[p. 9]

PREFACE — Practical rationalism, or the pedagogy of the true

Editor’s note

Draft translation, October 2026. Numbered notes (1)–(5) are the author’s. Page references in square brackets refer to the printed French edition. Two anomalies of the printed edition are reproduced as printed; nothing has been corrected. Note (5), attached to the quotation from Leibniz, refers to an article in « Producteurs » rather than to a work by Leibniz. On p. 16, note (2) appears twice under the same number “(2)”.

The enterprise with which this study will be concerned is the enterprise as it presents itself in present-day industrial society. But there is no claim here to observe the consciousness of the enterprise as a fact. What is studied is rather certain methods which tend to favour the appearance of that consciousness. And it is a question of the public consciousness of the enterprise, not of its private consciousness. Perhaps only public consciousness deserves to be called consciousness of the enterprise in the contemporary sense of the word enterprise.

Industrial civilization is characterized by the enterprise, but today the enterprise is something very different from what it was at its origins, and from what earned it the name of enterprise. Although it has not ceased to be that, it has also become something else. And the coexistence within it of its modern meaning and its contemporary meaning is liable to perplex its theorists.

The initial aim of the enterprise is the pursuit of profit.

Whether one undertakes something with one partner or with several, the private consciousness of such an enterprise is the consciousness of personal interest. From the outset, an enterprise must have been essentially profitable. That is why the first industrial enterprises were commercial and financial, for what mattered was to engage in fruitful operations, whatever their concrete nature.

The aims of the first industrial enterprises were no different from the aims of a war, a marriage or diplomatic negotiations. Only the means [p. 10] differed. But with the industrial enterprise, economic calculation founded on enlightened self-interest came into play; thereby the feeling of personal interest became clearer, which is not to say that it had not been at work before. Ambition, the desire to rise, to be counted among the great, the rich and the powerful, has been the universal driving force of those human undertakings which, interrupting the daily routine, introduced important changes into the world, not without risk, in order to gather their fruits.

Today a new hypocrisy enjoins everyone to look as though he never thinks of himself, commanding him to be concerned above all, if only in words, with the interest of others, even when it is opposed to his own. One might think oneself arrived at that final stage of society, announced by Spencer, where altruism alone reigns and where the war of military societies and the competition of industrial societies have given way to a contest of charitable zeal. The politician thinks only of his people and turns from his paternal care only to fly to the aid of oppressed peoples. The opulent nations turn away in disgust from their wealth and contemplate the poverty of the less developed countries, which demand, as a natural gesture, the free distribution of goods. Employers think only of their workers.

Leaving aside the deep historical meaning of the real facts and acts that correspond to these changes, one could not, without naivety, be taken in by their humanitarian façade. Even the most absent-minded have not failed to notice that along the route of the gifts there are sometimes people sufficiently aware of their interests to levy their tithe in passing. Men force themselves into moral contortions in which they lose, not their egoism, which is always present and perhaps usable, but their sincerity and their freedom. The enterprise of someone who emigrated to a new land, with improved material and intellectual equipment, was in no way a charitable enterprise. It was, for him, merely a profitable enterprise, and he had never imagined, even in a dream, that he was going to become the benefactor of the less evolved peoples among whom he would henceforth live. In the same way, those partners who, pooling their means and their knowledge, set up in business to exploit a new invention, have not the slightest intention of making happy the staff they are going to hire; they think only of employing them to the best of their own interests.

Industrialists are all the more entitled to have their profit in view when they undertake something since, around them, apart from a few unknown saints, no one ever forgets his own interest. At every degree of the social scale and in every occupation, even the noblest, such as the leading of peoples or science, personal interest of the most precise and most passionate kind never loses its rights.

In our ways there has settled the habit of a division of labour between those who give advice and those who pay. The different sections of society exchange moral exhortations, precepts which it is easier for us to give when the interest of others is at stake than to follow when it is our own.

