Industrial Religion

• Book: La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise. Pierre Musso. Fayard, 2017

URL = https://www.fayard.fr/livre/la-religion-industrielle-9782213701806/

Description

1. From the publisher:

"Industry is a worldview and not just a historical phenomenon. Before being about machinery, it is a vast intellectual mechanism. We live and believe in the "Industrial Revolutions" that have multiplied over the past two centuries.

This work offers an anthropological and philosophical reflection of the West on itself. This "Western selfie" reveals its powerful industrial religion, never before recognized as such.

Industry absorbs everything. It upholds the cultural architecture of the West. The West indeed has a religion. There has been no "secularization." Religion cannot disappear; it transforms. With the "Industrial Revolution," a "new techno-scientific Christianity" was formulated.

This work reveals the birth, within the Christian matrix, of a rational religion that has now become our universal belief. The industrial spirit has taken hold of the greatest mystery of Christian West, the Incarnation, and inscribed it in various great Bodies to transform the world: those of Christ, Nature, Humanity, and the Computer.

Pierre Musso explores the genealogy of the industrial religion and highlights three major bifurcations institutionalized in the monastery (11th-13th centuries), the manufactory (17th-18th), and then the factory (19th), before forming the enterprise (20th-21st). Its development has taken place over eight centuries, reaching its peak with the "managerial revolution," cybernetics, and digitization."

(https://www.fayard.fr/livre/la-religion-industrielle-9782213701806/)

2. Summary via ChatGPT:

"Pierre Musso's book "La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise" explores the deep historical roots of what he terms the "industrial religion." Musso traces the origins of industrial and capitalist ideology far earlier than Max Weber's analysis of the Protestant work ethic. He argues that the foundation of Western industrialism lies in the medieval monastic organization, which combined religious discipline with economic production. This industrial religion, evolving from monastic systems to modern enterprises, highlights the continuity between religious structures and capitalist production.

The book challenges the idea that industrial capitalism is a modern invention, instead positing that it is deeply rooted in Western religious and philosophical traditions dating back to the 12th century. Musso's work has been well-received in academic circles for its innovative approach to understanding the historical development of capitalism through a religious lens."

Review

1. Michel Bauwens:

This book was highly influential on my thinking. It is a genealogy of the religious human thought and practice that led to the establishment of the industrial capitalist model, going much further into history than Max Weber's 'Spirit of Capitalism', by tracing it to monastic practice. It's last chapter's trace how the ideas of Saint-Simon, very influential amongst the technical elite in 19th century France, evolved into the basic ideas that would become cybernetic management, and how all these ideas are ulterior developments of the original religious concepts.

2. Pierre Mœglin:

"What is industry? It is a historical phenomenon and a techno-economic reality. But first, as Pierre Musso responds, it is a state of mind. More precisely, it is a worldview based on "the dialectic of a mystery and an increasingly powerful rationality": on one side, the mystery of the Incarnation; on the other, the power of calculative reason. This dialectic is the result of industrial religion, an "institutional collage" of two "narratives": the transubstantiation of ideas into things and transformative action through science and technology. Over centuries, this collage has proven robust enough to lead the concept of industry through three successive "bifurcations": that of the monastery, where the rule embodies the alliance of faith and technical reason; that of the manufactory, where the organization combines the transformation of Nature with modern science; and finally, that of the factory and enterprise, which associates Progress with Economy. This is the thesis of this work: industry is a cosmology; this cosmology is nourished by a religion, and this religion is composed of reasons, reasoning, and rationalities as much as myths, rites, and dogmas."

(https://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/23357)

Discussion

Why the Industrial Doctrine is Religious

(translated by ChatGPT)

Pierre Mœglin:

""However, La Religion industrielle offers more than just a powerful summary of previous works; by choosing a religious approach to the industrial phenomenon, P. Musso extends his analyses and thus more clearly distinguishes himself from classical perspectives, particularly those of historians and sociologists of industry. His contributions are especially evident on three points.

Firstly, machines matter less to him than what he calls 'intellectual machinery.' This term refers to the doctrine and values underlying the industrial program—Progress, Reason, History, Civilization—which he considers more important than the technical achievements and scientific advancements that represent the development of this program. In this respect, he might readily identify with what the great historian of ancient Rome, Paul Veyne (1983: 12), wrote about the instituting function of creative imagination: 'Men do not find the truth: they make it, just as they make their history, and it serves them well.'

Furthermore, P. Musso's interest in industrial doctrine distinguishes his approach from that of most industrial historians, such as Jean Gimpel (1975), Bertrand Gille (1978), or Siegfried Giedion (1980), who are more focused on technique and infrastructure than on mentalities. Undoubtedly, he uses their materials whenever he needs them, but he does not adopt their guiding principles. And if he shows interest in Lewis Mumford (1950), another of these historians, it is only because he admires his long-term periodization. However, he retains nothing from its breakdown into three phases: 'eotechnic,' 'paleotechnic,' and 'neotechnic.'

