‘How French Moderns Think’ by Frédéric Keck

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).

As the first thing, How French Moderns Think presents a detailed and thoroughly researched portrait of the Lévy-Bruhl family, from Lucien’s founding (alongside Marcel Mauss) of l’Institut d’ethnologie at the University of Paris in 1925, to his son Henri, a legal scholar and sociologist, founding the l’Institut de droit romain, to the work of his grandson Raymond, a statistician and member of l’Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, and finally, to Lucien’s great-grandson Daniel, a renowned medical scientist with a specialization in vaccines currently working with Santé publique France.  In How French Moderns Think, Keck draws a Lévy-Bruhl family portrait composed of generational commitments to better understanding the social and political order for the purposes of training attention and preparedness—again, vigilance—in the face of a world that had already proven it could fall apart. 

This is where the second thing this book is comes through most directly.  Alfred Dreyfus is never far away from the motives and preoccupations of the Lévy-Bruhl family.  But Keck is careful not simply to place Dreyfus in the background or as some total but indirect force in the lives and thoughts of these generations of actors, born from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s direct relationship and correspondence with the man.  In How French Moderns Think, as he does in Lévy-Bruhl: Entre philosophie et anthropologie, Keck outlines the ways in which the French sociological tradition, and in particular Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s mobilization of the concept of primitive mentality, continually plumbs the Dreyfus Affair as a lesson and framework for vigilance—and, right or wrong, Keck’s account is not free of an anxiety that Lévy-Bruhl at times distorts these lessons. Still, there is no lesson in Keck’s story that does not end with preparedness—to anticipate, to recognize, to attend to, to understand the terms of chance and how they are first entered into (ideas present in Keck’s other books on epidemics and surveillance, Un Monde grippé [Flammarion, 2010] and Les Sentinelles des pandémies [Zones Sensibles, 2020]). 

Included in the book’s third thing is an excellent introduction to the political and intellectual stakes of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of mentalities—the “primitive” and the “modern”—outlined most notably in La Mentalité primitive (1922) and Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), translated as How Natives Think (from which Keck’s book takes its name) in 1925. What is impressive about How French Moderns Think is that Keck also draws from Lévy-Bruhl’s earlier writings; it is in this attention to the archive that the value of Keck’s assimilation of Lévy-Bruhl’s thinking has the greatest impact. Keck shows not just that “the primitive mind” does not differentiate the supernatural from reality, using a form of participation mystique to direct its world, but that Lévy-Bruhl’s thought, before and after these major works, was pressured by the philosophical and political dilemmas raised by colonialism and French society, making Lévy-Bruhl’s thought the site of revision and alteration also taken up by his children and grandchildren.  

Finally, How French Moderns Think raised for me some admittedly inelegant questions.  Where and how do we, as anthropologists, place ourselves in the discipline’s past?  As I read Frédéric Keck’s detailed account of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and his offspring, I was nagged by a feeling that we might need anthropology’s past a little more than this past needs us, which I fear is not the author’s point.  I would not hazard this possible misreading if it were not for the endless debates inside and outside seminar rooms about the merits and harms of teaching within the canon of anthropology, no matter how that canon is arranged.  This is not a question of a critical versus an uncritical reading of the canon; what’s at stake feels more like a genealogical fantasy (or a patricidal one). I could be convinced otherwise were it also not for years of listening to colleagues, after a glass of wine at a reception, recite their own lineages back three, four, even five generations to explain who they are in the field, in a not-really-ironic repetition of the fieldwork cliché of the kinship-obsessed native. What could be more tedious than rehearsing an intergenerational biography to insist on one’s intellectual worth in the present?  But I am convinced Frédéric Keck is doing something different.  There is no justifying, debunking, or even rationalizing—and certainly no interest in rescuing—Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s legacy in Keck’s account.  Much like scholars who take seriously the folds of mystical participation that come to shape our worlds, past, present, and future (see Christopher M. Kelty’s The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories [University of Chicago Press, 2019]) Keck’s stories of intergenerational vigilance are for readers who already recognize that the outlines of so-called modern thought did not arrive by chance.