If the first quality of a philosophical discourse is rectitude, it is fitting, therefore, that before entering upon this one we purify ourselves of every good thought, for a good thought is often the opposite of a true thought. It must be stated calmly that the first and constant meaning of the enterprise is known first of all by the one [p. 11] who undertakes; one must avoid confusing everything by distorting this meaning with foreign and artificial motives which could not long be sustained or which, if sustained, would lead to the end of enterprises and to the end of the civilization founded upon them. But perhaps lucid observers will forestall the disaster, if they discover early enough that certain meritorious sentiments have above all the effect of discouraging the spirit of enterprise, thereby making unrealizable the dream of universal happiness which is current above all among those who do not produce. For them, civilization resides essentially in their words. They do not realize that they could neither speak nor even subsist a single instant as civilized people, with all the refinements that this entails, without those self-interested enterprises before which they veil their faces. More realistic, the employees of entrepreneurs strive to obtain their share of the product, thereby confirming the self-interested nature of production. And production must indeed be self-interested, for who would make an effort if he did not count on a result? Who would put to work so many treasures, so much material and spiritual wealth, if spending them were to bring in nothing? In this sense the utilitarian and liberal doctrines have remained true. As long as there are enterprises, that is to say as long as ordinary men, who have no vocation for sainthood, can serve the public while seeking their profit, the first consciousness of the enterprise will reside in that direct and unnuanced intention which is the pursuit of profit. The day these men are forbidden to undertake in this way, they will undertake in another. They will perhaps return to practices from before civilization: they will try to place themselves at those points of social life where there is money to be picked up, the fruit of labour less and less free, and they will spend in ruses and exactions the energy which could have been spent on production and progress.

Personal interest, or private consciousness of the enterprise.

Before a public consciousness could be brought into being or developed in enterprises, enterprises had first to be found already instituted. Now these institutions proceeded from an initiative which had its meaning in itself. The meaning of that initiative was personal interest. In that interest resided the private consciousness of the enterprise. It was later believed that one could undertake without this private consciousness: theories of the motivation of the act of undertaking now include political will. This element is used to explain the birth, in new countries, of enterprises which supposedly owe nothing to the private initiative of foreign entrepreneurs. But perhaps an analysis of the real facts, bringing to light all the interests interwoven in these national initiatives, would lead one to recognize private interests in them, either directly economic or political. Such interweavings, moreover, already existed in classic, long-established enterprises. All the more reason to say that, as an initiative, the enterprise must profit those who undertake it, whether they bring their capital to it, or commit public wealth to it, or offer their inventions, their ideas, their prestige or the facilities of power. And there is no example of the profit obtained not being expressed in figures. In the end, it is the enterprise which, by its activity, generates this profit, whoever its beneficiaries may be. The existence, in a nation, of loss-making public services is comparable to the existence, in an integrated industrial group, of establishments that produce at a loss. These losses are necessarily paid for by the surpluses of other establishments. And the whole must give a positive result. Otherwise [p. 12], private entrepreneurs or public managers would long ago have given up the game.

When one seeks to determine the motives that drive the entrepreneur, one runs the risk of confusing intentions of all kinds with the motive proper to the enterprise. It has certainly been said, very rightly, that the pursuit of profit was not unbridled and that the entrepreneur sought a moderate gain. Other aims have therefore been assigned to the enterprise, in the hope of discovering them through psychological analysis. But to say that the pursuit of profit is not boundless in no way means that economic profit is not the proper aim of the enterprise. Quite the contrary. It is precisely because the intention of the enterprise is profit — in the financial sense of the word — that the entrepreneur pursues it with moderation. His pursuit is moderated by the rules of the operation. He is like the card player who knows how many tricks he can reasonably hope to take, given his hand.

So little is it ignored that the industrial enterprise essentially produces wealth that every service rendered to it is charged for. The most disinterested find it natural to receive their cheque once they consider that they have helped, by some contribution or other, towards the success of the enterprise. And politicians are certainly paid out of public funds, but they cannot be unaware that the State Treasury is fed either by national production or by the contribution of foreign productions. It is therefore not only their prestige but also their wealth that grows with the profit of enterprises. But some may take a closer interest in particular initiatives, temporary or lasting: public works, the operation of communication routes or of sources of raw materials.

