In a brief article, published shortly after the passing of Bruno Latour, Didier Debaise (2022) takes stock of the French sociologist and philosopher’s contribution to our understanding of modernity. In his major work, Enquête sur les modes d’existence, Latour (2012) defines the Moderns as a “people of the Idea” (p. 33). Debaise argues that Latour’s philosophical project can best be conceived as a pharmacological inquiry into the pragmatic value of our ideas, which, in spite of their innocent appearance, have all too often functioned as disqualifiers of what was put away as ‘belief’, domesticators of all kinds of (scientific) knowledge, and colonizers of other ways of inhabiting the Earth. Latour’s inquiry into the efficacy of ideas takes place within a more general framework of questioning modernity as the progressive emancipation of human beings from natural constraints. Although Latour rarely refers to discussions in educational theory, it is remarkable that the notion of emancipation—an educational concept par excellence—takes such a prominent position in his problematization of modernity.

Against this background, the aim of this presentation is double. First, and inspired by Latour’s definition of the Moderns as a ‘people of the Idea,’ it stages a conversation between Latour’s work on modes of existence and approaches within history of ideas. Latour is often read as a philosopher of objects, materialities and technologies. This presentation, in contrast, will focus on how intellectual history can treat ideas through a Latourian lens. It is interesting in this regard that in the aforementioned project of the modes of existence, Latour (2012) extensively engages with the work of philosophers of language and speech act theory that has had decisive influence on Skinner’s contextualist understanding of history of ideas (Skinner 2002). In opposition to all too mentalist or culturalist conceptions of the nature of ideas, this first, more methodological part will elaborate a concept of ideas that does justice to their pragmatic intents and practical effects.

The second part of the presentation exemplifies and develops these methodological considerations by bringing them to bear on the idea of emancipation and the role it has played historically both in the rhetorical construction of modernity and the meaning that education can or should have in a modern project of progress (Tröhler 2020). More in particular, the focus will be on the notion of emancipation within the discourse of the German ‘kritische Pädagogik/Erziehungswissenschaft’ (Mollenhauer 1968). Particularities of this discourse of emancipation will be elaborated via a contrast with the use of the notion of emancipation within Freirean critical pedagogy (Freire 1968/1996). Developing these contrasts in a historical-comparative manner allows for analyzing the particularities of each specific discourse while shedding light on contrastive modes of existence, each with their own educational vocabulary. My hypothesis is that there is no educational mode of existence sui generis, but that the modern-progressive educational vocabulary should be understood, at least as long as it is articulated within the “Modern Constitution” (Latour 1993, p. 13), as a byproduct of the politico-moral imagination.

Debaise, D. (2022). Le peuple de l’Idée. Ce que Latour fait à la philosophie. Esprit, December 2022. Retrieved online via https://esprit.presse.fr/article/didier-debaise/le-peuple-de-l-idee-ce-que-latour-fait-a-la-philosophie-44379. Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Ramos, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Originally published in 1968). Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2012). Enquête sur les modes d’existence. Une anthropologie des Modernes. La Découverte. Mollenhauer, K. (1968). Erziehung und Emanzipation. Polemische Skizzen. Juventa Verlag. Skinner, Q. (2002). Visions of politics. Volume 1: Regarding method. Cambridge University Press. Tröhler, D. (2020). Learning, progress, and the taming of change: the educational aspirations of the Age of Enlightenment. In D. Tröhler (Ed.), A cultural history of education, volume 4: The Age of Enlightenment (pp. 1-23). Bloomsbury.