1 The International Bureau of Education as a Matrix of Educational Cosmopolitanism

Since its foundation, the IBE has wanted to spread the idea of international cooperation in education. Study trips were promoted, as well as meetings with international educators and trainers, and interschool correspondence via mail, at a time when email and online exchanges did not exist. But what strikes a historian is the startling contrast between “dithyrambic statements – part of a legitimation strategy – and the alarmist observations that punctuate the daily exchanges” within the IBE (Hofstetter, 2022, p. 101).

These tensions are not only related to the funding deficit of the institution, nor to the peculiar approach of some of the advocates of world peace, such as Adolphe Ferrière, who adopted a spiritualist approach, perceiving the world as an essential totality, or even a mystical approach under the sign of astrology, and was gradually discarded in favour of more scientific profiles such as Jean Piaget, director of the IBE for four decades (from 1929 to 1968). They are also linked to political or even geopolitical parameters, in times of structuring of an East-West axis whose two centres of gravity were the United States on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other. In this context, peace and neutrality are perceived by the Federation of Education Workers as a way for the IBE “to consciously or not deceive educators, to make them believe that one can, through neutrality, suppress class warfare and achieve social harmony” (Apletine, quoted in Christian et al., 2022, p. 534).

This is why some members of the IBE were wary of being too closely associated with the League of Nations, and others wished to initiate bilateral meetings, without its relay, with foreign governments, stressing that cooperation in education does not indicate support for authoritarian regimes. Thus the IBE gradually became an intergovernmental body by binding itself first to countries where progressive education, the pedagogical spearhead of the IBE under the sign of activity, creativity and spontaneity of children and adolescents (which itself found a scientific counterpart in Piaget’s psychology), was well established (Poland, Ecuador), then to countries whose governments were much less in tune with the liberal spirit, such as 1930s Germany. To solve this tension, the IBE valued a “strictly scientific universalist internationalism” but this was not enough to avoid discredit. When the world is torn between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, is universal cooperation at a global level truly possible?

Thus, in 1939, a fateful year, the delegates of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy used the IBE, of which they were members, as a platform to declare: “It is to the extent that each will base education on the genius of its people, that peoples will come to better understand and respect one another […], for without a sense of the nation there can be no true humanity” (cited by Hofstetter & Boss, 2022, p. 152). These sentences are not absurd in themselves, since philosophers who are now critical of GCE have similar positions (whose blind points we will be describe later), but one can guess, with the comfort of hindsight, the intention and true meaning of these words.

That being said, the IBE initiated here a fruitful practice of not thwarting any national educational movement. It is through the wealth of national experiences, the development of knowledge and national experience in each country, that the IBE believes it can coordinate and drive educational reforms around the world (Hofstetter & Boss, 2022, p. 149). Ultimately, we must accept dealing with national realities at the risk of falling into hegemonic, standardising and impoverishing goals – those that the current notion of GC is sometimes accused of conveying. Piaget, in a note about the relationship between the IBE (which he was leading) and the SDN, indicated that: “The IBE therefore does not aim to standardise education by means of conventions, but rather to strengthen the characteristics of each country’s educational systems by disclosing them” (cited by Hofstetter & Boss, 2022, p. 152).

In this context, the notion of global citizenship education is developed with all its tensions and its contradictions but also, given the highly liberal and cosmopolitan inspiration of its promoters, its richness. On the one hand, the IBE’s general secretary regretted, in retrospect, that the Bureau had not clearly objected to the Nazi occupation. Neutrality indeed backfired cruelly against the promoters of global citizenship education, and even the place of practice of the IBE, Switzerland, was called into question. The post-1945 period was incompatible with neutrality, making the IBE seem compromised. However, on the other hand, the ideals it carried did not weaken. The ideal of a democratic, humanitarian and non-belligerent education kept all its meaning at a time when large and relatively pushy nations, such as France, claimed to be on the side of victors and took advantage of this position to impose discriminatory norms, in the colonies for example, through what cannot be called an emancipatory education. In this, the obstinate but tireless internationalism of the IBE not only anticipated the future UNESCO, a United Nations’ body dedicated to science, culture and education; as an intergovernmental centre for comparative education, it actually foreshadowed it, becoming one of its cardinal agencies in 1952 before fully integrating it in 1969 (Hofstetter & Schneuwly, 2022, p. 542).