Apart from their quarrels with the tax authorities, those who openly draw their profit from enterprises of which they are the promoters or the moving spirits represent, in society, the men whose lives are least complicated. Their employees share in this simplicity, spoilt, however, by the conviction of being exploited or by the feeling of insecurity. All the others, drawing more or less, closely or remotely, on the profit of enterprises, occupy a false position in society. Some must conceal their too close ties with industry. Others, who profit from it and who, moreover, provide society with some honourable activity, do not realize that in a less productive society this activity would also be less well paid. They hide from themselves the industrial source of their well-being and despise or ignore the industrial enterprise. The mere mention of economic activity can go so far as to produce, in certain circles, a sense of unease: to speak of it seems an indiscretion, as if it were a family secret or a bodily function. All the more so if one speaks of the enterprise bluntly, as I have wished to do here, that is to say by reducing its original meaning to that economic form of personal interest which is strictly financial profit. One finishes scandalizing one's audience or one's readers when one asserts, to begin with, that the enterprise is destined to remain essentially this pursuit of profit and that it is precisely with this original stain that it generates and sustains civilization; that none of those who share in civilization can virtuously dissociate himself from this first sin; and that no one can hope to extend the benefits of civilization except by accepting the existence of self-interested industrial initiatives, or even by encouraging them.

[p. 13] But once one has dared — even if this reality might displease some — to see and say how things stood with enterprises and their private consciousness, one is in a position to show that enterprises are also something else and to propose the means that have made it possible to bring into being within them a consciousness of a new kind.

From the private to the public consciousness of the enterprise.

The enterprise has a meaning for entrepreneurs. Does it have a meaning for workers? How is one to pass from the meaning of the enterprise to the meaning of work? It is enterprise bonuses that have served as the means of effecting this passage. In the aftermath of the Second World War, as in the aftermath of the First, a social advance had taken shape. In 1918 it was the eight-hour day; in 1946 it was certainly Social Security, but also the participation of the staff in the results of the enterprise.

At the time, this idea was bound to fail, because it did not then have the technical means to be realized. Recourse was had either to profit-sharing, long since outmoded, or to anarchic improvisations. For some years now the technique of enterprise remunerations has been ready, but the goodwill of nations towards the advancement of the condition of the working class now seems exhausted.

Certainly, technical progress of itself creates the means of distributing the goods produced to ever wider circles of consumers. But the problem of interest in daily work in the enterprise is not thereby solved. Far from it, for the increased means of enjoyment turn the mind towards leisure, in comparison with which work seems ever more a chore.

Today, the whole spotlight of propaganda and preaching is turned on the gifts which industrial societies ought to grant to the underdeveloped peoples. The men who work in these societies are quite forgotten. Or, if one wishes to attribute a meaning to their work, it is now only the meaning of a philanthropic undertaking. Industrial societies as a whole, and each worker within them, would have no other aim than to relieve the misery of the world and to appease its hunger. However generous and uplifting this destination may be, it makes one lose sight of the concrete and immediate end of the particular work supplied by the enterprise. And there is perhaps here a new form of alienation.

Besides, work no more has its true meaning in final selfish consumption than in the altruistic sharing of that consumption. Work is essentially production. If, while working, one thinks of earning money for oneself or for the starving of the various continents, one is thinking not of concrete work but of abstract gain; the nature of the work and what one has in view to produce become a matter of indifference.

Yet what must be obtained or distributed is products, not money. Money is only a means and a sign. It matters greatly, therefore, [p. 14] that such and such goods be produced, and not that one acquit oneself of a chore which is supposed to provide the money to live and to keep others alive, or to consume and to be charitable. (1)

(1) Now the attention of the legislator in France seems to have turned once again towards wage-earners. Under the label of a slogan that claims to be revolutionary, “participation,” a deferred annual distribution of the taxable profit to the staff is being made compulsory. By these provisions, imbued with an ideology more than a hundred years old, the foundations of the enterprise as an initiative are being undermined, while the express aspirations of wage-earners concerning the enterprise as an institution are not satisfied.

These measures accentuate the divisions and the struggles of private and abstract interests instead of directing everyone’s efforts towards the concrete production to be supplied in the general interest. The justification of these criticisms will be found in the work as a whole.

Nonetheless, these humanitarian perspectives have halted the movement which, even with procedures of insufficient technique, was directed towards the true solution of the human problems of work. The technique now exists, and it is ready for the day when public attention turns once more towards this solution.

A remarkable fact: whereas the idea of an effort towards greater productivity, which barely appears in 1946, flourished in the following years, this notion too has now lost much of its interest, if not in enterprises, at least in the eyes of public opinion.

Besides, public opinion has for some time turned away from economic questions. Its guides, in the parties or in the churches, have more readily put moral questions to the fore. In France, interest in political economy had been a hard-won conquest of the nineteen-thirties. Historians had experienced the fruitfulness of the materialist conception of history. The workers’ trade unions had succeeded in freeing economic relations from their whole ethical and sentimental matrix.

