Society incarnate: Association, society, and religion in French political thought, 1825--1912

This dissertation explores the history of the notion that to believe in religion is to believe in society by tracing instances in which, in the discourse of the nineteenth-century French left, the term "religion" entered into the same semantic field as the notions of "society" and "association." Three questions were intertwined in this way of thinking about religion: Are associations real? Are their bonds obligatory? And can individualism be a social bond? These questions are used to examine different versions of the "religion as association" problem and to explore the range of possible variations that nineteenth-century republican and socialist discourse admitted. The case studies that are examined include: the Saint-Simonians, P.-J.-B. Buchez (1796-1865), Pierre Leroux (1797-1871), the Trinity Debate in La Revue philosophique et religieuse (1855-1858), Clarisse Coignet (1823-1918) and Marie-Alexandre Massol (c. 1805-1875) of La Morale independante, Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888), and Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). This way of thinking about religion not only illuminates the intellectual context in which Durkheim's sociology of religion emerged, but also lays out the tensions that structured the French left's social imaginary as it strove to conceptualize a post-revolutionary order.