‘Large issues within a small compass‘: Histosophy

I have demonstrated that esprit de corps is a very important historical, social and political notion, and I have offered arguments that allow us to understand why. To construct the present diachronic narrative, I have analysed transnational and translingual interdiscursive ‘relics from the past that are available to us in the present’,1 systematically privileging primary sources that made explicit use of the Gallicism. Despite my philosophical sensibility, I was not trying to attain objective knowledge about an exemplary, essential and universal definition of esprit de corps. Conversely, neither was I assembling historical data for the sake of erudition, disconnected from their relevance to understanding our modernity and present epoch. In this sense, I echoed Foucault's intention to write a ‘history of the pres-ent’. I believe I have practised a specific combination of history and philosophy, a kind of intellectual history that could also be called histosophy, an interdiscursive approach that is correlated to what Foucault called genealogy or ‘archaeology of knowledge’ and to the method of Les mots et les choses. It is particularly adapted to a lateral approach to ‘ideology’ and an ‘analysis of representations’.

The possibility of a ‘histosophy’ defined as ‘the art of surveying large issues within a small compass‘6was alluded to three decades ago by the historian David Walker in the journal Labour History. Walker did not proceed to explore the promise of his throwaway remark, but he did mention that a histosophical approach could be ‘a provocative introduction to a range of issues which others are […] examining in more historically specific contexts’. The phrase ‘esprit de corps’ was, in 2014, when I started to take notes towards the present book, a scholarly neglected ‘small compass’, a notion that was not considered to be a significant keyword of modernity. Here is what Walker answered from his office at Deakin University in Australia after I reminded him of his ‘histosophy’ coinage: