Modes of power

After completing his doctorate, Jean Baechler turned his attention to analyzing the essential foundations of ideology in Qu'est-ce que l'idéologie (1976), and explored the main attributes of political power, presiding over the historical actualization of its mechanisms (Le pouvoir pur, 1978). By defining the three modes of power as "coercion," "authority" and "direction," he laid the foundations for a rigorous general theory of "political regimes," "power relations" and the dissimilar logics of political consent. This analysis of power is a conceptual breakthrough and paves the way for comparative sociological analysis of the historical actualizations of the phenomenon.

Social morphologies

Hereafter Jean Baechler embarked on a vast historical sociological investigation of "democracy," breaking new ground on two counts. On the one hand, he placed the logic of democracy within a very long human history, dating back to the Upper Paleolithic, and in so doing, broke with the common genealogy that began with the Greek cities of the classical age.^[16] On the other hand, it complicates the analysis of power relations and modes of political consent by taking into account the type of social organization underlying each historical variant of the democratic regime. In the wake of American social anthropology, the concept of "social morphology"^[17] was put forward, along with a strict typology of bands, tribes, cities, chiefdoms, principalities, kingdoms, empires and nations (cf. Démocraties in 1985, Democracy: an analytical survey in 1995, and Précis de philosophie politique in 2014). His Esquisse d'une histoire universelle (2002) and Les morphologies sociales (2005) summarize the fundamental historical theses of his general sociology. As for the question of war and international relations, they are inseparable from this general theory and sociology of politics. They are present in all his work, and are systematically set out in the summary work Guerre, Histoire et Société (2019).

"Orders" of activity

In Jean Baechler's anthropology and historical sociology, the "political order" of human activities always assumes a predominant causal valence and sensitivity. It is the political order that has the greatest influence on all the other orders of activity (economic, demographic, technical, ethical, etc.). This is due to the very nature of power (Le pouvoir pur, 1978), since its "power" mode (versus "authority" and "direction") is always potentially capable, through its internal coercive (autocratic) and external bellicose expressions, of expressing dysfunction and radically impacting all other orders of human activity. Radical assessments and open violence are the hallmarks of this.

But while "politics" is causally primary, for Jean Baechler it remains anthropologically secondary in terms of ultimate ends: it constitutes a "service," ancillary order, and is not the type of activity in which the question of the meaning of human existence is played out. This is why Baechler's political philosophy and historical sociology are not at the center of his anthropological reflection, but need to be understood as subordinate moments of a more general enquiry.

In the 2000s, Jean Baechler systematized his non-essentialist thinking on "human nature" and its concrete manifestations within thirteen specific "orders" of activity. Each of these orders corresponds to the resolution of an unavoidable "problem" of existential "survival" or "destination" for individuals as well as for human groups. Among these orders, Baechler counts the demographic, the hygienic, the economic, the technical, the political, the pedagogical, the ludic, the morphological (solidarity mechanisms), the sodalic (group formations), the agoric (networks), the normative, the eschatic (metaphysical) and the staseological (critical). The work Nature et histoire (2000)^[18] makes this clear, and is a breakthrough for the human and social sciences, which have always been in search of the fundamental generative structures of history. Certain aspects of this extensive anthropological opus were subsequently taken up, clarified and expanded in the three related books Agir, faire, connaître (2008), La nature humaine (2009) and Les matrices culturelles (2009).^[19]

The two books entitled Qu'est-ce que l'humain? Liberté, finalité, rationalité (2014) and Modèles d'humanité (2019) summarize the author's general assumptions on the fundamental "virtualities" of the human from the initial schema of "freedom." This freedom is seen as a genetic non-programming of the species, involving its "finalized," "rational" but intrinsically "fallible" historical condition. Over time in the form of those mentioned works, J. Baechler ultimately developed a general treatise on man and human societies, in other words an "anthropological sum" on the one hand and a comparative historical sociology of world history on the other.^[20]

Final ends

Also applied to the analysis of final ends, beyond the ancillary ends of survival, this general anthropology encompasses both an anti-relativist ethics of the "bonne vie bonne" (Les Fins dernières, 2006) and a classification of metaphysical rationalities dealing with the question of the "destination's ends" of human existence. Jean Baechler ended up calling this last metaphysical order the "eschatic" (La Spiritualité, 2021) for want of a better lexicon, doctrinally neutral in everyday language, to designate the "things of the end," i.e. the metaphysical questions about the meaning of life that human beings cannot fail to ask themselves. The notion of "religious" is unsuitable for this purpose, as it excludes from its scope non-religious explorations of the problem of the end and meaning of life, which is a feature of philosophies.

This "eschatic" order is the subject of a twofold investigation. The first is a properly metaphysical reflection on the logically possible justifications for the question of the Absolute. Two major variants emerge, one secular ("absolute," lower case) and the other religious ("Absolute," upper case). The second part of the investigation focuses on the historical identification and sociological explanation of the main factors in the historical emergence and doctrinal clarification of each of these major metaphysical options, via individual and group explorers of the eschatic or "destination's ends" ("philosophers," "metaphysicians," "priests," sects, networks, churches, political parasitism of it, etc.). For the great metaphysical propositions about the final ends did not emerge at any time, in any place or in any way: the secular path of Becoming ("Devenir") was exemplified in ancient China and Greece, the religious paths of the monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) in West Asia, and Vedic and then Hindu Atmanism in India. These three great coherences of metaphysical rationality therefore need to be explained in terms of the sociological conditions of their emergence, which can only be identified through the long comparative approach of historical sociology.