Early Experiments in the Sociological Operation I: Languages of Belief Within the French Eighteenth-Century Knowledge Culture

In the previous chapter, I have tried to further outline a historical-anthropological method for investigating the meetings between historical sociology and the belief-category. In this chapter, I will set out to further historicize these meetings, and this in two ways. First, I will contextualize, what I have called in the introduction, the sociological operation, as originating in the post-revolutionary crisis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the many public-intellectual debates it set off between social-Catholic reactionaries and their modernist-reformist opponents. I will argue that these debates were largely centred on dealing with the historical legacy of the Enlightenment, and its many successes and failures, focusing on its impact on understanding (and misunderstanding) what it meant ‘to believe’. And secondly, I aim to show how these debates resulted in the construction of multiple narrative strategies of sociological self-historicization, through which several early sociological actors tried to differentiate their own understanding of social life while simultaneously presenting their own unique response to the societal crisis of the age.