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

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.

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."