These conquests did not withstand the grave moral problems raised by the war and its aftermath. However, the needs of reconversion and reconstruction revived, in the immediate post-war period, this ever-threatened economic interest. It was the era of productivity, during which the doctrine of enterprise bonuses was worked out.

It became possible to institute enterprise bonuses when one could observe, in enterprises, the existence of interests of the operation, different from the interests of management corresponding to the private consciousness of the enterprise, and different also from the many individual interests present in the enterprise, the interests of each wage-earner, the interests of each director. It was realized that a new sensitivity could be brought into being in the wage-earner, that he could be made sensitive to the interests of the operation.

The notion of sensitivity is closely related to the notion of interest. Any interest whatever directs a man’s mind so as to make him grasp events in a certain sense. From then on, he is sensitive to differences, to changes; he attributes definite values to things and facts. Thus the interest of individual gain makes one sensitive to quantitative differences, to the rhythm of payments, to the [p. 15] relations between the wage and the toil it remunerates. The interest of the operation, to begin with, is purely objective; it is assumed or designated by no one; it cannot even be called an interest; it is merely what concerns the operation, what can influence it.

Then it is what influences it for the good, and at that point the appearance of this idea of value signals that an interest has been born, perceived only by those who run the operation according to true data.

But such an interest can be shared, and that without even considering the final value of the operation. One does not have to ask: why is it in anyone’s interest that the operation be efficient? The simple running of the operation according to the true situation presents an interest in itself. In the same way, the driver of a vehicle does not enter into the plans of the passengers, into the motives each had for taking that vehicle. The driver’s attention is directed solely towards efficient driving, which requires that he be sensitive to a certain number of signals.

The staff employed by an enterprise are not charged with “running” the operation, but it is they who operate; they must therefore, according to their level, take or carry out decisions that affect the proper running of that operation. The enterprise bonus gave each colleague an individual interest in this objective interest. It was accompanied by information which brought out the true data on the basis of which decisions were taken. It therefore explained those decisions and gave its reason for being to the work of execution.

Thus a new definition of the enterprise emerged. As an initiative, it consisted in the pursuit of an economic profit. But this initiative instituted a stable set of means of production operated by a working community. As an institution, the enterprise consisted in the operation in common, by men, of material means.

To the management of the enterprise with a view to profit was added the operation of goods with a view to production. The pursuit of a personal monetary gain by the entrepreneur and by his colleagues became subordinate to the collective realization of a concrete product, thing or service. The consciousness of the enterprise as an initiative is private. But the consciousness of the enterprise as an institution is public, not because it belongs to the State, but because it is the consciousness of a collective activity. Associated entrepreneurs never have anything but private interests. Even the interest of their company, which goes beyond their individual interests, is a private interest of appropriation. But men who work in common share, independently of the private interest concerning their personal gain, in a public interest, the interest of the operation.

A public consciousness of the enterprise exists in all enterprises, without an enterprise bonus and without information. Indeed, man can take part in events through conscious acts. Here it is a matter of practical acts, and even of acts of production. We observe in the enterprise men in the act of producing, and therefore of acting consciously. They know what they are doing, but each is not conscious [p. 16] only of his own activity: “In every act, consciousness is common” (2). Each is therefore conscious of the activity of the others, and if the activity is, as in the enterprise, essentially common, all the more will it be accompanied, in all those who take part in it, by a consciousness that admits community from the outset. Now this consciousness is identical with intelligence, for it is intelligence that is at work in practical projects, just as much as in the consideration of theoretical objects. It is in this way that workers understand their work.

(2) Milka Lodetti. “Genèse de la matière” (existence, expression, extériorité), Paris, 1967. Propositions 30-45-63 (2) Ibid. Prop. 31.

There is thus a first consciousness of production and, in a sense, a first public consciousness of the enterprise as an operation. But this consciousness is not imbued with rationality, which may seem particularly unfortunate in a domain where activity is rational by nature, although what is still only a characteristic needs to develop and to be perfected.

Family relations being essentially affective and not rational, it is not of the first importance that the consciousness of these relations be rationalized; it may even be only partly desirable. But production, as a practical activity, puts concepts to work and, as an economic activity, it considers with clarity the problem of the relations between means and an end, that is to say the problem of utility.

