Description: This book traces the contributions of the Lévy-Bruhl family to social and political thought and expertise in 20th-century France, shaping the anticipation of economic and health crises.
How French Moderns Think tells the story of the French sociological tradition through four generations of the Lévy-Bruhl family: Lucien, who founded the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris; his son Henri, who founded the Institute of Roman Law; his grandson Raymond, who took part in the creation of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies; and his great-grandson Daniel, a vaccine specialist at the Institute of Public Health. This family history casts a new light on the philosophical debates about "primitive mentality" and the "savage mind." By drawing on the expert knowledge inherent in this family genealogy, the articulation between the logical and the "pre-logical" is not a cognitive question but rather a problem of anticipating unpredictable events. By relating Lévy-Bruhl's engagements from the Dreyfus Affair to the Minister of Armaments during the First World War, Keck narrates the confrontation of the socialist ideal of justice and truth with the French colonial experience and its transformations in global technologies preparing for pandemics.Brief description: Frédéric Keck is a senior researcher at CNRS, author of Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts as well as several books in French, and coeditor of The Anthropology of Epidemics.
Review Quotes: "Keck's book is a breath of fresh air. He is willing to explore the depth of the issues raised by Lévy-Bruhl in the rise of sociology and anthropology after the Dreyfus Affair and the struggle against French anti-Semitism, and to go beyond terminological allergy towards the concepts of "primitive" and "mentality." The argument that French social scientists have tried to understand catastrophic and "unpredictable" events highlights the insufficiency of a social scientific thought that restricted itself to modern conceptions of rationality and logic, and is increasingly important in today's era of pandemics and global warming."--Ghassan Hage, author of "Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination"