Is it only yesterday's humanism, whether religious or secular in origin, that is dying - and is it really dying? - or is it more profoundly the very paradigm of humanity? At least it is worth asking the question. Do we not hear on every side today that everything is ‘constructed’ and ‘formated’? No inherited moral standard now seems acceptable, nor any reference to any sort of human nature or naturality. The only idea that henceforth finds acceptance is that of the infinite plasticity of the human, leaving individuals free to shape themselves as they wish beyond any commonly received standard, since only defiance of the norm seems to be the source and proof of freedom.

All of us share the same feeling of being torn between two equally impossible attitudes, namely the absurdity of resistance and the abjectness of renunciation, that is to say a feeling of surrender to the course of events and I think that it is true that we are all more or less filled with this feeling or to revert to other terminology which I will borrow from Jacques Ellul, we all have the feeling of being swept away in a haphazard process over which we no longer have any hold. In this respect, I tend to agree with Alain Caillé, that we are at the moment experiencing a shift, a transformation, a revolution - use whichever term you prefer - such as has only happened two or three times in western history and it is true that this great shift is probably comparable, to the Renaissance, say, or the fall of the Roman Empire or possibly the Enlightenment or even the Industrial Revolution in its extent, radicality and also what is enigmatic about it that for those who are experiencing it. There is a radicality in what we are experiencing which is the source of that feeling which sometimes assails us that all resistance would not only be useless but ridiculous. I intend to deconstruct, if I may so express it, this feeling of ridicule which is paralysing us and which indeed paralyses us all the more because it is exploited day after day by talk of flux in which all desires and all ethical or political voluntarism is in general described as some kind of residual archaism.

What is humanity? I do not claim to answer this question; more simply, I will seek to bring to light the now-problematic character of the very concept of humanity. I will start from a basic established fact: today we cannot conceive the notion of humanity without starting from a dual tension, between a distant past and a future which is either more or less near or very remote. In whatever direction one turns, the concept of humanity is confused. It is still more confused if we seek to embrace past and future together.

This article is intended to be both an analysis, and also an account: that of a generation of young citizens, to which I belong, which is both enthusiastic about and worried by recent advances in genetics. In the modern world mind set evolves very rapidly. In the late 1960s women demanded ‘a baby when I want!’ The right to contraception followed. Then, in the early 1970s, another slogan was heard: ‘a baby if I want.’ Shortly afterwards, a woman's right to abortion was recognized. Now, new demands are increasingly being synthesized as: ‘a baby of the kind I want.’ The spectre of eugenics is slowly and insidiously being reborn at the heart of democracy.

About fifteen years ago I took a journey through the famous work of Mary Shelley, and the interpretation of her warning call. Let me say briefly why I am interested in Mary Shelley.

At the beginning of the 80s I was invited by a journal to reflect on what was totally new at that time: the birth of children conceived asexually and outside the body by in vitro fertilization. At that time very little work existed on these issues, though they were soon to generate a great deal of ink. The only publications to have appeared were Jacques Testart's very first book, De l'éprouvette au bébé spectacle (From the test tube to the miracle baby), and René Frydman's L'irrésistible désir de naissance (The irresistible desire for birth).

The ‘dehuman’ and the inhuman are not, even partially, exterior to the human, as are the material and the living, the animal and the bestial; they represent rather the extremes, the very limits of the human. The inhuman forms the interior facet of the boundary which makes us human and concerns us as such. In that sense, it is never exterior to us.

My title is deliberately provocative. It is intended to give pause to all those - quite a few, I imagine - who are convinced that they owe nothing at all to religion in any shape or form and who, as a result, think they have lost nothing in the recent difficulties that have stripped the Christian churches of most of the hold they still retained over European society. Because it goes without saying, in today's thinking, that religion is a question of personal choice, individual participation and private belief. This is not the kind of religion I am talking about. The thesis I should like to advance is that, whatever our beliefs, church or degree of involvement, until quite recently all of us used to owe something to religion, and that we have all lost something in the enormous change which has carried us with it over the last thirty years and which, among other things, is currently completing its liquidation of the vestiges of religious organisation that remained among us. This something is directly related to the ‘dehumanisation of the world’ with which we are now so preoccupied.

The notion of ‘gentle barbarism’ was developed during our critical analysis of the discourses and mechanisms of ‘modernisation’ that emerged in the context of the movement for permanent reform (in education, the public services and business management), in which public bodies and businesses have been engaged since the 1980s. These discourses and mechanisms of modernisation seem to us to represent a blind spot where sociological analysis is concerned.

