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by the bourgeois, rigorously specialized scholar. Renan has little use for aristocratic dilettantes, and for an unlettered “people.” They can be prepared for enlightened participation in public life and learning in some indeterminate future.²⁵ The meticulous scholar is a champion of “critique,” ready for the work of analysis²⁶ rather than creation. Critique can be applied anywhere and is often superior to its object, which may be a piece of culture without claims to artistic greatness: “a frivolous novel” or “a madrigal.”²⁷ Critique is quite pointedly not a form of rigorous philosophical skepticism but rather a continual examination of prior assumptions, toward a “more pure and advanced truth.”²⁸

      Instead of seeking some creative synthesis—or an unfortunate declaration of first principles—the modern research scholar, Renan continues, should devote himself to a well-defined subdiscipline (it becomes “a little world where he encloses himself stubbornly and scornfully”) and produce specialized mono graphs within it, even as he shares his work with other scholars to produce further knowledge.²⁹ The scholar should not hope that his work will outlast him. He should be pleased to have, with a life’s labors, added “an obscure stone … without name” to the great “temple” of secular knowledge.³⁰

      For Renan, the numberless monographs of modern scholars will be of inexpressibly greater use than a metaphysical statement about the nature of the world or being. The nineteenth century, claims Renan, is not a century of metaphysics, and certainly not of religion. In a circular thought, he believes that the historical moment demands critique, above all through historical and philological scholarship; they are the replacements for both religion and metaphysics, and should be.³¹

      As the foregoing suggests, the argument of The Future of Science is not always remorseless in its rigor. After announcing that belief in God is implausible and discredited, Renan offers a conclusion that recalls the loss of his own faith with only a measure of irony, and plays with the possibility that he may be wrong to reject it.³² He claims there is nothing special, unique, or true (or, if one prefers, “true”) about classical civilization but then defends its contested prominence in education on linguistic and cultural grounds.³³ He writes boldly as a herald of the age of reason, but renounces speculative, philosophical reason, and commends insinuation as the most effective pedagogy for the emerging scientific age. Perhaps above all, despite the declared absence of metaphysics in modern thought, he also announces the very metaphysics to which he and other modern scholars have pledged and should pledge themselves. They work “to substitute the category of becoming for that of being, the conception of the relative for the conception of the absolute, movement for immobility.”³⁴

      For Renan, the destination of this scientific world was entirely open; it would not serve or fulfill the human but perhaps transcend it entirely. The progress of knowledge might lead to a future in which humanity itself is superseded—in which “humanity will have disappeared”³⁵—a prospect he proposes with equanimity.

      In addition to Comte and Renan, there was a final, more distant philosophical forebear who appears with considerable regularity among the writers, scholars, and publicists of these new settlements of culture, society, and politics in the Third Republic: René Descartes. For Durkheim, readers must remember that France is “the country of Descartes.” Hence France must, Durkheim says, “bring things back to definite notions.”³⁶ The search for a science of society must “systematically discard all preconceptions,” as Descartes and Francis Bacon did.³⁷ Descartes’ physiological speculations were still respectfully (if critically) addressed in articles about neuroscience as well. In January 1897, an academic journal usually dedicated to scholarship—the Revue de métaphysique et de morale—went further, and published a poem by Sully Prudhomme entitled “Descartes.” There the philosopher appears as hero, his “glory forever without rival / Tomorrow we will build, with all your writings / With the hands of France a triumphal arch / Through which the august army of minds will pass!”³⁸

      Descartes, Comte, and Renan served as points of reference and inspiration for those seeking to build a new, self-consciously modern and scientific order in France in the late nineteenth century—but why? What possibilities did they hold within their work that other thinkers did not, and what was drawn from each of them?

      For various scientific and social-scientific theorists of the Third Republic, Descartes in particular offered the assumed example of a radical break with a discredited past. Whatever intellectual historians might make of that dubious assessment, it clearly inspired Durkheim and others. To cast away assumptions in search of secure and certain knowledge was assumed to be an enterprise of immediate relevance.

      Still more than in Descartes’ Discourse on Method, the break with the past would now be collective in form. Its rhetorical affect was that of meticulous exactitude in accord with consensual disciplinary boundaries, not bold and distinctive metaphysical argument, and it would vindicate its authority through the work of specialized scholars. For Descartes, Renan, and Comte alike, advances in the sciences would come through the accumulation of many individual studies, leading to a magnificent edifice—what Descartes called his rebuilt “house” of secure and certain knowledge, above all of medicine, that would be built while he lived provisionally by a more conventional morality,³⁹ and what Renan (as we have seen) called a “temple.” At the turn of the last century, some sought a science of society, others a physcial science of human being as such, as in psychomotor research and the workings of the brain. But for all their differences, the social and intellectual form for the acquisition and accumulation of knowledge—immanent, collaborative, credentialed, specialized—was assumed.

      Yet Descartes was not quite the thinker to vindicate that change in every particular. Comte provided the means of exit from philosophy into the social sciences, above all via sociology. Durkheim remarked, in a Kantian turn of phrase, that sociology began under the “tutelage” of philosophy,⁴⁰ and historically, it was Comte who offered the path from that tutelage to a discipline that could in turn master philosophy. Durkheim certainly believed that sociology would be required to renew or even refound philosophy: “Nowadays it is universally agreed that philosophy, unless it relies upon the positive sciences, can only be a form of literature.”⁴¹ As for ethics, “it is social science that takes up the problems that up to now belonged exclusively to philosophical ethics.”⁴²

      Similarly, through Renan, many writers, scholars, and theorists could find an expansive account of what science was and how it could best assure its progress. The days of Cartesian argument against radical skepticism, first principles, and metaphysics should serve as inspiration for precisely no one. In the “scientific” world Renan saw coming into being, one would simply assume that individual human agency counted for very little, that the idiom and methods of the modern bourgeois scholar were the best or at least the most lucid possible expressions of human understanding, that becoming and the relative were real, and that being and the absolute were superfluous or illusory.

      These thinkers gave overlapping ambitions for many of the new intellectual and cultural settlements of the Third Republic. France—and ultimately the world—were ready to be organized by communities of scientists natural and social, and they were ready to enter into the domains of society, culture, humanities, the mind, the soul, and God.

      These projects were loosely allied with one another but by no means the same, in method, cultural and political views, and in discrete professional ambitions. Durkheim was not a materialist, as many contemporary partisans of a fully naturalist account of the mind were; Marcel Mauss and others were socialists, Durkheim was not. Durkheimian sociology confidently asserted its authority over social facts without historical or geographic boundaries; but Durkheim also believed the nation-state to be a modern communal form especially well suited to address the problem of anomie, while Renan predicted the eventual attenuation of that same nation-state.

      Amid all these differences, however, these thinkers tended to share certain assumptions. Important among them was an abiding sense that conscious experience, free will, and individual agency were of little import. As Durkheim put it on behalf of his own disciplinary commitments, “Individuals are much more a product of common life than they are determinants

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