He considered himself a "Swedenborg of history" who sought to update the philosophy of Kantian liberalism and individualism for the socio-economic realities of the late nineteenth century, and influenced the sociological method of Émile Durkheim.

[6] The insistence on the validity of personal experience leads Renouvier to a yet more important divergence from Kant in his treatment of volition.

James wrote that "but for the decisive impression made on me in the 1870s by his masterly advocacy of pluralism, I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up."

He holds that we are rationally justified in affirming human immortality and the existence of a finite God who is to be a constitutional ruler, but not a despot, over the souls of people.

[6] Renouvier rejected absolute idealism, Spinozism and classical Christian theology finding its views on an infinite, omniscient and omnipotent God to be deterministic.