1 Collective Entities

This all contributes to reflections that make it possible to grasp transversal phenomena. Among these, we will highlight collective entities, which can be nations, religions, or groups of teachers. All groups are not collective entities: some of them are groups of individuals gathered by their interests (groups of voters, pressure groups, social classes), others are series (people waiting at a bus stop), and others, in a Goffmanian perspective, oriented gatherings (at a party, around a meal).

The point of a reflection on collective entities is to investigate general will and citizenship. For to be a citizen is to participate in the decisions of a collective to which one belongs (nation, federation of nations, region, city) while recognising the legitimacy of the collective decisions that emanate from it. It is then necessary to overcome, no longer a sociological nominalism, but a disembodied political philosophy according to which a well thought procedure, based on minimal hypotheses about what unites the members, would be able to maintain a civic bond.

Advocates of deliberative democracy readily imagine deliberative situations where individuals have only their means of communication, a common language, for all fellow citizens. There is a form of political cosmopolitanism that cannot be taken for granted; it is difficult to imagine that the legitimacy of decisions does not relate, at least partially and in any way, to a given group or community (a club, a company, a Church, a university, a company, a city or a nation). For two reasons. Firstly, because decisions and collective decisions assume that their protagonists have much more in common, habits, practices, categories of thoughts. Secondly, because the same protagonists are supposed to pursue and re-elect the purposes of the collective entity on whose behalf they make this decision, regardless of that entity. The question which seems to me to guide the study of the collective decision is that which Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked in The Social Contract: how can we draw, from the expression of plurality of wills, that is to say from each member of the group, a declaration of the general will?

(Urfalino, 2021, pp. 19–20)

These are two sides of the same coin. To explain as a sociologist how a collective entity works requires reinvesting philosophical problems around the modalities of the social contract and the general will, that is, the will of this properly collective entity which is not that of its aggregated members (sui generis). Symmetrically, imagining, as a philosopher, fictions to model collectives’ decisions and provide criteria for their legitimacy (is it the general will, the voice of the people, of its rulers, of an aggregate majority?) can only be done if one turns to the concrete entities that make collective decisions possible.

An example can help capture the problem. Let us imagine a book club that has to decide which pizza will be eaten at the end of the next meeting dedicated to Proust. The group deliberates and the decision is made by a vote: to buy (and eat together) a chorizo pizza. Is this a collective decision? It seems so, because the members have decided something together and this decision obliges them. Yet appearances are misleading: it was, in fact, a matter of sharing individual preferences fairly. To better make this point, let us now imagine a club of gourmets who must decide what is the pizza of the month. The group deliberates and the decision is taken by a vote: the most deserving pizza, which will be promoted in order to preserve the nobility of this dish, is anchovy pizza. This is a collective decision because it is not made for individual members of the collective, but on behalf of the collective whose purpose it is to promote pizza. The fact that this collective is composed of individuals specialised in pizza is important, but not enough: indeed they could have, like the members of the book club, shared a pizza because they were hungry or wanted to share a moment of conviviality; but that is not the case here.

The collective decision is therefore ultimately the decision of the collective as such. That is why a decision of Parliament is generally a collective decision. While members may have an individual interest in making such a decision, they propose laws that often do not affect them alone or even affect them as individuals, just as the ‘pizza of the month’ choice might have a possible, but indirect, influence on the culinary habits of club members and their decisions regarding fair sharing. One of the reasons the question of collective entities is concealed in social sciences comes from the misleading equivalence established between different phenomena: fair sharing, collective decision, majority vote, collective decision as such, or of its members taken one by one.

2 Plural Subjects and Feeling of Obligation

Similarly, being a citizen means participating in the purposes of a collective entity that makes collective decisions every member is required to endorse as a citizen. The collective decision therefore contains a rather mysterious element that demands clarification: it obliges the members of the group that contributed to the decision, as well as the members of the broader entity on whose behalf the group expresses itself. This is a central theme in works aiming to renew holism, one situated in the wake of Durkheim, who had already pointed out that the characteristic of what is ‘social’ is to oblige individuals.

To move from a reflection on groups to a study on citizenship, we will proceed in stages from theories of collective intentionality to then point out their limits, including their individualistic bias. This will allow us to identify this potential bias in global citizenship considerations that tend to evade or simply ignore certain collective entities, usually seen as being the framework of citizenship. It is not that ‘the world’ replaces ‘the nation’ or ‘society’. If that were the case, it would be too simple; and, for good reason, almost no global citizenship theorist is so naive. Yet, these collective entities are often thought of on the model of ‘the world’, that is to say as a collection of individuals; calling it a ‘global society’ or a ‘global community’ does not change that.

