cannot be understood in deterministic terms, Bouglé wrote, summarizing what he took to be Proudhon's approach. Instead it had to be understood in terms of the clash of opposites. Here he perceived what he labelled Proudhon's “polytheism or pluralism,” which he regarded as “the deep root of his economic and political tendencies.” Underpinning Proudhon's outlook, he wrote, was “the cult of multiple forces, irreducible one to the others.”Footnote 49 Here Bouglé was effectively synthesizing what was, by the 1910s, a well-developed revival of libertarian and antistatist strands in French socialism. One key figure was the Proudhonian editor of the Revue socialiste (Socialist Review), Eugène Fournière; another was the jurist and trade union analyst Maxime Leroy, like Fournière a key participant in the Proudhonian revival.Footnote 50
A much more important and more immediate source for the introduction of the idea of pluralism into French political thinking was the émigré Russian sociologist, Georges Gurvitch. Gurvitch was an almost exact contemporary of Laski's, and although he is now rather forgotten he was a dominant voice in Continental sociology at the time when Talcott Parsons was in the ascendancy in Anglo-American sociology.Footnote 51 Gurvitch first used the term, in a legal sense, in a German-language article on Otto von Gierke in 1922, after he had left Russia but three years before he had settled in France.Footnote 52 Two of the main influences on his early intellectual development were Frenchmen, Proudhon and Bergson, and in this article he also cited the French jurists Léon Duguit and Maurice Hauriou, both of whom caught Laski's attention too.Footnote 53 Duguit was notable for his critique of sovereignty as a metaphysical concept, while Hauriou's theory of the institution laid the foundations for a sociological account of the emergence of legal norms.Footnote 54 These were enduring reference points for Gurvitch, who wrote an authoritative article on Hauriou in 1931.Footnote 55 Maxime Leroy was an influence, too, and wrote the preface to Gurvitch's Le temps présent et l'idée du droit social (The Present Time and the Idea of Social Law) (1932). Gurvitch was also familiar with the English guild socialists, among whom he cited S. G. Hobson in particular.Footnote 56 But there is no evidence that he had read Laski at this stage. On his own testimony, Gurvitch's knowledge of English was rudimentary before he moved to New York in 1940.Footnote 57 He was in fact much more immersed in German than in British thought, and his study of Les tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande (Current Tendencies in German Philosophy) (1930) was an important moment in the introduction of German phenomenology into France.Footnote 58
Gurvitch's own constructive work in the sociology of law had its roots in his experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1917, which, as a supporter of the Socialist Revolutionaries, he saw through Proudhonian lenses. It was in this crucible of grassroots social upheaval driven by the soviets, which he saw as exemplifications of direct democracy in action, that Gurvitch formed the idea of social law arising spontaneously and independently of the state's juridical order, as well as his vision of collectivist economic planning founded on a pluralist economic democracy rather than on the direction of the central state apparatus.Footnote 59 He subsequently came to theorize this idea with the help of the phenomenologists’ practice of giving priority to lived experience rather than abstract conceptualizations. For Gurvitch legal norms owed much less to legislative commands than to the lived experience of social groups. The central theme of his sociology of law was therefore that the sources of law were plural, not singular: law did not have to come “downwards” from the will of the sovereign state, but could and did spring from below—notably from the practices of social groups such as trade unions, clubs, or factories.Footnote 60 Any social group that embodies an idea gives rise to new legal norms, he argued, echoing the central theme of Hauriou's theory of the institution.Footnote 61 He was the founder and chief editor of the Archives de philosophie du droit et de sociologie juridique (Archives of the Philosophy of Law and the Sociology of Law), first published in 1931, which was to become an important organ for the discussion of pluralist conceptions of law. During and after the war he was an influential advocate of an explicitly pluralist rewriting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: inspired by Proudhon, his proposed “bill of social rights” was founded on what he called a “pluralist technique” in which liberty would be secured by the reciprocal counterbalancing of autonomous social groups.Footnote 62
After the Second World War Gurvitch tried to claim paternity of the concept of pluralism, in the face of rival Catholic claims at the Semaine sociale held at Strasbourg in 1946.Footnote 63 But if we focus on the language of political pluralism, that claim is contestable. In fact, he made only quite limited use of the concept of pluralism in the 1920s, and it was only in the 1930s that he made it the cornerstone of his legal sociology, in such works as L'idée du droit social (The Idea of Social Law) (1932) and Expérience juridique et philosophie pluraliste du droit (Legal Experience and the Pluralist Philosophy of Law) (1935).Footnote 64 There is no question that pluralism was central to the way he conceptualized his theory of law, but that conceptualization dates from the 1930s, rather than from his article on Gierke a decade or so before, and even then he did not immediately translate his legal pluralism into an explicitly political pluralism. The chronological break comes into clear focus if we compare the two texts of his article on democracy, the article as it first appeared in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Review of Metaphysics and Ethics) in 1929 and as it was reprinted in his book, L'expérience juridique et la philosophie pluraliste du droit in 1935. The two texts were almost identical, except that the latter used subheadings, one of which contrasted “Démocratie unitaire et démocratie pluraliste” (Unitary democracy and pluralist democracy). The terms pluralisme and pluraliste had been entirely absent from the 1929 text, and the 1935 text provides almost the first example of Gurvitch taking the concept of pluralism outside the domain of law.Footnote 65 By the mid-1930s, the term “pluralism” had a political resonance that it had still lacked by the end of the previous decade.
