Early Experiments in the Sociological Operation II. The Christian Sociologism of Louis de Bonald

The fifth chapter in the book is devoted to the work of Louis de Bonald, showing how the latter, as an exemplar of the Catholic-reactionary movement, constructed his own entry into the sociological operation. I will do so in two ways: first, by looking at how the French vicomte concretely constructed a sociological belief-language which attempted to bind the philosophical and religious opponents of the eighteenth century together; and second, by looking at how Bonald used techniques of self-historicization in order to create a sociological space in which his ideal social-Christian society could unfold itself. In this first part of the chapter, I will briefly introduce and contextualize the figure of Bonald while also highlighting how his own experience of a Catholic crisis of belief and his reputation as one of the founders of a social science were strongly linked together. In the second part of this chapter, I reveal how Bonald employed history as a tool for making beliefs socially performative practices. Bonald positioned himself as a communicative bridge between the agonistic histories of Enlightenment and Catholicism, seeking to combine the best qualities of the two in order to imagine a society which was interdependent and naturally constituted.