How French Moderns Think is at least three things.  First, it is an intellectual biography of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and his descendants, told as the story of shared concerns across four generations under the sign of the French sociological tradition.  Second, the book follows the seemingly endless ripples of the Dreyfus Affair and its attendant antisemitism across French civil and intellectual life, which in no small way shaped Lévy-Bruhl’s thinking of “mentalities” (primitive, modern, or otherwise) as well as the inherited focus on chance and justice passed down in the Lévy-Bruhl family.  Third, the book is a careful genealogy of thinking about the ways through which explanations arrive, social realities form, and attention and action (vigilance) flow from sociological and anthropological knowledge—a story that begins with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and ends with the book’s author.  How French Moderns Think, translated from an earlier version in French, Préparer l’imprévisible: Lévy-Bruhl et les sciences de la vigilance (Presses Universitaires de France, 2023), extends many of the arguments on the political relevance of Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of vigilance that began in Keck’s earlier book and thesis, Lévy-Bruhl: Entre philosophie et anthropologie (CNRS, 2008).

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