What had changed in the meantime was that Catholic social thinkers in Maritain's and Mounier's circle had discovered pluralism. They were crucial in carrying the pluralist idea from Gurvitch's mostly quite technical work into the wider domain of intellectual exchange. The connections between Gurvitch and the Esprit circle have been more or less completely overlooked in the literature on both.Footnote 66 Yet they were significant and enduring. Already by the end of 1934 Gurvitch was actively involved in a philosophers’ group associated with Esprit, along with Maritain, Nikolai Berdyaev, Paul-Ludwig Landsberg, Gabriel Marcel, and Jean Wahl.Footnote 67 He was a recurrent contributor to Esprit over a period lasting for more than two decades.Footnote 68 He was a common point of reference in the journal. “No reader of this journal can be unfamiliar with M. Gurvitch's thought,” declared the philosopher Jean Lacroix, reviewing his work in 1935. Lacroix went on to draw attention to the affinities between Gurvitch's ideas and the attempts “we at Esprit” were making to build a pluralist conception of the state.Footnote 69 Gurvitch was much cited by both Mounier and Maritain.Footnote 70 It was probably Maritain who introduced Gurvitch into these Catholic intellectual circles: the two men apparently first met around 1927, shortly after Maritain's famous break with the royalist Action française, and in the 1930s they were fellow participants in the symposia of the Union pour la vérité (“Union for Truth”), such as that of April 1934 on liberalism and communism.Footnote 71 Gurvitch's Déclaration des droits sociaux (Declaration of Social Rights), published towards the end of the Second World War, first appeared in New York in a series edited by Maritain, and the first text it cited was Maritain's Christianisme et démocratie (Christianity and Democracy).Footnote 72
The Gurvitch–Maritain connection was clearly crucial in disseminating the language of pluralism, and in spite of their very different backgrounds there was a marked intellectual convergence between the two men. But in the 1930s they derived significantly different insights from the conceptual lens of pluralism. Pluralism enabled Gurvitch to reconceptualize the social order, including the legal order, on a bottom-up basis, with the autonomous life of groups understood as the source of social norms. Maritain's central problem—something that had absorbed his thinking ever since the Vatican's condemnation of the Action française in 1926—was what the primacy of the spiritual might mean in the modern world in which the church would never succeed in reconquering the state. Autonomous group life, which to Gurvitch was the essence of pluralism, was for Maritain a means to the end of solving the problem of the relations between the spiritual and the temporal in the modern state.
