Abstract

The theoretical dialogue that has been going on for many years between the philosophies of the modern period and the social sciences on the institutional structuring of the social body and the political body can shed light on the concept of ‘esprit de corps’. The purpose is to address the issue raised by social science researchers concerning this concept and to use it as an indication of a broader work spanning corpora and periods from early modernity onwards. Therefore, this article proposes to examine Malebranche’s texts to explore the ‘esprit de corps’, understood as the awareness of being part of a whole, and the moral injunctions that this sense of belonging entails. Like other philosophers of his time, Malebranche reflected on the notion of ‘political bodies’ and on how people belong to the various bodies they form. In pursuing this archaeology of a concept that emerged late in the ‘Ancien Régime’, we also appropriate the theoretical tools proposed by Michel Foucault in some of his works on power over bodies.