Concern for informing the staff leads to a rational awareness of the enterprise, to a social pedagogy.

From then on, reason is here concerned in the highest degree. The intuitive consciousness of production is an economic reason unaware of itself, which must be revealed to itself through a knowledge of the enterprise. This reason is unaware of itself in those who do not engage in economic calculation. These are essentially the operatives. But when management tries to inform them of this calculation and of its results, it notices that it sees more clearly itself, for it has had to make the elements and methods of the calculation precise and logical. It followed that, previously, the consciousness of the enterprise as an operation, in management itself, had not yet reached the highest possible — and soon desirable — degree of rationality.

For example, if one considers the principle of a correspondence eliminating time between the receipts and the expenditures of a production — a principle which, it seems, no one had ever thought of before — it appears at first as a logical requirement. (3) It is quite absurd to compare with a given production expenditures which were not occasioned by that production. But then one perceives, behind the logical requirement, a pedagogical concern, a concern for communication which, if one likes, is still logical, in the sense that the logos is speech, whereas in the calculation itself it was reason and connection.

(3) André Boyer and Jacques Dubois. “Traité complet des primes d’entreprise.” Paris 1958, p. 145 ff.

[p. 17] At the basis of the doctrine, then, there is a postulate. The logical, the rational, is also the only thing communicable. It is the only thing intelligible, even to those who are not competent. This deep conviction, which united the inventors of enterprise bonuses in their action, was stated by them in a kind of aphorism:

Who sows truth reaps intelligence. (4)

(4) “Le partage des biens de civilisation dans les entreprises.” (“Producteurs”) Paris 1953, p. 157.

One might, of course, wish to refute this principle by observing that what men “understand” is precisely almost never what is “logical” and, conversely, that high rationality remains uncomprehended by the many. But, as to the first point, is accepting the absurd a form of understanding? And, as to the second, has anyone really tried to bring the rational within reach of the reason of the many by studying the pedagogy of the true?

Here we come to the whole philosophy of the consciousness of the enterprise. Not only does the enterprise, like every existence, have its truth, more or less knowable, that is to say more or less reducible to concepts, to systems of propositions. But, further, the enterprise is essentially the place of logic, in that it is the place of economic calculation.

One may even say that the more the enterprise as a financial adventure evolves towards the enterprise as an activity of production, the more logic takes precedence within it over intuition. We are here in a privileged place for the knowledge of truth through the reciprocal adequation of concept and reality; we are, moreover, in a privileged place for communication or, as people say today ad nauseam, but also indiscriminately, for “dialogue.”

Not everything that is taken for dialogue is dialogue, if it is true that the interlocutors all talk more or less unreasonably and scarcely understand one another. But a dialogue about production and about profit is a true dialogue, since here a purely rational thought addresses itself to reason. We are then in the case foreseen and hoped for by Leibniz. A day will come, he says, when, instead of arguing, people will take a pencil and a piece of paper and say: “Gentlemen, let us calculate” (5). A great and fine saying, which announced not only the whole mathematical apparatus of the contemporary sciences, not only logical calculus, not only calculating machines, but also industrial calculation and the access of all producers to an understanding of industry.

(5) L’année des techniques salariales en France, 1950. “Des primes de productivité aux primes collectives.” (“Producteurs”). “Une prime de productivité doit être une prime collective.” (article also published in the Revue française du travail) p. 35.

The enterprise ought therefore to become the place of dialogue and, perhaps later, following this example, a truly reasonable dialogue would be instituted among men, on questions where reason would first know its object by making it. But this progress presupposed that the pedagogy of this kind of communication be studied, a pedagogy of reason and of truth.

[p. 18] It is such a pedagogy that we propose to make known in the chapters that follow, for it has now been worked out; it results from a long labour of practice and reflection, always inspired by a certain philosophy. There is in it a confidence in human reason which may well be called rationalism. But it is a new rationalism, first because it is constituted at a privileged point where reason is active before being cognizant, and then precisely because it is a rationalism in which theory follows practice and does not precede it.

In this domain there is no question of applied science, far from it. The rational foundation is provided by action itself. Theory does not have to introduce reason, concept or meaning; it finds them. And intelligibility is no longer a scientific problem; it is only a pedagogical problem, solved in principle, since the meaning being proposed is, of itself, communicable. Research therefore bears on the best way of achieving this communication. Pedagogical intelligibility flows from practical intelligence; the consciousness of the enterprise flows from knowledge of it.

In other words, to those who raise a pedagogical problem, a problem of communication, one ought to say: “First do something intelligent, and you will be able to teach it, that is to say make it intelligible, communicate it to the intelligence.”

This “do” has only a practical meaning. It would not be a matter, for example, of constructing an intellectual system, a theory concerning reality. It would be a matter of introducing into existence new realities which were rational. And these realities could be made graspable, from within, by human reason. In this way a consciousness of this enterprise would be created.

The natural sciences have succeeded in feigning a reason in what is not the work of human art. It is a reason that is often very complex and accessible only to initiates. In these disciplines pedagogy popularizes, when it does not set out to initiate slowly.

But the reason of industrial enterprises is much simpler, although it is more refined than one thinks when one sees them from afar. One heads in a theoretical direction when, considering the enterprise from outside, one believes one can introduce an explanatory reason into it, in the form, for example, of the famous marginalist calculation which managers or operators supposedly use without knowing it. The reason of enterprises is not explanatory; it is realizing. Without denying economists, who conceive their science on the model of the natural sciences, the right to “rationalize,” to “conceptualize” theoretically and from outside the running of enterprises, it is permissible to practise directly, for that running, a rationality which renders transparent and communicable the events or acts proper to the operation.

It is permissible also to suggest that one of the possible paths of the so-called human sciences, which would better be called the sciences of man, starts from a rational conduct in the domain under consideration, provided that the object lends itself to it.

[p. 19] This rationality will of itself supply theoretical science with the concepts it needs. Theory would here offer the possibility of understanding to those who do not act but who, coming after the event, contemplate.

Rational practice would thus be the starting point of a social pedagogy. It would radiate its rationality over the whole social group, producing perhaps, step by step, in other domains, a rational conduct.

This work is a first attempt in that direction. The domain, here, is the enterprise. Having cooperated in my modest way, but above all having witnessed the elaboration of certain principles of rationality in the running of the enterprise, and having seen moreover how, within the enterprise, and for the use of those who were nonetheless actors in this rational practice, a pedagogy of this practice could be worked out, I should like to make the theory of it, for a more broadly social pedagogy. My work is an essay in pedagogy addressed to the masters. It communicates the rationality and intelligibility of enterprises to those who stand outside.

Here, then, is the order which led from the first practical conceptions to this theoretical communication:

1° To realize reason, through industrial calculation, in the running of productive operations.

2° This, with a view to arousing, in managers as in operatives, the consciousness of the enterprise.

3° Thanks to this rationality, to communicate industrial truth to the colleagues of the enterprise.

4° To do so, they are given an interest in the industrial gain by means of an enterprise bonus.

5° And they are informed of the progress of the operation by using the industrial calculation which serves as the basis for calculating an enterprise bonus.

6° Hence a complete and systematic pedagogy of information, which has reached maturity after long years of study.

7° The principles of industrial calculation and of the pedagogy of industrial information are communicable to the society that lies outside the enterprise. But in fact they have so far been communicated, through writings and lectures, only with a view to their practical use in a growing number of enterprises.

8° For the first time a theory of the question is attempted, that is to say a communication outside industrial circles, and hence a communication to society, to increase its knowledge, and not directly with a view to a practical use.

This is a primary pedagogical act for the pedagogical diffusion of this reason throughout society.

9° The aim of this pedagogical action is, besides the disinterested education of reason in all those who will receive this communication directly or indirectly [p. 20], the possibility of future practical applications, by way of contagion, in other domains.

The public consciousness of the enterprise, starting point of a social metaphysics founded on reason and on the dignity of the worker.

The principle of this whole action is a “social metaphysics” which rejects the notion of human masses and the irrationality of the psychological actions which that notion entails. Certainly, reason is not equally at work in every human life and in every moment of a human life. But if one speaks to man, let it always be by regarding him as a person, that is to say, a reasonable individual. If one recommends actions to him, it must be by providing him with the means of carrying them out as a man, that is to say, as a free and reasonable subject. This, it seems, is even one of the principles of democracy.

It is good that the sociologist should describe, record and analyse all the categories of human acts, from the more to the less rational, logical, reasonable. A place might be made for a sociology of the rational which, detecting in human experience acts in which reason is at work, would bring them forward, proposing them for reflection, perhaps for imitation.

