Ensemblance
The Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps
- Unveils the hidden and conflicting ideologies at stake behind the concept of esprit de corps and its contemporary uses
- Focuses on the discursive uses of esprit de corps in various transnational contexts and in the long term, from 1700 to present times
- Combines intellectual history, cultural history, philosophy, history of ideas, discourse analysis, political theory and labour history
- Offers a fresh look into the modern dialectics of individualism and collectivism, structure and agency, laissez-faire and corporatism
- Deepens our understanding of the history of corporate capitalism and its military influences, as well as to understand the current revival of occidental nationalism
Esprit de corps has played a significant role in the cultural and political history of the last 300 years. Through several historical case studies, Luis de Miranda shows how this phrase acts as a combat concept with a clear societal impact. He also reveals how interconnected, yet distinct, French, English and American modern intellectual and political thought is. In the end, this is a cautionary analysis of past and current ideologies of ultra-unified human ensembles, a recurrent historical and theoretical fabulation the author calls ‘ensemblance’.
Esprit de Corps: A Timeline
Introduction: A Thousand Platoons – The Enduring Importance of Esprit de Corps
- Team Spirits: Twenty-First Century Uses of ‘Esprit de Corps’
- Knowledge Aperture: Academic Literature on Esprit de Corps
- Abstract Universalism: The Problem of a Philosophical Perspective When Studying Esprit de Corps
- As Far as We Can Tell: A Longue Durée Intellectual History of the Uses of ‘Esprit de Corps’
- Surveying Large Issues Within a Small Compass: Digital Genealogy
1. Musketeers and Jesuits: The French Birth of ‘Esprit de Corps’ in the Eighteenth Century
- Not Only in the Military: First Occurrences of the Phrase in Print
- The Head of the World: A Short Prehistory of the Phrase ‘Esprit de Corps’
- One Hundred Fifty: A Quantification of Esprit de Corps?
- Bad Grafts: Critical Uses of ‘Esprit de Corps’ in the Encyclopédie
- Too Zealous to Be Honest? The Trial of the Jesuits
2. Adunation of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps
- The Mask of Reason: Dialectics of Particularism and Patriotism
- Collective Cogito: The Nation as a Natural and Spiritual Corps
- Capitalism versus Esprit de Corps: The Suppression of the Corps de Métiers
- Common Good: Revolution and the ‘Adunation’ of Society
3. We Must Hang Together: The English Appropriation of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- Exotic Flavour and Distinction: Linguistic and Semantic Observations
- Unavoidable Zeal: Early Propagation of EdC in British English
- The Honour of a Nation: Official Debates about EdC in the UK and the USA
- The Natural Bond: Universalist and Familial Esprit de Corps
4. The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformization of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France
- Superiorly Normal: Renewal and Normalization of Esprit de Corps
- Esprit de Corporation: The Decline of Labour Communities and the Spread of Individualist Competition
- The Honour and Duty of the Soldier
- Defend Your Flag: Napoleonic Esprit de Corps
- The Cement of the Social Edifice: The Counter-Revolutionary Praise of Esprit de Corps
5. Collective Temperament: Esprit de Corps as Sociality and Individuation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- Whose Norms? Conformative Esprit de Corps and Autonomist Esprit de Corps
- ‘We Who Suffer’: The Problematic Regulation of Solidarities
- Esprit de Corps and The Spirit of Individuality: Tocqueville’s Reminiscence
- Esprit de Corps and the First French Sociologists: Fourier, Tarde, Durkheim
- Self-Alienation: The Individualistic critique of Esprit de Corps
6. The Mystique of Esprit de Corps in France in the Twentieth Century
- The Moral Empire: Permanence of the Ambiguity of Esprit de Corps in French
- The Superior Self: Esprit de Corps as Honour in Terraillon and Bergson
- Professional Habitus: French Esprit de Corps in Work, Management and French Education
- Esprit de Corps as a War Machine: From De Gaulle to Deleuze
- The future of a Gallicism: Canada as a Semantic Border Between French and English
7. The Way of Hilton: Esprit de Corps in the UK and the USA in the Twentieth Century
- ‘A Happy Phrase’: The Specificity of English Uses of ‘Esprit de Corps’
- Brothers in Arms: Esprit de Corps in Military Discourse
- The Purpose of Unity: Political and Institutional Aspects of Esprit de Corps
- Measure by Measure: Intellectual and Theoretical Uses of ‘Esprit de Corps’
- The Management of Men: Corporate and Managerial Discourse
Conclusion: Ensemblance
- ‘Large issues within a small compass’: Histosophy
- Is a General Theory of Esprit de Corps Possible?
- Drive, Discipline, Duty and Distinction: Four Scales of Esprit de Corps?
- The Contigency of Ensembles: Six Questions Raised and Answered
BibliographyIndex
Since Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and, more recently, Badiou, there has been considerable interest in countervailing the history of individualism with others on the production of group subjectivities, where the individual emerges from out of, or is sacrificially sublimated into, a cog in the machine of a no-less manufactured collective identity. Luis de Miranda's enquiry into the origins and ambivalent spread of esprit de corps, or the subjectivation of 'ensembles', marks a major intervention in this debate. Ensemblance is a remarkable 'histosophical' achievement, a compellingly original mix of transnational history and philosophy, from the philosophes to the present, and beautifully written to boot.