The political and conceptual challenge was therefore significant: it was about strengthening the internationalist and pacifist spirit while rooting education in particular nations. It was also about claiming to lead a strictly scientific approach, despite the IBE having been formed by more or less scrupulous supporters of ‘progressive education’, which values the creativity of children, their spontaneity and curiosity (to serve their ‘natural development’), while investing new generations with a redemptive mission for future humanity. Certainly, the figure of Piaget was useful to reconcile the scientific claims on human psychology with progressive pedagogical methods. The IBE’s major comparative surveys also provided relatively objective documentation on national education systems. Nevertheless, “the IBE claim[ed] not to defend any pedagogical doctrine, but rather consider[ed] that these principles are attested by scientific investigations. Does science tend to be a guarantor of the convictions of the IBE partners?” (Hofstetter & Schneuwly, 2022, p. 552).

In fact, educational internationalism with psychological connotations can be “mystifying [and of] astounding naïveté” (Hofstetter & Schneuwly, 2022, p. 555), when nationalisms and major geopolitical divides are exacerbated. It is the case with the opposition between the proletarian internationalism of the 20th century and civilising cosmopolitanism or, more recently, between liberal democracies and the great emerging authoritarian nations, from Russia to Iran to China. These conflicts are made even thornier by the complex positions of states at the world level concerning the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, replaying to some extent the East-West opposition, or regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Moreover, according to Hofstetter and Schneuwly, educational internationalism and its pedagogy generate highly popular theses and comfortable political cant. Who could be opposed to the generous idea that ‘the future of humanity is at stake in education’ or disagree with the fact that it would be good for ‘youth to become aware of their civic responsibilities’? Essentially, educational internationalism is supported by a mental geography rooted in a hybrid synthesis of scientific data, geopolitics linked to the involved governments (in the IBE then UNESCO) and a reformist so-called progressive pedagogy around activity, creativity and cooperation between children at a class level, as a prelude to cooperation between humans on a global scale. As Piaget, who at the time was UNESCO’s Acting Assistant Director-General, said:

it is only from a set of active methods, which puts at the forefront joint research (teamwork) and the social life of the students themselves (self-government) that the study of national and international attitudes as well as the difficulties of their coordination can take on concrete significance. […] international life is the forum, on a completely different scale, of the same conflicts of reciprocity and of the same incomprehension as any social life. […] as soon as a social life is organised among the pupils themselves, it becomes possible to extend it in the direction of international exchanges and even study groups dealing with international problems.

(Piaget, 1949, pp. 50–51)

The terms are clearly set, but they are insufficient to circumscribe the international and scientific education that the IBE was calling for. The path traced by Piaget is to be taken again, tirelessly, and we propose to do it with other disciplines than his, those of which we are specialists: sociology, anthropology and philosophy, as stakeholders of ETS.

Before proceeding with this task, in the company notably of Durkheim, Mauss and Pettit, it is important to acknowledge these contradictions. UNESCO itself does so today, regarding the notion of global citizenship: “there are a number of ongoing tensions with the concepts of global citizenship and global citizenship education” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 10). By officially making global citizenship one of its main education goals for 2014–2021, UNESCO acknowledges, through its Assistant Director-General for Education, that there is no “consensus on the meaning of global citizenship and therefore what GCE should promote” (Tang, 2015, p. 5).

International organisations therefore tend to fall back on a common denominator, which has the merit of being unifying, yet remains unclear; and we know that vagueness is unable to resolve certain recurring tensions. GCE would thus be a framework fostering “the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes learners need for securing a world which is more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable”. It would call for “a conceptual shift in that it recognises the relevance of education in understanding and resolving global issues in their social, political, cultural, economic and environmental dimensions”, through values and skills that “facilitate international cooperation and promote social transformation”, such as “communication skills and aptitudes for networking and interacting with people of different backgrounds, origins, cultures and perspectives” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 9). These elements are both mobilising and troubling.

Mobilising, because we perceive a continuity, coherent and cumulative, with the initiatives of the IBE as a matrix of educational internationalism. The horizon outlined today for GCE is thus firmly anchored in the history of the democratic nations as well as the intellectual and associative movements that gave rise, to a certain extent, to current international organisations: the League of Nations and the IBE, as precursors to the UN and UNESCO. In addition, the emphasis on communication skills and network building takes on a special meaning in GlobalSense since online (videoconferences) and face-to-face interactions (Erasmus+ student mobilities) are an important part of the project. However, the elements of definition mentioned above are also troubling because the question, essentially, is to promote an education whose advocates generally admit the indefinite nature. This raises a rather noticeable quandary, as we shall see, for the most nuanced promoters of GCE. There are at least two aspects to this quandary.