While the invention of the language of pluralism certainly owed something to the libertarian socialist tradition to which Gurvitch, Fournière, and Leroy belonged, it also drew productively on indigenous French Catholic sources. An important clue is to be found in Georges Renard's lecture on “The Rational Organization of the State” to the Semaine sociale in 1929. Renard spoke there of the need to replace the dualism of the human person and the state with the dualism of the human person and the institution; or, he added, “what comes to the same thing, the pluralism of the human person, of the state, and of the institutions formed within the state or alongside the state or above the state.” Renard was an academic jurist who as a young man had been active in Marc Sangnier's Sillon movement, a forerunner of Christian democracy, and after the death of his wife entered the Dominican order. He was a disciple of the eminent Catholic jurist Maurice Hauriou, and the passage just quoted followed a paragraph in which he commended the relevance of the “theory of the institution” that was a pillar of Hauriou's social philosophy. This theory, according to Renard, provided the foundation stone for a rational organization of the state, since it circumscribed the rights of the state over intermediate institutions.Footnote 73
Hauriou himself deployed the term “pluralism,” in challenging Duguit's sociologically determinist conception of law.Footnote 74 Given that he was also, as already noted, an important influence on Gurvitch, he could reasonably be credited as a key source for the emergence of pluralist discourse in France; more so than Duguit, who features much more prominently in the anglophone literature.Footnote 75 Significantly, Hauriou (unlike Duguit) was a thoroughly committed Catholic, who like Renard was affiliated with the Sillon and later with the Parti démocrate populaire.
If we ask why Catholics, in particular, should have found the concept of pluralism practically useful in political argument, one answer is certainly that it served the purposes of a church that was largely retreating from the aim of reconquering the state in countries such as France. Its priority was instead to defend its own autonomy, and to do so by appealing to general principles that would also uphold the liberties of a whole variety of intermediate bodies.Footnote 76 That was a central theme of the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931), in which Pius XI coined the principle of subsidiarity as a means of distinguishing what the state should do centrally from what it should leave to the free agency of local authorities and the institutions of civil society.Footnote 77 But there were also a cluster of specific issues that ranged the cause of pluralism sometimes against the monist state, and sometimes against overpowerful organizations in civil society. It was useful in fighting secularist zealots in education: thus Henri Simon interpreted the conflict over the removal of a crucifix from a primary school in Normandy as a clash between two conceptions of the public school, “la conception étatiste et unitaire et la conception familiale et pluraliste” (“the statist and unitary conception and the familial and pluralist conception”).Footnote 78 Equally, the Catholic trade union confederation, the CFTC (Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens, or French Confederation of Christian Workers) campaigned vigorously for the maintenance of le pluralisme syndical (“pluralism of trade unions”) in the face of the Confédération générale du travail's drive for closed-shop agreements in the Popular Front era.Footnote 79 Intriguingly, Catholic civil society organizations would again have recourse to the language of pluralism in opposition to Vichy policies: in labour policy, Vichy opted for a single trade union model, or syndicalisme unique, rather than for a pluralisme syndical, which it deemed divisive, and in its youth policy there were loud voices arguing for la jeunesse unique (unitary organization of youth), against which Mounier and his allies asserted the claims of pluralism.Footnote 80
That said, it was a particular segment of Catholic opinion that adopted the language of pluralism. For Maritain, who famously broke with the Action française following the papal condemnation of December 1926, “pluralism” allowed him to distinguish his own political position from that of the Catholic hard right, which certainly believed in the importance of intermediary bodies in a healthy social order and like Maritain often appealed to personalist ideas, but disdained the language of pluralism. That was partly because the hard right never endorsed Maritain's growing acceptance that a modern political order must allow the coexistence of a range of rival “spiritual families.” At the same time, Maritain's position at this point should not be confused with Christian democracy: his circle mostly declined to endorse a republican or any other particular organization of the state, and instead focused on a pluralistic organization of civil society as a counterweight to the power of the state; even, in France, to the power of the republican state.Footnote 81
The polemical uses of pluralism in France were tied up with the critique of bipolar ways of viewing politics and society, and it was thus embedded in the rhetoric of the “third way” that first flourished in the interwar period. The exponents of the “third way” typically presented their position as a way of transcending a sterile conflict between two established polar opposites—royalism and republicanism, capitalism and socialism, “right” and “left.” Esprit was one of the leading mouthpieces for the “nonconformists of the ’30s,” and was thus central to the development of “third-way” discourse in interwar France.Footnote 82