In the human sciences indifference is praiseworthy, but only up to a certain point. Perhaps one ought to create in them a zone of non-indifference, which would be the properly philosophical zone. But whether it be philosophy or science, the thing to which neither is indifferent is reason.

Anthropology is patient and, in that sphere, reason observes without flinching what is not reasonable. But it has resigned itself too quickly and, above all, it has not seen clearly enough that this resignation would breed ever more irrational conduct. By dint of observing, and of letting men know, that they were not guided by reason, they have been resigned to their folly. Those who have wished to act upon men have speculated on passion and unreason and, in this, they have scarcely innovated. That is why politics lags so far behind physics. In politics, the one who succeeds is still the most cunning, with that good, coarse cunning whose whole science is summed up in the proverbial wisdom of nations.

But in politics the humblest citizen holds, in private, views that contain more reason than is shown by the general conduct of affairs of State. The sum of these private reasons makes public unreason. This deplorable effect is explained by the character of the supreme reason of State, which is now no more than the science of the proper use of the irrational, games of force, games of passion.

The day when, in the State as in one of the enterprises that apply the new methods, men are the calculators and no longer the elements of the calculation, it will also be only a matter of a calculation about material forces. The cunning of the primitive and of the man of the world will find less employment there.

As long as the human sciences confine themselves to observing what is, it is hard to see how they could become a source of progress in reason and in morals.

[p. 21] Yet a science is theory; it observes. It remains, then, that practice, in certain domains, should install the rational and the just, in such a way that theory may afterwards bring this reason, this justice, into view, spread them abroad, and thus cultivate the little reason and justice that each man possesses within him.

To show man his passions: such is the role of the human sciences when they observe with indifference that mixture of barbarism and civilization which man is, in the conduct and in the societies that appear most civilized. To show him his reason and his justice, to make him see also that they are something other than a demand and an ideal: such would be the role of essays like this one. They would consist essentially, after having introduced reason and justice into a certain practice, in revealing them to the outside world.

But this purpose presupposes, in collective life, a moral dimension which demands a metaphysical attitude. If one is to call “social physics” a study of collective life which treats it from outside as a nature, one will have to call “social metaphysics” any study that brings in the moral dimension. If sociology wishes one day to solve the practical problems of life in common, it must look again at the individual existence which it had lost sight of because it considered each whole en bloc. A moral problem is felt as such only if it calls into question the proper meaning of personal existence.

To consider the moral dimension of collective life is, above all, to descend from the shapeless and massive level of the crowd to finer structures, where the individual takes shape. And, within the individual himself, to go in search of the invisible, what is farthest from the zones open to indifferent observation: his consciousness and perhaps his suffering.

The one who works would like to be able to take an interest in what he does and to be considered for what he does. His suffering is almost always due to the non-satisfaction of one of these needs, often of both together. It is to interest him in his work that one decides to pay him according to the results to which he contributes, and to inform him about the progress of the enterprise. But above all these are marks of consideration. At bottom, if I write, it is in order to claim consideration for every individual. And that is the deep meaning of social metaphysics.

What makes work morally painful is also ignorance of economic realities, blindness to the benefits of technical progress and to its possibilities for the future. Perhaps this ignorance is maintained by adherence to a fixed ideology which fills the mind and takes the place of thought. In other periods religion may have played an analogous role. Both are superstition and “obscurantism” when they obstruct reason and intelligence instead of cultivating them. But only concern for the individual leads one to want to cultivate his reason and his intelligence. All pedagogy, even when exercised on groups, is individualist. And it may further be that, more deeply, individual consciousness is torn today between the true meaning of present events, between the upright intention of present action, and the systematic interpretations flowing from the complicated and outworn conceptions that are current in society and which society, at every opportunity, imposes in a constraining way.

[p. 22] The procedures of industrial calculation, the enterprise bonus and the information that accompanies it are liberating for this individual consciousness, because they replace ready-made ideas in it with the consciousness of the enterprise. This is, for each person, a way of living the reality that he helps to make. The consciousness of the enterprise is truly public because it opens onto the whole of economic and social reality. Through it the human mind conquers, in the seriousness of daily work, the entire field of its beneficent action. The reason that is exercised in the creation of the consciousness of the enterprise is a human reason, whose sole concern is man.