Firstly, it is not clear to what extent education systems need UNESCO to achieve the above objectives, if it is also noted that “GCE can be delivered as part of an existing course (such as civic education or citizenship education, social, environmental, geographical or cultural studies)”. How do existing courses fail to meet the aforementioned GCE goals in terms of the values and behaviours learners need to ensure the emergence of a more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, safe and sustainable world? That the expected results are not up to the stakes is one thing, and it will be easy to agree that the world should be fairer, more peaceful, etc.; nevertheless, the real added value of the notion of GCE to achieve these objectives is another. This once again, is fully admitted: “Some ways forward to resolve these tensions are suggested, whilst maintaining that challenges around theoretical elements of GCE should not undermine its practice” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 10). This justifies our work, in this book, to solve these theoretical problems, or at least take them seriously, for purposes of a larger ‘practice’, or appropriation.

Secondly, UNESCO remains the site of significant tensions, and the countries represented in GlobalSense partly illustrate this. The United States left UNESCO in 1984 to protest against the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), which aimed to regulate access to quality information in the world through different points, notably “Include communication as a fundamental right; [r]educe imbalances in the new structures of communication; [s]trengthen a global strategy for communication while respecting cultural identities and individual rights”. Then, under the leadership of France and Canada, UNESCO worked on the defence of cultural diversity in the world, in order to respond to the risks of cultural standardisation related to globalisation. In 2005, the General Conference submitted for approval to the Member States a draft Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. It passed almost unanimously, “with only two states, the United States [who had rejoined in 2003] and Israel, voting against it” (Maurel, 2009, p. 137). These last two States are represented in GlobalSense but have no longer been a part of UNESCO since 2018, considering it too multilateral.

In fact, the added value of UNESCO lies less in its capacity to resolve societal debates (although this aspect is also important in view of the many researchers, consultants and political leaders mobilised in its fold) that in its contribution to make meetings between members of countries from the global north and global south happen. Indeed, the organisation can offer welcome financial assistance to “stimulate exchanges between the various countries of the world and encourage the sharing of knowledge in order to bridge the gap between developed and poor countries” (Maurel, 2009, p. 133). As for the GlobalSense research, funded mainly by the European Commission, it concerns only countries from the global north. Nonetheless, the stakes are just as high in terms of citizenship education. They concern, in pedagogical terms, decentralisation defined as a

gradual process of expanding the focus of learners from their local realities to include, connect them to, and provide them with a vision of other realities and possibilities. This concept sees the local vs. global as a continuum and is an effort to bridge the gap between the two.

(UNESCO, 2015, p. 20)

This is a gradual shift: it means that the realities explored, although different, are marked by strong commonalities. In this case, the five countries of the consortium, located on three continents, are marked by a modern ideology, in the sense of the anthropologist Louis Dumont (1992). It is a moral individualism, which naturally tends towards a cosmopolitanism that requires a relative erasure, in collective consciousness, of differences in status and boundaries. As Durkheim saw, the cosmopolitanism inherent to the idea of global citizenship has been linked with the ‘sacred’ figure of the individual in the more or less harmonious development of ‘organic solidarity’ in societies marked by a strong division of social work. It is why in this book we will devote a prominent place to theoretical questions, trying to distinguish between what is, on the one hand, the mobilising slogan whose usefulness we do acknowledge, and on the other hand, the conceptual framework that the idea of global citizenship deserves.

In our view, this framework can only be established with a firm foothold in humanities and social sciences, particularly sociology, anthropology, social philosophy and political philosophy. These disciplines thus contribute fully to ETS. Let us illustrate this point with an example of a mobilising discourse that becomes, from a sociological point of view, the indicator of a social aspiration that must be analysed. Highlighting a UNESCO cardinal document on GCE, Chernor Bah, Chair of the Global Education First Initiative’s (GEFI) Youth Advocacy Group, declared:

As a citizen you get your rights through a passport/national paper. As a global citizen, it is guaranteed not by a State but through your humanity. This means you are also responsible to the rest of humanity and not the State alone.

(quoted in UNESCO, 2015, p. 14)

This passage is interesting for at least two reasons. Firstly, by giving humanity the ability to guarantee rights, it puts it on the same level as a political society, which is often framed by a state or federation of states. This is the cosmopolitan ideal of the modern, the one that our student-teachers in GlobalSense share to some extent and in multiple variations: humanity is not a society, yet it does confer rights.

