Jean Baechler
[5] His major contributions to the field of anthropological and historical sociological knowledge pertain to a philosophical overhaul of the human sciences (or general anthropology), a general theory of 'power' and political regimes, the long-term history of democratic regimes in relation to various types of social organization (bands, tribes, cities, nations), the history of social morphologies, a non-relativistic virtue ethics, and a sociological explanation of the conditions underpinning the emergence of major religious and secular metaphysics, particularly during the Axial Age.
This text was subsequently reprinted, translated into English (The Origins of Capitalism, 1976), and completely recast in an expanded version in two large volumes, under the title Le capitalisme (1995).
The diversity of situations is reduced to a limited number of types, and this analysis has occasionally been misinterpreted as a radical challenge to Durkheim's theories regarding suicide-inducing forces without a subject.
[15] 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).
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.
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.
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).
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).
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."
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.
This final work provides a macro-sociologically rigorous answer to the classic problem of the "Axial Age" for each civilizational area, from the Upper Paleolithic to the era of planetary globalization.
); and "Sociology" completes the Baechlerian method – continuously tripartite, on this question as on the rest – by formulating an explanatory hypothesis as to the concrete factors that have made it possible to actualize the three metaphysical options that have virtually always been thinkable – i.e. since the beginning of the documentation of the problem by tangible artefacts, from the Upper Paleolithic onwards.
In French From 2013 to 2016, Jean Baechler led a series of seventeen colloquia and seminars on war at the Académie des sciences morales & politiques, culminating in the publication of the following proceedings: Online Papers