In their major book devoted to the Herbert Spencer ‘affair’, Daniel Becquemont and Laurent Mucchielli profess themselves to be quite ready to share the opinion of Georges Guille-Escuret: the 19th-century British thinker would appear to dominate ‘discreetly our spontaneous perceptions‘. The forgotten philosopher in France appears to colour the moral atmosphere of the West. He appears to be, without our knowing it, our major contemporary. The surprising lapse of memory in which his name has found itself stuck fast appears to guarantee the triumph of his ideas. To unearth his name and resubmit his work to scrutiny takes on a certain urgent character when seen from this perspective: it would mean putting the so-called ideological evidence of our time to the test of the history of ideas. To render unto Spencer that which is Spencer's would be to remove from this so-called evidence the ‘immediate and unquestionable character’ with which it invests itself.

My article has the title ‘Are there democratic values?’ In one sense the question is ironic: there are democratic values. And new ones appear every day. Nevertheless the question has a literal sense if you consider certain aspects of the regime or mode of existence of values in contemporary thought.

The idea that values are no longer what they used to be is not new: the classical line of argument on this question underlines the contrast between, on the one hand, the philosophy of the Ancients, for whom evaluation referred to a normative nature, to ideals, criteria of perfection, embedded in the order of things and, on the other, the philosophy of the Moderns, for whom we are the ones who make the decisions (we are the ones who do the evaluating). Objectivism of values on the one hand, humanist subjectivism on the other. I would like to leave aside this problem and the difficulties which it raises (notably: who is Ancient and who is Modern?), and try to approach in another way whether there is a specifically contemporary mode of being for values.

The most burning question we are faced with, in our anxiety about the possible dehumanization of the world, concerns the nature of modernity. Today's erasure of and uncertainty about norms relating to the definition of the human only go to confirm this. Indeed this is a typically modern question because it is in this civilization, which is unique in human history and which is replacing heaven with earth in the order of values, that human beings have been able to observe themselves from the outside and think that humanity could be outside itself to the extent that the idea of the ‘death of man’, the ‘end of humanity’ and now even a ‘posthumanity’ can be entertained.

I am quite prepared to admit that modern western thought is shot through with contradictions. For example, it is not coherent to think both that the idea of human nature is an illusion and that eugenics is an out-and-out evil; or to claim to be a democrat and exclude a priori the topic of eugenics from political debate. However, I personally very much doubt that the notions of nature and democracy are themselves in crisis. In my view they simply give rise to semantic confusion and false problems that certain basic twentieth-century discoveries - in the field of physics, anthropology and political science - ought to be able to clear up, if they were better known. We shall just touch on a few thinkers whose work may give us some pointers to a clearer, calmer view of things. First a philosopher, Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987), and an economist, Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), two of whose key ideas this paper will combine: a neo-Aristotelian conception of nature, implying the existence of regulating principles and norms, to which humans and their societies, like everything else, are subject; a procedural conception of democracy that says it is not an end in itself but, under certain conditions, an appropriate means of making political decisions and settling disputes. And in addition some anthropologists, who helped either to put human beings back into a neo-Aristotelian world, or to define more accurately the essence of the political: Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism gave back its full importance to the notion of formal cause and even to the idea of final cause, and André Leroi-Gourhan, who confirmed that ‘art imitates nature’ by demonstrating that technical skill is a natural extension of life, whose processes and results it mimics; Arthur Maurice Hocart, who demonstrated the ritual origin of all institutions, particularly political ones.

My topic will be philosophical and, more precisely still, ontological. If we wish to conceive of what is at stake in the ‘dehumanization of the world’ and if we want to oppose it, we need to widen our perspective and take in not only the destiny of the human but the status of things and beings in general.

The thesis I am going to put forward, which is still quite daring given the current stage of my thinking, is a hunch and a hypothesis that I am trying gradually to clarify. My theory is that there was a kind of originating decision, a primal ontological choice made by the Greco-Latin as well as the Judeo-Christian West about the way of viewing beings in general; a decision in favour of differentiated forms and against the representation of a real, supposed to be composed in the final analysis of a basic single substrate whose differentiated forms were merely states, pure appearances without substance. I am also putting forward the notion that this primal choice, which is or was our choice and remains my own, was not absolutely necessary; it was a contingent free opting in favour of something and against another possible option.