Secondly, in the aforementioned discourse, which entity is supposed to be responsible for humanity? Surely it cannot be humanity itself, since there is no world state or world federation of states. Therefore, it is no longer a collective entity that is responsible for the rights conferred to the world citizen, but individuals: ‘you’, that is, the young people to whom Chernor Bah talks. Yet the status of this ‘you’ is ambiguous. It refers both to a collection of individuals who constitute ‘humanity’, and to a moral ideal, that of the autonomous modern individual. Yet the latter is a product of the history of ‘liberal’ societies, who were the instigators, for example, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. This text itself was based on the specific model of the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights of 1789, rooted in French history (there were also other multiple influences for the UDHR from Christian contexts in the process of becoming secularised).

The conceptual node that we must work on is therefore situated in the gap between the moral individual – the object of our collective ideals – and the empirical individual whom we are told would constitute, once aggregated with his fellow men, humanity and related rights. Indeed, as soon as these two plans are confused, the risk is to fall into an a-political conception of citizenship in which “the alter ego is still me, a self distant infinitely” (Descombes, 1996, p. 85). Hence, the fierce debates, the content of which must be restored, on the very notion of global citizenship, accused in turn of naive abstraction, neo-liberalism or inconsistency, in the continuity of the fruitful tensions in which the members of the IBE had been immersed since 1925. By working on these tensions and even contradictions, we place ourselves in the lineage of an educational internationalism to which we want to contribute in a new way.

2 Avenues for Conceptual Solutions in the Philosophy of Education

To demonstrate this, we will commence the general framing by drawing on the words of a philosopher, Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor at Columbia University. According to Kitcher, education is the most important business in the world, according to the title of his latest book, The Main Enterprise of the World – Rethinking Education. The author invites education scholars to clarify, refute or amend his own philosophical theses, which he admits to be very general. How can we, in this perspective, draw upon Education and training sciences?

In a first approach, ETS seem well equipped since they allow to question “the relationship between the development of knowledge (purpose of the field of research) and its social utility (purpose of the field of practice), each being linked to a society project (political purpose)” (Albero, 2019, p. 25). However, we still need to specify the possible articulation between these three poles, in connection with the research objects announced. To do this, we will emphasise that Kitcher’s philosophical thought articulates a question of social sciences (holism), a question of politics (citizenship) and a question of social utility (education as the central mission of society). Kitcher indeed wrote:

We become who we are through a dialogue in which the growing person learns from and gives back to a broader social group […]. Moreover, understanding fulfillment through contribution to something larger (and more enduring) than the individual self helps connect the capacity for fulfillment to the capacity for citizenship […]. Education should be viewed as a central mission of society (if not the central mission) […]. My answer is to favor an educational program in which identification with the aspirations of fellow citizens is cultivated. Promoting solidarity should be an aim of education. This […] should not presuppose our ability to devise a system of education capable of producing citizens inclined to engage with any of their fellows, let alone cosmopolitans who reach out to all humanity. Rather it argues for orienting education toward expanding propensities for understanding and learning from others, seeing that expansion as compatible with a commitment to individual autonomy.

(Kitcher, 2022, pp. 7, 75, 140)

Each of these sentences deserves discussion, but it will be enough, for now, to identify the contribution of each discipline to the issues raised, in order to give substance to an interdisciplinary and international research project:

1. –“Contribution to something larger (and more enduring) than the individual self”. In the extension of Durkheimian intuitions, social philosophy makes it possible to specify the modes of affiliation with social groups or identification with entities broader than the individual self. By what mechanisms do individuals act according to the perspective of the ‘we’, irreducible to the isolated ‘I’ (Gilbert, 2013)? How do people manage to ‘decide together’ so that these decisions are attributable not to individuals, but to the collectives they compose?
2. –“This […] should not presuppose our ability to devise a system of education capable of producing citizens inclined to engage with any of their fellows”. Sociology reminds us that identification or belonging to a broader group (nation, fellow citizens, etc.) requires certain social conditions. If this discipline is riddled with heated debates between Marxians and supporters of approaches more favourable to the recognition of identities, we will at least agree on the following premise: there can be no national integration without social and educational equity. This requires investigating schools with audiences that present different social characteristics (Bell, 2021).
3. –“Favor an educational program in which identification with the aspirations of fellow citizens is cultivated”. Because of their links to practitioners and teacher training institutions, Education and training sciences can make such an ideal, reality. If Kitcher expresses the wish to transform ‘society’ in a way that he admits to be too vague, we will explore the conditions of possibility of this transformation, mobilising research on teachers’ work and its links with training (Majhanovich & Malet, 2015).