The importance of corporatist, federalist, and regionalist ideas to the “nonconformists of the ’30s” has long been recognized, not least thanks to Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle's pioneering study.Footnote 83 These thinkers typically rejected the twin evils of statism and individualism, seeing both as rooted in a materialistic view of the world, against which they espoused the cause of spiritual renewal. Intermediate social bodies played a key role in schemes of social reconstruction, as they would continue to do at Vichy. All these points are familiar in the literature. On the other hand the significance of pluralist terminology in this intellectual climate has never been noted. It remained very much a minority usage in this period, one that was characteristic of a certain strand in Catholic intellectual life. But Loubet del Bayle does not once use the term “pluralism” or “pluralist,” although he does include a quotation from the Proudhonian Bernard Voyenne in 1955 concerning the substitution of a pluralist for a unitary conception of the state.Footnote 84
What is most striking about the adoption of the language of pluralism by the Esprit circle is that it can be pinpointed fairly precisely to the period between 1933 and 1936. The connection with the advent of Nazism is inescapable. But the pluralist discourse of the 1930s did not simply prefigure that of the 1950s, when pluralist democracy was presented as the Western alternative to totalitarian regimes. Early French pluralism certainly defined itself against the “totalitarian state”—and Maritain was himself an early adopter of the concept of totalitarianism—but it was also, and equally vocally, directed against liberalism.Footnote 85 The pluralist state was explicity and repeatedly presented as a means of avoiding both the Scylla of the liberal state and the Charybdis of the totalitarian state.Footnote 86 Pluralism was a key strand in the progressive Catholic contribution to the many-sided campaign for the “reform of the state,” a campaign that really gained momentum in 1933–4, bringing into question central elements of the republican and liberal traditions in France.Footnote 87 That context is important, because in the postwar period pluralism often became identified with the liberal tradition, notably in the work of Raymond Aron.Footnote 88 But Maritain, Mounier, and their allies identified liberalism as one of their key enemies, because they saw it as a doctrine that took the abstract individual as its starting point. Thus Maritain defined liberalism as “a philosophy of liberty which makes each abstract individual and his opinions the source of all right and all truth.”Footnote 89 This “individualistic liberalism” was a purely negative force, useful as an ideological weapon in the struggle against absolutism, but losing its raison d’être once absolutism was gone. For Maritain, liberalism was not merely an error but was being liquidated by the facts of the time: whereas liberalism was (he thought) austerely secular in its outlook, the social revolutions of the time were in their essence mystical and religious.Footnote 90 Gurvitch, for his part, set himself squarely in opposition to both individualism and statism, because both led to the rule of repressive force.Footnote 91 Unlike Maritain and Mounier, however, he cherished the liberal tradition, seeing his own brand of grassroots socialism as a legitimate development of liberalism, not a break from it.Footnote 92
In repudiating the liberal tradition in the 1930s, Maritain and Mounier sometimes wrote as if a sociological individualism still dominated French republican thinking. In fact, as Judith Surkis, among others, has shown, republicanism had long since assimilated streams of thought that made society logically prior to the individual.Footnote 93 This was one of the decisive innovations in Durkheimian sociology: the differentiation that characterized modern industrial society did not entail social disintegration but produced a new kind of solidarity, which Durkheim labeled “organic” as opposed to “mechanical”; and liberal values, far from being the product of sociological individualism, in fact sustained a social order founded on organic solidarity.Footnote 94 Equally, the period from the 1890s onwards saw a striking resurgence of interest in Proudhonian ideas, as a counterweight to abstractions of the “ideas of 1789.” Curiously, liberalism itself was largely silent in the ideological wars of the interwar period, marginalized by a socially minded republicanism that tended (unfairly) to depict liberalism as an “Anglo-Saxon” ideology. In that sense Maritain and his allies were pushing at an open door. But the challenge they faced was that the Third Republic remained resistant to the Catholic voice in public affairs, and only in the era of the Popular Front was there a discernible thawing of attitudes. Maritain's pluralism was, first and foremost, intended to establish the legitimacy of the Catholic public voice.
The legacy of Catholic pluralism
In the era of the Second World War, intellectuals across the West associated the idea of pluralism with Maritain and his circle, rather than with Laski and the British political pluralists. When he wrote The Idea of a Christian Society in 1939, T. S. Eliot briefly alluded to the idea of a pluralist society, which he treated as Maritain's distinctive contribution.Footnote 95 It is striking that an Anglo-American intellectual should identify the term with Maritain rather than with the British political pluralists: this reveals the very limited extent to which the concept of pluralism had entered broader public discourse in Britain, where (as Runciman has shown) political pluralism was on the wane after 1920.Footnote 96 Eliot was not alone: the Italian Christian democrat Luigi Sturzo likewise identified the idea of pluralism with Maritain in a letter of 1941.Footnote 97 As this article has demonstrated, in France in the 1930s explicit invocation of pluralism was more or less wholly the preserve of progressive Catholic circles.