Let us start with collective intentionality: it is the ability for individuals to have intentions that can only be properly described in the first person plural. The philosopher Margaret Gilbert has explained this point in what is a now classic way in social philosophy and general sociology, but also in language sciences, sociology of social interaction, economics and psychology. Gilbert takes the paradigmatic example of two people walking together (as opposed to two people walking in the same direction). Maybe they had made an appointment, maybe they have freely started a conversation about the weather, maybe they do not know each other at all and one of them just asked for directions. Whatever the objective of this joint movement, the degree of acquaintanceship of the persons and the degree of explicitness of the possible shared objective, it remains that each person cannot press or slow the pace without warning the other person or without apologising, and the latter may be reciprocally justified in raising accusations. For example, Anna and Joseph are walking together and Joseph “suddenly stops walking and sits on a bench. Anna faults him for that and Joseph understands that Anna is in a position to fault him because of their joint intention” (Gilbert, 2003, p. 34).

The illustrative examples are numerous: walking, dancing, judgments on the quality of canteen meals, the collective feeling of being guilty even if one is not individually responsible (about Nazi Germany) or even political obligation in general (but we said in the introduction that Gilbert’s attempt fails in this last point). Moreover, the model offers some flexibility with regard to the fields of investigation: far from postulating the existence of groups, Gilbert rather describes a process and specifies that ‘plural subjects’ can be tendentious, that is, individuals can act as if they exist, thus making them happen or on the contrary failing to do so.

For example, Jill might be offended by Jack’s question, “Why don’t we go for a walk?”, although she would not mind […] “would you like to go for a ride?” and similar formulas. One explanation for this sensitivity lies in the fact that “we” was spontaneously interpreted as implying the existence of a plural subject […] whereas, according to the interlocutor, there is no plural subject.

(Gilbert, 1999, p. 243)

The model thus makes it possible to examine the existence of asymmetrical power relations, when one of the parties can more easily revoke the (supposedly) joint commitment than the other, or, on the contrary, publicly state that a joint undertaking had been entered into, though the other party says not (Bouvier, 2004). The approach is thus a way of reformulating, in a precise yet refined way, the more intuitive analyses of Durkheim, Weber and Simmel. This is how Gilbert comments on the famous Weberian example of the two cyclists avoiding each other; but while Weber judges that the attempt to avoid the other is a social action, Gilbert insists on the difference between being related to the behaviour of others, and a joint commitment. However, only the latter is social in the strict sense. This rejoins the Durkheimian intuition: ‘walking together’ implies Us having intentions that are not a sum of personal intentions; they are sui generis.¹

Gilbert’s approach is analytical. That being said, as we saw in the introduction, Gilbert enters de facto into the meanders of politics, on which Human and social sciences depend because they rely on the ideal of modernity which constituted them and still animates them. It is therefore necessary to distinguish two levels, descriptive and political.

1. On the descriptive level, the Gilbertian model, although ‘holistic’, remains too attached to the contractualist fiction of assembling wills: indeed, many collectives “cannot be the product of associative and contractual activities; not only do they precede the latter, but they are the ones who make them possible by assuring them from the outset a ‘commonality’ of principle” (Kaufmann, 2010, p. 344). In other words, if the association of walkers makes it possible to understand the difference between a sum of wills and a sui generis assembly of wills, it leaves in the shadow all pre-contractual practices, such as the constitutive rules of a social activity. Thus, to play chess, it is necessary to have rules prior to the joint commitment of the parties (Descombes, 2000). The same remark concerns money, which cannot be reduced to a social link between contractors, since it does not only contribute to the latter: it constitutes it (Searle, 1995). Yet one cannot buy one’s own property (by paying oneself), or play chess against oneself: it would not really be a purchase or a game of chess. On the other hand, one can walk alone; and even walk alone while acting as if one was walking with somebody: is “walking together” not the paradigm of an intersubjective relationship, rather than strictly social (Descombes, 2014)?

2. On the political level, the Gilbertian theory does not generate the same type of difficulties. It is indeed specifically modern, in that it belongs to the liberal and nominalist matrix, in many respects constitutive of the nascent social sciences and political theory (Hobbes, Rousseau) which was its breeding ground: the plural subjects are thus thinkable from individual interactions. By representing society as founded on an assemblage of wills, it also joins an extremely powerful imagination during the French and American revolutions of the 18th century. If the model of the plural subject clashes with the case of collectives in Us on a large scale (of the ‘our nation’ type), it remains anchored to a fundamentally emancipatory ideal: individuals remain indeed the active subjects of the plural collective constituted.

3 General Will and Individual Autonomy

The political crux of the problem, in connection with citizenship as a relation to a society (nation-state for example), is that the logical Us from which the institutions originate differs from the empirical We who is the recipient. Weighted with its modern and liberal perspective, Gilbert’s model perfectly reflects the logical Us. A collective such as a nation can indeed be apprehended logically so that one imagines members co-engaged by an act of will. This corresponds to a certain reality, the modernity of nations having effectively emancipated individuals from certain ties hindering their freedom. But beyond this logical Us, there remains the weight of uses and social relations pre-existing to the establishment of this Us.