Does the existing order have any better justification than the argument that it is ‘natural’? In most of its guises the ‘nature’ argument in fact arises more often than not from an argument whose authority is questionable, since it has been used to back up many forms of tyranny, oppression and exclusion. In this sense we are quite rightly wary of this notion of human nature as used to explore the democratic ideal. If the democratic ideal is associated with the modern experience of the indeterminate and the ‘dissolution of fixed markers of certainty’ (Lefort), it seems to imply the idea of the plasticity of human nature rather more than the hypothesis of an objective human essence. As the feminist and ecology movements have taught us, the question of nature has to remain open in democracy, and open above all for democratic debate. An insistence that there are characteristics intrinsic to human nature that make humans inclined to a democratic way of life reminds us too much of Plato's ideal city or Hobbes's Leviathan. And if we criticize this type of reasoning in those who seem to us to be democracy's enemies, we can scarcely have the face to use it to justify that kind of regime.

Daniele Hervieu-Léger and Marcel Gauchet explain that today the hold that the religious dimension has always exerted over human societies is, of very recent date but definitely, slackening; that it is becoming ‘hollow’ and ceases to inspire collective action, leaving henceforth wide open the question of knowing in which name we should attempt to take our destiny in our hands and base the norms of collective being. This question at once summons up another, implicitly contained in the latter: is every ethical norm (or moral norm, for we are not making a distinction between the two concepts here) ultimately religious in origin, as is most often supposed, or can one in fact conceive of sketching the outlines of a moral code that is immanent within the social relationship, a moral code that is sufficiently coherent and self-consistent to do without, at least in theory, a religious-type transcendence? Here, I should like to make a case for the second response by emphasizing that religion - whatever meaning one bestows on this notion, still undefined today - does not constitute the primary, irreducible social and historical fact that is most often supposed, but that it should itself be interpreted as the formulation of a more original and more universal formulation: the threefold obligation of giving, receiving, and repaying distinguished by Marcel Mauss in his famous Essay on the Gift. Of course, I shall not claim here to do more than sketch a few possible lines of argument. But even before formulating them, I must call to mind two prejudicial objections that my argument has encountered.

To my mind, the most urgent current task in the social sciences is one in the context of which the unduly cut-and-dried distinctions between positive and normative, between sociology and ethics, between secular pluralism and religious spirituality, and so on, should be abandoned. I would like to reclaim the legacy of a Marxian-type dialectic by stating that the social sciences today (and I would even risk speaking of a single present-day ‘social science’) have the threefold task of (1) thinking through in depth the directions of a desirable social change, (2) asking what are the ‘resources for action’ already available for this end within the totality of social actors and (3) identifying the moral capacities that need to be stimulated and/or created so that the resources for action which are not yet available, but which are desirable under point (1), may be able to take root and flourish. I defy anyone to disentangle clearly and analytically the positive and normative parts of such a task …

If the somewhat acrimonious debate on the status of the gift that I have had with Alain Caillé for the last two years continues to hold my interest and if I have eventually overcome my irritation in the face of what has occasionally seemed to me a failure of understanding linked to the defence of an ‘article of local faith’, it is because our debate is a fundamental part of the worthwhile task of the social sciences. Nevertheless, I shall make it clear straight away that the expression ‘sociological gift’ hardly satisfies me, in the light of the description of this task which I have just supplied.

Like many interested in the gift, I have to confess to having always experienced a certain attraction for methodological individualism. Through its way of approaching social actors, methodological individualism introduces the actor's concern: what are the sound principles which account for the behaviour of the actors that are observed? This is the question which individualism compels us constantly to ask. Admittedly, its response is almost always the same: self-interest. As R.H. Frank wrote:

There are at least two ways to dehumanize the world. The world can be dehumanized from the top or from the bottom. From the bottom up would mean letting a barbaric situation develop which would reduce us to an animal state. From the top down would mean striving to achieve and impose a wisdom appropriate to the angels. Two ways of ruining the sense of what is human. Neither angel nor animal, you will recognize there the ‘in-between’ which is the site of humanity and which it is tempting, when it is threatened, to assert, for in this dehumanizing process - whether this is meant from the top or the bottom - we are the losers in both scenarios. We lose what makes humanity itself, in other words moderation, the in-between, finiteness, chance, the propensity to communicate.