This remained true in the period from 1940 to 44; that is, the language of pluralism was certainly deployed at Uriage, home of the Vichyite leadership college where Mounier taught for a time. But there is little evidence that it moved beyond there into broader Vichy discourse, or indeed into Resistance discourse.Footnote 98 As we have seen, Maritain and Mounier used “pluralism” and “personalism” as strongly collocative terms: a pluralist state provided the institutional context for the flourishing of the human person. But personalist ideas appealed to far-right circles in the 1930s and to some Vichy ideologues, whereas pluralism never took off there, and that meant that after Liberation pluralist language was a much more effective tool in political argument than specifically personalist vocabulary. The imperative that had driven Maritain and Mounier in the 1930s—the need to carve out a distinctively Catholic stance which accepted the modern democratic republic but staked a case for a Christian presence in the public square—intensified after Liberation, and we find an MRP deputy in 1946 urging “the condemnation of the liberalism and the individualism of 1789 … the affirmation of the pluralist state … the freedom of groups, the freedom of the person and of the family, the freedom of the father in particular.”Footnote 99 In that same year the Semaine sociale—the centerpiece of Catholic intellectual life—took pluralism as a central theme.Footnote 100 The connection between pluralism and Catholic thought remained tenacious in the 1950s: certainly in Maritain's works of the period, but also, for instance, in the early years of the Revue française de science politique (founded 1951).Footnote 101 The young historian René Rémond—a committed Catholic—described pluralism in 1958 as “a fundamental notion in Catholic thought.”Footnote 102 But it was in the course of the 1950s that pluralism really became naturalized in broader French social and political thinking, gradually liberated from its partisan association with Mounier and his legacy (Mounier died in 1950 at the age of forty-four). Now, in the context of the ideological Cold War and the struggle to conceptualize Western values in the face of Soviet “totalitarianism,” the adjective “pluralist” came to be commonly paired with “democracy.”Footnote 103 Whereas in the 1930s pluralism was a third way, equally distinct both from liberalism and from totalitarianism, now pluralist democracies were represented in bipolar fashion as the antitheses of totalitarian regimes.Footnote 104 This usage was consecrated in the work of Raymond Aron, who in works such as Démocratie et totalitarisme (Democracy and Totalitarianism) (1965) made a pivotal distinction between constitutional pluralistic regimes and single-party regimes. Aron had reviewed Gurvitch's L'expérience juridique et la philosophie pluraliste du droit in 1936, and was in critical dialogue with Maritain from 1939 onwards. We can, in fact, find him anticipating his mature usage of pluralism in an essay of 1945. But there is no specific evidence to link his pluralism with that of the Esprit circle: one key difference was that Maritain and Mounier held that a satisfactory definition of pluralism depended upon a strong concept of the common good, whereas Aron found that concept philosophically problematical.Footnote 105
Aron's defence of pluralist democracy against totalitarianism is certainly a more familiar story than that of the identification of pluralism with personalism in the 1930s. What had changed? “Pluralism,” having been an anti-system catchword in the 1930s, rallying the “nonconformists” of that decade, had by the 1950s begun a journey towards the political mainstream. Once embedded in the antiliberalism of Catholic social criticism, it now served as a pillar of Cold War liberalism in the face of the totalitarian enemy. That trajectory largely mirrors the trajectory followed by totalitarianism theory itself. As James Chappel has demonstrated, the conceptualization of totalitarianism, which would become fundamental to anticommunist ideology in the Cold War, was first shaped in the 1930s by antiliberal Catholic intellectuals, among whom Maritain was central.Footnote 106 Clearly one political transformation that was instrumental in this process was the integration of Catholicism into the political mainstream in France under the Fourth Republic. This made it possible for an originally Catholic political vocabulary to be assimilated into other political traditions. That would have been much harder to imagine in the Third Republic.