The method of this study was worked out together with the very method that created the consciousness of the enterprise. This method had to avoid two pitfalls. Indeed, when our society wishes to solve human problems, it runs the risk of falling into two opposite vices: lack of rigour or excess of rigour. One lacks rigour when one believes that the presence of man makes all calculation impossible, so that one loses oneself in sentiment, in commonplace psychology, and becomes ineffective. With excellent intentions one can even, in this way, do a great deal of harm. One applies excessive rigour when one adopts the frame of mind of an unfeeling technician, of a professional organizer who sees in the enterprise, at worst, a source of income and, at best, a mechanism to be perfected in an exclusively mechanical direction. Moreover, as soon as techniques of collective life are concerned, there also arises the temptation of applied psychology or applied sociology. Having constituted, on the model of pure or fundamental physics, general categories and laws, one hopes to apply them to particular cases. One is then a psychologist and a sociologist as one is an accountant, a time-study man, a specialist in transport, in planning equipment or in punched-card accounting. Everything is brought down to the level of indifferent practical ideas.

Is there, then, no middle way between sentiment and a materialist and externalizing technique? To deny it is to underestimate the capacities of civilized man or, rather, to fail to take a complete inventory of them. On the one hand, he is capable of calculating vigorously, wherever his object lends itself to calculation and even demands it; so, in the institution of enterprise bonuses, one does not refrain from calculating, while demanding of oneself the greatest possible precision and the greatest accuracy. And he is also made capable, by the education he receives, which has been called the “humanities,” of understanding his fellow man. This understanding cannot be put into an equation, but its method is transmissible, provided that it is taught, by masters who practise it consciously and who have established its principles, to pupils who agree, at the same time, to refine themselves. The means of this refinement are study, self-knowledge, observation of the world, the cultivation of the fine arts and of poetry, and effort directed towards the good.

It has rightly been said that the acceleration of technical progress was due chiefly to the communicability of methods in the sciences. It is certain that such methods can be communicated while remaining on the surface of the mind, as long as this pedagogy does not aim at the formation of great researchers and true scientists.

By contrast, “human techniques,” except those of a psychological action exercised by material means, do not advance quickly, for if one wishes to cultivate in [p. 23] a man the understanding of man, one must penetrate into consciousness, one must develop the spontaneity of the intelligence and of the heart, by carrying through a whole moral education. One must bring the future “humanist” to cease thinking of himself, to cease shutting himself up in his desires, his aversions and his grudges. Let him think less of judging others than of awakening their interest, whoever they may be. All this is done slowly, and it would be the object of a basic teaching which, at the same time, ought to teach pupils intellectual rigour through the acquisition of a mental toolkit: languages, mathematics and logic, historical criticism, observation and experimentation, research, the definition of concepts.

It was deliberately that the inventors of enterprise bonuses introduced humanist requirements into their methods. Far from being added to the technique from outside, they formed part of it. That is perhaps one of the causes of the difficulty this technique has had in gaining acceptance. Rightly, its successes have been attributed to the personality of its inventors. They, like many leaders, seem to possess a secret which they cannot transmit and which makes them irreplaceable. But, after all, this secret is transmissible, and it is to contribute to its transmission that I write. There is here a virtue which must be capable of being taught. And it is perhaps not indispensable that it be taught by living example and by frequenting the master. The principles of a “human” conduct can be thought and formulated. They have been, in the various writings from which the present work seeks to draw the conclusions and the consequences for general use.

The practical rationalism which it attempts to propose is in no way opposed to the intuitive method. On the contrary, it calls for it, less because the reason in question here is practical before being theoretical than because of the intuitive character of every intelligent act. What is to be conquered for our wisdom in every domain of thought and conduct is perhaps a simple view, a central position from which thought radiates with ease, travelling through the detail of the concrete not by blind groping but in clarity. To reach such a view one must take the side of life; where man is concerned, one must cease to pretend that human inwardness can be assimilated to an external nature; one must give up an affected coldness that passes itself off as objectivity. But true objectivity towards man is never too warm.

To preach good sentiments and humanitarian conduct to men is perhaps still only to speculate politically on their psychology and to make men, with their passions and their ideas, the elements of a calculation.

But it is dealing humanely with men to associate them with an industrial calculation, in order to give a logical meaning to their daily work and, by freeing them from the private interest that imprisoned them or from the ideas that paralysed them, to open them to the consciousness of the enterprise in its generous activity.