Kitcher also examines the question of religion and secularism in a chapter entitled “A role for religion?”. Indeed, if education must induce the feeling of belonging to something broader than the individual, then is there not a reason to make religions contribute to it, capable of representing communities around shared beliefs and rituals? Kitcher’s answer is negative, although it admits exceptions. Only the so-called ‘refined’ religions have an educational utility, that is to say those which offer examples of morality (stories, parables, tales, poetry) as ‘reminders’ or ‘tools’, strictly illustrative, serving a social and moral discussion that can only be secular. This goes to show that ecumenism is not enough. Furthermore, these precise conditions require the enlightenment of political philosophy (Laborde, 2017).

The interdisciplinary investigation (social philosophy, political philosophy, sociology, education and training sciences), should allow, in the long term, to specify to what extent and under what conditions ETS constitute, on the subjects which occupy us, an original epistemic field and not just a chance meeting between several disciplines.

If the subjects treated and the disciplinary fields must be mutually rethought, it is because the academic disciplines are themselves affected by the evolutions of nation-states in a global context, insofar as they have been actors in their development and in the modern project of individual autonomy. This concerns philosophy, sociology (Callegaro & Marcucci, 2018) but also comparative education (Malet, 2011), to which our international perspective intends to contribute. These points are developed in the first part of this work.

In addition, a model of citizenship, historically built on the nation-state (initially in Europe), has spread through cultural and commercial exchanges but especially colonial enterprises, affecting the regions of the world in different manners, and the ways in which people belong to their political community. What are the consequences in terms of citizenship education? Is it only possible, if not desirable, to decouple citizenship from its national framework? What are the conditions for the development of a cosmopolitan citizenship, of which Durkheim saw the emergence as a modern ideal? These points are dealt with in the second part along with the findings of the GlobalSense research.

3 Methodological Individualism and Moral Individualism

To understand the complex links between individuals and society, mentioned as one of the most important conceptual tensions to be considered in the perspective of global citizenship education (UNESCO, 2015), we must clarify the terms by distinguishing methodological individualism and moral individualism, which will then allow us to address the related issue of holism. In sociology, individualism is often associated with a method: methodological individualism, which was popularised by James Coleman, followed by Raymond Boudon. It consists in assuming that people’s actions are understandable and rational, so that the aim of sociology must be to reconstruct, if necessary by the method of ideal types, the sequences of reasoning leading to certain behaviours – such as how families choose a school – or certain beliefs, for example the differential diffusion of Christianity in the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages (Boudon, 2001).

The strength of this type of approach is, notably, that it seeks to explain a phenomenon in a minimum of hypotheses. With this approach, there is no need to assume that there are ‘cultures’, ‘civilisations’ or even a ‘spirit of these times’ to understand and explain most human behaviours in society. Even Max Weber’s famous ‘spirit of capitalism’ is conceived by Coleman and Boudon as a simple metaphor that veils the transparency of Calvinist reasoning: if God is omnipotent, then he must be insensitive not only to offerings but also to any institution claiming to link (in this case according to the economy of sin and reward) the believer to the afterlife. He must also be insensitive to faith and love (as Luther believed) and it remains for the faithful, in absolute subjection to God, to only work for the glorification of the latter in the world and to seek in it the signs of his election, like enrichment that is valued as such. There is no ‘spirit of capitalism’ as such here, but an aggregation of rational individual behaviours, reconstructed in an ideal-typical way by the sociologist and forming in the long run what nominalists can call – therefore with quotation marks – the ‘spirit’ of capitalism (and it doesn’t matter if this Weber thesis was disputed: what is at stake here is the method).

Nevertheless, this sociologist position, is not in fact solely methodological. Like Karl Popper before him, Raymond Boudon promoted moral individualism while claiming that it was essentially a matter of method. This shift is noticeable in France in the highly publicized Sociological danger (Danger sociologique), published in 2017. Its authors, Gérald Bronner and Étienne Géhin, criticise the ill-considered use of collective entities in social sciences by claiming that this explanatory mode risks drying up the belief in individual responsibility, morality and merit. In doing so, the authors refer to a set of moral principles – and not only methodological ones – around the value of individual autonomy, which, as a typical requirement of our modern societies, is fundamentally holistic (Dumont, 1992).

Thus, our individualistic principles form an ideology, without any derogatory connotation. Ideology, in the anthropological sense, is essentially the hierarchy of values of a society, knowing that a value of a higher level can, without contradiction, encompass its opposite. Thus in Genesis, the masculine encompasses the feminine, in the image of Eve born from the rib of Adam, himself created in the image of God. At the higher hierarchical level, Eve (a part) is inferior to Adam (the whole). One might point out that actually, a woman is equal to a man, and even sometimes superior to him; but it remains that in the aforementioned myth, if Woman is equal to Man, it is at a determined hierarchical level, in this case a lower one. In other words, the oppositions “woman > man” and “woman = man” are here hierarchically inferior to the opposition “woman < man”. We can also refer to Bourdieu’s ancient but famous study of the Kabyle house and the oppositions between high and low, above and below, public and private (etc.) that accompany the opposition – falsely symmetrical – between masculine and feminine (Bourdieu, 1970).

