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DP:
Welcome Luis! It’s wonderful to have you here again! In case some readers missed it, let me briefly mention that we had talked previously on this site in a detailed and fascinating interview about your background and your ideas, including your work on philosophical counselling and the Philosophical Health movement.
Today we’re here for another, very special reason. You recently published a book with Edinburgh University Press: “Ensemblance. The Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps.” Looking at the title (and let’s ignore “Ensemblance” for a moment), you’re proving a “genealogy” of the term “esprit de corps” in this book. You write:
Despite a tendency to reduce the meaning of the phrase to team spirit and camaraderie, the … signifier is still active within a rich semantic field of meanings: ‘cooperation’, ‘joint ownership of projects in the workplace’, ‘togetherness in combat’, ‘common consciousness’, ‘common sense of purpose’, ‘sport’s greatest appeal’, ‘collective genius’, ‘patriotism’, ‘anti-cronyism’, ‘community spirit’, ‘nepotism’ …
… and a whole lot more. Now this may be so, but could you briefly explain to us the significance of this? Why should we care about the many meanings of the phrase “esprit de corps”?
When I started researching about esprit de corps, I had no idea how important the phrase was in the modern history of the West. Some people wondered why I was working on what seemed to them to be a niche topic. I confess my first reason was purely a philosophical fascination for the explosive combination of the two ideas in the same phrase, spirit and body in French.
Now, just one year after I started working on esprit de corps, the then Brexit chief British politician David Davis wrote, just a few weeks before the historical vote, that England needed to rebuild a “national esprit de corps”. And again a bit later, Donald Trump started to use “esprit de corps” in his official speeches, both before and after his election.
In fact when we look at the last 300 years, a great deal of people who have made history or the history of ideas at least have been fascinated by the ambiguous meanings of esprit de corps, including philosophers or sociologists like Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Bourdieu. They cared and wondered and we should care and wonder because the phrase addresses one of the most important questions of modernity, which …
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