4 Holism and (Global) Citizenship Education

The second part of the book will develop these points in relation to discourses (political, educational and academic) that promote ‘global citizenship education’ and claim to broaden the usual framework of the political community by addressing its members: teacher trainers, teachers, students, future citizens, researchers. The task is all the more complex because universities, whose organisation into disciplines can be quite easily relaxed to make room for ‘education towards’ (sustainable development, global sensitivity, etc.), are privileged recipients of this type of discourse and a fortiori so are the carriers of Erasmus+ projects (Barthes & Lange, 2022b).

In spite of a decidedly holistic approach, taking into account the encompassing aspect of the ideal citizen, let us point out that encompassing does not mean imposing. On this point, it is useful to return to Walzer’s Liberal-Republican thinking: “There can be no society of free individuals without processes of socialisation and without a culture of individuality, without a political regime that comes to defend the whole and that citizens themselves would be willing to defend, if necessary” (Walzer, 2008, p. 17). The totality – here described as a society, a culture, a political regime – is therefore a resource for individuation, in the same way that the common higher principles of Boltanski and Thévenot satisfy a meta-principal, that of common humanity. That is why there is no ‘ethnic city’ in their model, which would be based on hierarchies of origin or race.

Let us take the measure of this gesture, which signs Walzer’s influence (Thévenot, 1996). The authors deliberately exclude existing motifs of coordination on the grounds that they cannot claim legitimacy in our liberal societies. Their purpose is therefore proto-normative: it is not satisfied with a description of coordination between people, but wants to separate potentially legitimate principles from those that are not. In short, not all authorities are equal, hence the use of political philosophy. The use of classical texts in this field to model social ‘worlds’ (Saint-Augustin, Saint-Simon, Rousseau, Smith, etc.) marks the underlying cultural aspect. It is a western European thinking that people are supposed to master, in line with their ‘critical skills’.

If Boltanski and Thévenot are not holists in the sense that they would have produced a true reflection on sui generis collective entities, they are indeed holists in the sense that they presuppose a shared cultural framework, although implicit, which goes beyond and gives form to the specific grammars of ‘cities’. Being liberals as they recently admitted, they are keen to preserve a separation between different worlds (civic, domestic, industrial, inspired, opinion, market) while denouncing the illegitimate encroachment that one can exert on another, for example the merchant world on the civic world under a “undue transportation of magnitude”. This sociological perspective is therefore pragmatic in the sense that it pays attention to how people, by justifying their action and challenging that of others, can navigate between different registers of greatness. Nevertheless, it remains anchored to a powerful postulate in political philosophy, which in turn helps to situate the endeavour:

The question of justice was strongly armed [in France] by a history of centralised state and institutional Catholicism, while the question of pluralism was confined to a few political devices of debate that had little to do with morality because of the absence of a culture of political liberalism.

(Boltanski & Thévenot, 2022, p. 28)

This is how the authors justify their gesture politically, in the service of pluralism and liberalism. This meta-reflection is crucial. It serves as a reminder that sociology of justification is inevitably included in its own object: when sociology tries to account for the logics of justification, it is difficult for it not to register itself in such a process, because sociological knowledge must be publicly justified.

Liberalism thus understood, which is also our assumption (Lantheaume & Urbanski, 2023), is part of the ‘ideology of the moderns’, to speak like Dumont, which sociology cannot easily shake off. Sociology is indeed the product of this ideology, and even its potential expression when the actors themselves take up its results. In short, modern societies are deeply affected by liberalism and this is precisely what makes them united, under the auspices of what Walzer calls the culture of individuality. Durkheim had also glimpsed this in his attempts to link, on the one hand, ‘collective consciousness’ and ‘social brain’ (on the side of unity), and on the other hand ‘division of labour’ and ‘organic solidarity’ (on the side of individuality and pluralism). It is thus in a similar way that the liberal postulate of Boltanski and Thévenot informs what makes the principles of justification hold together: the social worlds are distinct, incommensurable, but legitimate a priori, while being put in equivalence and questioned by social actors.

Because of its deep connection with the individualistic ideology of the moderns, the holism in question is not causal, only structural, and not in the Marxian or Foucaulian sense, but in the sense of ordinary language specific to the grammar of a society. This is to say that the culture of individuality of which Walzer speaks is not to be understood as having a causal effect on individuality; nor is it to be understood as having an inverse causal effect in the sense that the culture carried by the social totality would crush authentic individuals (those who would somehow escape this culture).

The aforementioned complexities of individualism will be analysed, in the second part of the book, in studies and recommendations on global citizenship education. We will also scrutinise an individualistic bias, apprehended as an emanation of the ‘liberal-nominalist’ motif from which escape, in our opinion, both the (holist) social philosophy of Durkheim and the (republican) political philosophy of Pettit. Armed with these clarifications, how can we more closely approach the notion of citizenship in its relationship with institutions such as the public school? Where should we place, among the terms of the equation outlined, constantly invoked collective entities such as ‘society’, ‘nation’, or ‘global society’ or even ‘global political community’? These questions will benefit from an updated Durkheimian perspective, inseparably neo-holist and neo-republican.