Secondly, he does not reduce the advent of industry to the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, nor to their contemporary, managerial versions: according to him, its prodromes and premises date back to 9th-century monasticism. Indeed, it is at this time that the Christian West acquired an industrialist mindset and retained it for a long time, without making industry a stable state or a fixed reality once and for all: it is a trend, a phenomenon in the making.

This dynamic approach to the industrial fact is inspired in P. Musso by authors who are otherwise very different from each other: for example, the specialist in the political issues of industrial society Raymond Aron (1964), the Thomist philosopher and historian of medieval thought Étienne Gilson (1986), and the jurist, psychoanalyst, and anthropologist Pierre Legendre (1983). Conversely, this approach distances him from historians and economists of well-defined industrial periods, such as Patrick Verley (1997) or David S. Landes (2000). Moreover, he only mentions them occasionally, while he takes care to emphasize his debt to the legal historian Harold J. Berman (2002), from whom he borrows the transhistorical use of the concept of the West. This 'West' does not refer here to a specific area and era, but to the civilization which, forged in Greco-Roman antiquity, gives itself a universal vocation: 'catholic,' in the etymological sense of the term.

"Thirdly, he does not limit industrialization to the production of goods; the industrial religion seems to him to primarily target the governance of people. This is why the efforts to industrially organize society appear to him as fundamentally political. This project aims to confine the state to a managerial role by deliberately minimizing or obscuring the social aspects of society. C.-H. de Saint-Simon (1966: 91), one of the main thinkers of this project, dreams of transforming the 'French Nation' into a 'great workshop.'

In this sense, he is, without knowing it, the heir to a lineage that, according to P. Musso, traces back to Saint Benedict and Saint Bernard, passes through Francis and Roger Bacon, and is later revisited, enriched, and systematized by David Hume on one side and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the other. This same lineage, after him and thanks to the influence of Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians, drives the formation of the civil engineering corps, then encourages the practitioners of scientific work organization, and finally influences the planners of the 20th and 21st centuries.

To account for the industrial doctrine in these terms and, through it, to study industry as a total social fact, as P. Musso does, requires rigorous methodological choices. These choices lead him to draw on authors rarely associated with each other, such as the art historian Erwin Panofsky, the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, a specialist (notably) in the role of technology in culture, as well as major figures of the Annales School, Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby, and Jacques Le Goff. What these authors have in common, and what they share with Michel Foucault—seldom cited but implicitly present throughout the work—is the emphasis they place on the dual genealogical and epistemological dimension presiding over the formation of dominant ideas. In this case, the idea that seeks to assert itself is that of an industrial regime, a process and system of thought claiming the status of a mode of governance.

The reference to an industrial government is present, for example, in C.-H. de Saint-Simon when he includes the famous maxim on the cover of his pamphlet 1ère Opinion politique des industriels: 'All by industry, all for it.' This reference reappears to characterize the current industrial stage in the mention of 'algorithmic governmentality' by Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns (2010). P. Musso, for his part, prefers the term 'governance by numbers,' which he owes to the legal scholar and philosopher of law Alain Supiot (2015), who himself borrowed it from the statistician historian Alain Desrosières (2008).

Thus, according to him, the industrial doctrine is situated at the intersection of theology and political economy. His religious approach has nothing to do with the technical, economic, or social viewpoints adopted by industry specialists like François Caron (1997) or François Crouzet (2000). Similarly, his complementary genealogical and epistemological reading of industry opposes Marxist and post-Marxist theories, such as those of the economist Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter (1999) and the historian of globalized capitalism Immanuel Wallerstein (1980), the latter being entirely absent from La Religion industrielle. According to these theories, the industrial stage reached by Europe and North America can be explained by the conjunction of a powerful movement in favor of innovation and a significant phenomenon of capital accumulation.

Furthermore, P. Musso's reading also tacitly opposes characterizations of capitalism based on just one of its dimensions, whether industrial or post-industrial (Touraine, 1969). He also minimizes, or even outright rejects, interpretations such as that of the specialist in comparative history Kenneth Pomeranz (2010), which argue that the 'great divergence' of the West relative to China is due to the proximity of coal mines and large industrial centers in Great Britain, as well as the availability of colonial land. Similarly, this reading de facto dismisses the explanation, recently in vogue, proposed by the geographer and biologist Jared Diamond (2006) and by those who, following him, emphasize the ecological and demographic factors of industrial development in certain countries and its delay in others."

(https://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/23357)

More information

* PhD Thesis: Suriano, Benjamin, "From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body: A Labor Theory of Revolutionary Subjectivity & Religious Ideas" (2016). Dissertations (1934 -). 628.

URL = https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/628

"A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 2016."

• Interview (podcast) with the author, in French:https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-grande-table-2eme-partie/la-religion-industrielle-de-pierre-musso-1799968