Contenu du sommaire

The Heirs of Capital. The initial situation of the French Marxists was characterized by the illegitimacy stemming from a twofold exclusion. They were excluded de jure from the political field and they were also, de facto, excluded from the intellectual field. As a result, the invention of Marxism as the «philosophy of socialism» and the organization of the Marxists into a «class party» are, to a large extent, a legitimating operation. Within the framework of doctrinal polemics, the Guesdists discredited and isolated those socialists whom they dominated intellectually, the «self-taught». Moreover, they avoided opportunities for public debate with the intellectuals recognized by the traditional legitimating institutions. Against «the intellectuals», the consecrated academies or writers, they put forward the «party intellectual», the guardian of the doctrine of «scientific socialism». It thus becomes clear that the dogmatism and sectarianism of the early French Marxists is neither a choice nor an inevitability, but the forced exploitation of a contradictory situation.

Historical Materialism has a History Too. As a general rule nowadays, anyone who seeks to defend historical materialism reformulates it by stripping it of the economistic and evolutionist aspects stigmatized by its critics. By contrast, this article endeavours to understand the economic monism of the general statements of the materialist conception of history, and also its evolutionist features, as essential elements of this doctrine which set it in the general history of the social sciences in the 19th century. The concept of civil society played a strategic role by promising a break with the categories of traditional political philosophy and the opening-up of a new theoretical field, in which the social sciences established themselves. By making explicit the aspects through which the materialist conception belongs to its age, one is able to appreciate both its heuristic value and its limitations.

The Vocation of the Universal. Study of a number of texts, particularly novels by Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres, brings to light the distinctive features of a new social figure, that of «the intellectual». The supposed common features of the individuals initially designated by this term were membership of the university world, an affinity with positivist thinking, and low social origin. Produced outside the group it designated, the representation of the «intellectual» combined an intellectual style judged to be vulgar with democratic ideals. The «intellectual» was seen as a usurper presuming to speak in the name of the universal, and so was doubly disqualified : intellectually (universality is nothing other than the stamp of the educational System) and politically (universality masks sectional interests).

A New Art of Government. Security and general Welfare are the two aims of «Wohlfahrtstaat» : minded to solve the questions of security in terms of social optimality, the political Counselor Leibniz, as early as the 17th century, recommends to the rulers, the use of positive intervention techniques on society. A national insurance service — managed by the State — would then help minimizing and taking in charge the risks against which a single individual could not cope. This article underlines the philosophical and political actuality of Leibniz by presenting his writing on «Insurance» and shows that the model of the insurance emerges with the need for a new governemental ratio.