The difficulty we sometimes experience in grasping these points comes from the fact that under the effect of individualism, itself favoured by the division of social work, the moderns pay less and less attention to the hierarchy of values. This is why there are many debates on the equality according to the moderns. Does it imply ‘recognition of differences’, or rather their neglect, or their subordination in the name of the de facto superior modern value, that of egalitarian individualism?

In short, as moderns, the content of our collective ideology is individualistic (responsibility, autonomy, universal human rights), but we have difficulty perceiving it because this ideology, in the same gesture that enshrines the preeminent value of the individual, tends to deny the idea that this value comes from society as a whole. Moreover, by placing the individual at the top of our hierarchy of values, we may tend to consider society as an aggregation of individuals, even if they are united by a state as defined by artificialist theories (but symptomatic of individualistic ideology) of the social contract tearing humans away from the state of nature. It is precisely this anthropological reflexivity that Popper or Boudon lacked, and that many of their successors still lack, blinded by the confidence they have in the individualist (liberal) ideology. For finally, “why would the social life of a modern society be fully consistent with the representation it gives of itself in its ideology?” (Descombes, 2009, p. 48).

However, this field of ‘liberal sociology’, which sometimes overlaps with that of ‘analytical sociology’ (Bronner & Di Ioro, 2018), remains eminently interesting if we consider its moral side. The principle of parsimony allowed by methodological individualism has a political counterpart. In essence, it is quite wrong to think, at an ontological level, that collectives are created from individuals; and yet, at a political level, we must in part act as if this were the case.

In other words, the principle of analytical parsimony, which aims to reduce the number of beings necessary to explain a phenomenon and thus to eliminate the ontologically doubtful entities that are collective individuals, is the scientific counterpart of a true political ‘obsession’. Even if such an obsession tends to confer […] a highly problematic individualistic bias on reflections concerning collective intentionality, the latter have the merit of relaunching the investigation into two questions that are essential for social sciences: the question of the ontology of collectives, that is, their mode of existence, as well as the question of the specifically political properties to which only certain collectives would be entitled to claim.

(Kaufmann, 2010, p. 334)

This work will return to the notion of collective intentionality, but it will suffice for the moment to say that it is a type of ‘micro-holism’ with an individualistic basis; or, if we prefer, a ‘parsimonious holism’ that makes sure not to multiply the collective entities that can surreptitiously clash with our inseparably modern and individualistic (in the moral sense) ideals. This micro-holism, which can also be found in Simmel or Goffman’s works, is exploited in particular by Margaret Gilbert and Philip Pettit, two social philosophers who intend to revisit, in their own ways, the holistic heritage of Durkheim.

As a version of political liberalism, critical republicanism is also caught between the parsimonious explanatory aim and the political concern of the moderns. This is highly noticeable in the work of Pettit, who is a social as well as a political philosopher (trying to make ‘individualistic holism’ and ‘republicanism’ converge). Indeed, a sociology of secularism, but also of the Republic and more broadly of political liberalism, must be parsimonious in the sense that it cannot assume, a-critically, the existence of many collective entities that would impose themselves on the individual: common belief, religious culture, community identity; phenomena that instituted religions display as prevailing over individual consciences. But to succeed with this wager, while avoiding the aforementioned pitfalls of nominalist sociology, we must remember Dumont’s lesson by assuming the individualist ideology as it presents itself in our Western societies, in its egalitarian form. In doing so, we thus recognise that we are constantly confronted with two different figures: on the one hand, the empirical individual in charge of sociology; on the other hand, the moral individual in charge of political philosophy. Is this a mixing of genres? No, because the intersections between sociology and political philosophy are inevitable (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). The challenge is precisely to provide sufficient reflexivity to unravel their entanglements.

