The Role of Manners in Theories on the State and Society During the Directoire
Final Report Abstract
The subject of the project was the debate surrounding the concept of "moeurs" ("manners" or "mores") in political theories during the late phase of the French Revolution, the period of the Directoire (ca. 1797-1799). Manners are understood to be standardized forms of social interaction, which are often ascribed a function as socio-moral stabilizers of modern societies, while at the same time being far less binding than formal legal rules. In discourses of political justification during the 18th century, manners and morals played a central role, especially since Montesquieu's main work, De l'Esprit des Lois (1749). They opened the possibility of conceptualizing the social as an independent sphere from the political. During the French Revolution, the social sphere became particularly important in the problem of how citizens could identify with the new republican state. In this context, efforts in symbolic politics and popular education aiming at promoting egalitarian behavior gained the upper hand early on. In addition to these developments, which have been researched in great detail during the last decades, the project revealed two further trends in the development of the concept of morality that have been little explored to date. Based on Pocock's diagnosis that the republican concept of virtue was replaced by that of manners in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 18th century, a comparable shift in the use of the term "moeurs" from moral to pragmatic aspects could be demonstrated (in particular using the examples of Pierre-Louis Roederer, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Jean-Baptiste Say). In the second half of the 1790s, "moeurs" became the guiding concept for describing social and economic processes in France. However, the simultaneous insight into the autonomy of social, political and economic mechanisms ultimately led to the abandonment of attempts to subsume them under the single generic term of "moeurs." From the perspective of the history of ideas, this analysis allowed the transition from moderate republicanism to early liberalism to be theorized more precisely. Secondly, the discovery of a prize-winning essay by the Halle Kantian Ludwig-Heinrich von Jakob made it possible to identify significant differences in the conception of "morals" between the German-speaking and French traditions. This revealed not only the incompatibility of Kant's concept of morality, based on autonomy, with the concept of "moeurs," which was used mainly descriptively in the milieu of the French Institut national, but also the discrepancy between the two concepts of republicanism, between an economically conceived orientation towards the common good in France and the idea of selflegislation (in the Kantian sense of the rule of law and justice) in Germany.
Publications
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Benjamin Constant et "l'esprit du siècle". Vortrag im Rahmen der Konferenz "Historiographie des Lumières au 19e siècle", Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 21.-23. September 2022
Asal, Sonja
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Einleitung, in: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Vom Gesellschaftsvertrag oder Prinzipien des Staatsrechts. Aus dem Französischen von Vincent von Wroblewsky, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 2022, S. 7-25. (ISBN 978-3-86393-147-6)
Asal, Sonja
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Sitten in Staats- und Gesellschaftstheorien zur Zeit des Directoire (1795-1799). Projektpräsentation im Rahmen des Forschungscolloquiums am Lehrstuhl für Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte (Prof. Dr. Harald Bluhm) der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 7. Juni 2022
Asal, Sonja
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"Mœurs" und "manners" als Topos von Gesellschaftsanalyse und –kritik. Einführungsvortrag zur Tagung "Sittenkritik und soziopolitische Ordnungsvorstellungen (ca. 1750- 1840)", Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung, Martin- Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 21./22. September 2023
Asal, Sonja
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Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob (1759-1827) zwischen Widerstandsrecht, republikanischer Tugend und politischer Ökonomie, Vortrag im Rahmen der Konferenz "Politische Aufklärung – Halle als Ort der Unruhe im späten 18. Jahrhundert", Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 23./24. Mai 2024
Asal, Sonja
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Manners and Political Stability in a Commercial Republic: the Case of France, c. 1795-1799, Vortrag im Rahmen des Enlightenment Workshop der Voltaire Foundation / Universität Oxford, organisiert von Nicholas Cronk und Avi Lifschitz,15. Mai 2024
Asal, Sonja
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Sitten und politische Stabilität. Zur Frühgeschichte des Liberalismus in der Zeit des Directoire. Projektpräsentation im Rahmen des Forschungscolloquiums am Lehrstuhl für Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte (Prof. Dr. Jens Hacke) der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 23. Januar 2024
Asal, Sonja
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Manners in a Commercial Society. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Pierre Louis Roederer, and the Transformations of Republicanism under the Directoire (c. 1795–1799). History of European Ideas, 51(7), 1511-1531.
Asal, Sonja
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Zivilisation/Civilisation. Rousseau-Handbuch, 557-561. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Asal, Sonja