Still, the Catholic filiations of the concept did not disappear. Two examples can serve as illustrations. The Centrist leader François Bayrou, who has deployed the language of pluralism more persistently than another other front-rank politician today, explicitly acknowledges his own debt to Maritain's integral humanism, and his party invokes Maritain and Mounier as intellectual ancestors.Footnote 107 Meanwhile, in a different political tradition, Pierre Rosanvallon is, as already noted, the preeminent theorist of pluralist politics in contemporary France. In his youth he had been active in the Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne (“Christian Student Youth”—JEC), and it was through his involvement in the JEC that he acquired his first professional position, as economic adviser to the Confédération française démocratique du travail (“French Democratic Confederation of Labour”—CFDT), in which position he became a leading figure in the “Second Left” and an advocate of autogestion, or workers’ self-management. The CFDT was itself a secularized version of the Catholic trade union, the CFTC. One of his great mentors, later acknowledged in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, was the CFDT intellectual leader and historian of medieval philosophy Paul Vignaux. Vignaux was, crucially, an Esprit collaborator and close associate of both Maritain and Gurvitch.Footnote 108
Conclusion
What does this conceptual history tell us? It should be clear, first of all, that pluralism in France had a distinctive history, which was by no means a mere reflection of its history in Britain or the United States. Histories of national pluralisms were certainly entangled—not least because of the importance of the “other” in these histories—but they were by no means interchangeable. The advent of pluralist discourse in France owed little to either British or American political pluralism. The ideological affinities and political concerns of the early French pluralists were very different from those of their British and American counterparts, and sprang, in particular, from the imperative to rethink the position of Catholicism in the modern state.
We could go further. The story of the invention of pluralism in France has something much more than a local significance. It was not just that pluralism in France had a separate history from its history in Britan and the United States. In some ways the French story is more important. Pluralism was actually more vocal as a political tradition in France by the 1930s than it was in Britain or the United States; and even more so by the 1950s. One large question about the conceptual history of pluralism is how pluralism acquired a normative value sufficiently strong to make it a commonplace way of defining Western societies against the totalitarian challenge from the 1950s onwards. The Catholic thinkers discussed here, and Maritain in particular, must feature prominently in the answer to this question. Although he is much written about, Maritain's place in twentieth-century political thought is still underappreciated.Footnote 109 That Maritain had a key role in the formation of postwar Christian democracy, and in the birth of the doctrine of human rights, is now coming to be understood: he was, writes Samuel Moyn, “the premier postwar philosopher of human rights.”Footnote 110 What this paper has uncovered is the pivotal role he played, along with his Catholic allies in the Esprit circle, in the reception of the idea of pluralism into French political culture. Pluralism may, indeed, be the key conceptual bridge that connects the antiliberal Maritain of the 1930s with the postwar champion of human rights: it is one enduring conceptual legacy of the personalist wave, and a key pillar of the rights philosophy of the postwar welfare state.Footnote 111
If a political language identified with a Catholic “third way” was successfully assimilated into mainstream political language from the 1950s onwards, it is natural to wonder what impact this had on republican conceptions of citizenship. French political culture remains resistant to arguments for civic inclusion founded on “difference”: these arguments are conventionally dismissed as communitarian imports from Anglo-American political cultures. Even arguments for parity of political representation between men and women have been framed in an overtly universalistic way, rather than as efforts to ensure the adequate representation of the distinct interests and qualities of women.Footnote 112 Likewise, the case for banning Islamic headdress has had traction in France due primarily to the tenacious hold of the idea of laïcité, conceived as intrinsically at odds with communalism.Footnote 113 Maritain and the Catholic pluralists shared the belief in the supremacy of the common good over sectional interests that drives this republican conception of citizenship. Where they differed fundamentally from orthodox secularist republicanism was that they envisaged an order in which heterogeneous legal and institutional structures could promote rather than hinder the common good. The kind of secularism the Catholic pluralists confronted remains tenaciously powerful. Pluralist ideas and language have particular significance in France precisely because there are battles of this kind to be fought.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Professor James Chappel, Dr Katherine Davies, Dr Iain Stewart and Professor Julian Wright for detailed comments on drafts of this article, and to the journal's editors and readers for their equally detailed suggestions. Audiences at the Institute of Historical Research and at the University of Nottingham heard presentations based on this work and made perceptive criticisms.