As such, a major French reference for thinking secularism, in an inseparably parsimonious and individualistic perspective, is Catherine Kintzler, very early discussed by Cécile Laborde (2001). Kintzler’s perspective, inspired by Condorcet (philosopher, mathematician and president of the French revolutionary assembly in 1792), is indeed extremely parsimonious, recognising in principle only individuals, a pledge of their equal treatment, and going so far as to promote a ‘principle of untying’ at the foundation of political association. The author’s concern is thus, unlike Régis Debray (2004), to think secularism radically detached from any religious model. Kintzler deployed a sharp critical lucidity to understand the pitfalls of a ‘teaching of the religious fact’ (enseignement du fait religieux) that would not be reflexive enough. The sociologist Jean-Paul Willaime himself became mired in these pitfalls, despite Baubérot’s clarification who reproached him his closeness with Nicolas Sarkozy’s position on secularism, which was too conciliatory towards religions as such (Baubérot, 2009).

Nonetheless, it is risky to favour Kintzler’s parsimony inspired by Condorcet. Too radically and too abstractly individualistic, Kintzler is now more and more clearly espousing conservative views on the supposed dangers of ‘wokism’ or on the prohibition of the ostensible wearing of religious signs for parents accompanying students during school trips. As it happens, the pendulum effect between exacerbated individualism and conservative pseudo-holism had already been identified by Dumont. In addition, before that, Mauss and Fauconnet had indicated the danger, in Condorcet’s work, of hypostasising a metaphysical individual serving a philosophy of history (at a stage before sociology) from which, moreover, certain personalities claiming to do sociology such as Herbert Spencer, did not escape (Mauss & Fauconnet, 1968, p. 19).

Fundamentally, if Kintzler’s republican thought has the merit of raising well-circumscribed points of vigilance about the French public school, it nevertheless contains the defects of classical republicanism. It is also called ‘official’ republicanism, in the sense that several of its aspects are taken up in mainstream French political discourses and decisions, of which the prohibition of the ostensible wearing of religious signs is a particularly illustrative example (Laborde, 2008). The republican thinking of Philip Pettit, individualist and holist, or, if one prefers, parsimoniously holist, constitutes in this respect an exceedance. Certainly, Pettit’s social philosophy is fragile (Urfalino, 2022), but what interests us is the way he questions the existence of groups in the Republic; in other words, we are interested in his political philosophy, taken over and refined by Laborde (2017).

Yet, to say this, is to still depend on philosophy. The latter is not an end in itself, but a means to revive sociological questioning. Sociology was not merely constituted in the wake of philosophy; however, when it wanted to empower itself as a science, it lost sight of certain ways of questioning the Republic, the nation and citizenship. These approaches were ‘preserved’ by philosophers, so that they guide social sciences on new issues, as modernity advances, by inviting them to take a reflexive and distanced look at the latter. The solution lies, in this case, via the philosophical detour, in the more direct reinvestment of the work of the French school of sociology (Durkheim, Mauss) and those who followed.

4 The Social Totality in Practice

These issues of distinguishing holism, individualism, liberalism and republicanism are crucial for mapping the “conceptual framework” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 10) that constitutes the dynamic notion of global citizenship education, which itself deserves “conceptual clarity” (Tang, 2015, p. 6). Education professionals, whatever their specific logic of actions, are to a large extent the guarantors of “a conception of the collective good […] in an individualistic society [whose] definition of the common good is the imperative of ensuring the autonomy of each person” (Descombes, 2013, p. 154).

In sociology, Boltanski and Thévenot’s approach makes it possible to explore two aspects mentioned above. One aspect is the aspirations of individuals imbued with individualistic morality, as evidenced by the ‘worlds’ (civic, domestic, industrial, inspired, opinion, market) typified around Smith, Rousseau, Saint Augustine, etc. The other aspect is the modes of construction of what is common, based on individual interactions within situations where the hierarchy of beings in presence – and sometimes the definition of these situations – is played out, since people, with similar critical skills to sociologists’, can question social reality on the basis of a ‘world’ or ‘city’ as a typified reserve of topoi prevalent in a given society (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006).

However, the crystallisation points mentioned above must still be brought into coherence in regard to the privileged field, namely the (public) school. It is indeed a very specific, regulating and integrative institution, whose congruence with the model of Boltanski and Thévenot can be questioned. It is on this level that their approach must be completed and amended by Durkheimian neo-holism, but also the studies of Mauss on the nation and certain perspectives of political philosophy that attempt, to say it concisely, to connect the holistic and individualistic aspects of the ideology of the moderns. Thus, the expression liberal nationalism (Gustavsson & Miller, 2020), although discussed, at least clearly poses the terms of the problem. Indeed, liberal, egalitarian individualism, to which we all participate to some degree, including Human and social sciences researchers as part of their academic activity, relates to the idea of nation.

