Liberalism and Rationalism at the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1902–1903

This article reconstructs and analyzes a debate on “the crisis of liberalism” that took place in a prominent philosophy journal, the Revue de me´taphysique et de morale, in 1902–3. The debate was actuated by combiste anticlerical measures and the apparently liberal demand made by Catholics for freedom of instruction. Participants—all hostile to the church—sought to articulate a principled, rationalist liberalism that could respond to the needs of the republic in the post-Dreyfus era. Participants—including Célestin Bouglé, Dominique Parodi, Gustave Lanson, Elie Halévy, and Paul Lapie—balanced each in their own way the demands of rationalism, democracy, and modernity. The debate opens a window onto the transition between the Second Empire’s dissident, neo-Kantian, liberal republicanism and the antitotalitarian liberalism that Hale´vy and his student Raymond Aron would articulate in the interwar years