'Esprit de Corps': birth and evolution of a polemical notion (France, UK, USA; 1721–2017)
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Date
2017-11-27Author
De Miranda Correia, Luis Filipe
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This work provides the first ever transnational intellectual history of the
globalized notion of esprit de corps, disputedly defined as a sometimes beneficial,
sometimes detrimental mutual loyalty shared by the members of a group or
larger social body.
As a polemical argumentative signifier, ‘esprit de corps’ has played an
underestimated role in defining moments of modern Western history, such as the
French Revolution, the United States Declaration of Independence, French
imperialism, British colonialism, the Dreyfus affair, the World Wars, the rise of
administrative nation-states, or the deployment of individualism and corporate
capitalism. The birth of the term is evidenced in eighteenth-century France, both
in military and political discourse. ‘Esprit de corps’ is shown to be an important
matter of political and philosophical debate for major historical agents
(d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lord Chesterfield, Bentham, the Founding
Fathers, Sieyès, Mirabeau, British MPs, Napoleon, Hegel, Durkheim, Waldeck-
Rousseau, de Gaulle, Orwell, Bourdieu, Deleuze…), but also for less renowned
authors, scientists, officers, militants, entrepreneurs, administrators, or
politicians (e.g. the British Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union).
A comparative methodology is proposed, based on the longue durée
examination of large corpora of primary sources in French and English, via
digitized archives and a focus on explicit mentions of ‘esprit de corps’ in their
rhetorical, philosophical, and historical context. The approach is tentatively
called ‘histosophy’: the long-term survey of a large issue within a small compass
(Walker, 1985), the compass being the invariable observed signifier, and the
large issue the multifarious relation between universalism and particularism in
the context of globalization. An interpretation is eventually elaborated to account
for the fact that ‘esprit de corps’ is today an incantation of widespread global use,
especially in corporate discourse, with laudative essentializing denotations.