Is there not, however, a risk in developing such a burning theme as the nation in sociology? Certainly this discipline is marked by interactionism, pragmatism, methodological individualism, constructivism and Marxism, approaches that all tend to define human relationships as relatively disenfranchised of the national totalities that give them meaning (Karsenti & Lemieux, 2017). Therefore, is it not an outdated object, that Durkheim and Mauss worked on explicitly only because they lived in an era eminently marked by national phenomena, including the horror of the great wars?

It is more likely that the founders of sociology had sufficient reflexivity not to write only under the effect of the conjuncture. In fact, the nation is always implicitly present, to varying degrees, in sociological work. We have mentioned methodological individualism, sometimes confused with moral individualism, because its proponents do not dare to formulate clearly the terms of modern ideology, carried mainly by societies in the form of nations (Mauss, 1953/2013). Let us give another example, at the other end of the spectrum of sociological controversies, still in the form of a symptom: the metamorphosis of Pierre Bourdieu concerning the republican public school. After having undermined its foundations, denounced as ‘cultural arbitrariness’ associated with ‘symbolic state violence’, he turned around in the 1990s to defend the state – obviously national – and rehabilitate many aspects of the old order against neo-liberalism.

Sociology, however, was invested with a Herculean mission, properly embodied by Bourdieu’s ‘heroic’ perspective. For, though the state was for him the ideal place to grasp the field of fields, it is (his) sociology that ultimately made it possible to objectify this field. Society as such then disappears behind the fields seized from the perspective of the state, as objectified by the sociologist’s critical competence. Essentially, though Bourdieu in his last work did not fully admit his ‘Durkheimism’ (since it would have been incompatible with a critical sociology), the fact remains that he made the state “the embodiment of the collective” by remaining dependent of French republican history, embodied even in the very identity of the sociologist, “an official son of civil servants who feels that the social world in which he lived is ending” (Fabiani, 2016, pp. 216, 241).

That is why the publication of On justification (De la justification) in 1991, translated in English in 2006, is crucial. The work takes up suggestions made by Bourdieu himself, who explained that he wanted to think of fields by referring to the “plurality of worlds” consisting of “commonplaces, irreducible topics” that make the “plurality of logics corresponding to different worlds” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 21). The author, however, did not lead this endeavour and it is Boltanski and Thévenot who fully give back to actors their critical skills and thus reintroduce, we believe, the idea of global society, the one that Durkheimians and Maussians holists scrutinise. For if Durkheim was a republican devoted to the state as a potential place of truth, free of any social peculiarities (he thought in particular that, as such, officials should not unionise), it is the idea of society that runs deeper into his work, from The Division of Labour in Society to The Elementary Forms, as well as that of Mauss with The Gift or The Nation.

If the pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot regenerates sociology by expanding perspectives beyond nostalgia for the state, we have nevertheless stopped in midstream. Certainly, Boltanski and Thévenot are aware of what is at stake, when they point to the need for international comparisons. Their typification of worlds indeed depends on a given social totality, as we see in the choice made by Boltanski and Thévenot of referring to authors who, all Western, are supposedly the depositaries of a vein of justification, in relative contrast to a preponderance of the domestic logic in Russia and the merchant logic in the United States of America (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2022). However, if this is the case, it means that a more advanced comparison, resolutely anthropological, would burst their model. Therefore, it becomes eventually necessary to make the ‘whole’ appear as totality, in other words, as the society which ‘holds together’ the principles of justice. This program, already perceived by Boltanski and Thévenot through the idea of ‘historical sedimentation’, must be extended. We propose to do so by assuming the socialist ideal, more precisely the critical republican ideal, while signalling towards cosmopolitanism (Erez & Laborde, 2020).

5 Sociological Holism and Comparative Education

Let us clarify the link between a socialist perspective and critical republicanism. According to Karsenti and Lemieux, the socialist ideal is indeed an ideology, but with a particular status, clear of the circular dynamics that oppose liberals and conservatives. The socialist ideal must indeed be understood, according to these authors, as a reaction to what is the conservative reaction. The latter being worried about the effects of a nominalist liberalism, which tends to grant existence, as in Margaret Thatcher’s famous sentence of 1987,¹ to individuals and families but not to society. It is here that a connection can be made with critical republicanism, that of Cécile Laborde in particular: it is socialist in the sense that it constitutes a reaction to the conservative reaction of Dominique Schnapper and Catherine Kintzler. Essentially, Laborde shares with these ‘republican’ authors a number of assumptions relating to the value of moral individualism in its egalitarian component. But, unlike Schnapper and Kintzler, she takes fully into account the progress of modernity, which means that the republican ideal, in France and beyond, should be adapted to these new conditions in order to remain faithful to itself.