Zygmunt Bauman, the thinker of liquid modernity, has left us an endless amount of books, articles, lectures, notes, and interviews that continue to be published and republished with inexhaustible interest. But the totality of his work cannot be reduced to the idea of liquidity, which was also his happiest insight and one with the most far-reaching media effect. On the contrary, Bauman radically changed the vision of sociology, and sociology has never been the same since his profound operation of reflection and reconstruction according to an innovative vision. His contribution can be related to that of at least three major exponents of sociological thought, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Charles Wright Mills, thus representing an ideal continuity of the development of sociological thought on the libertarian side.

First, Max Weber, the German scholar gave a modern twist to social studies by introducing the principle of “ethical neutrality,” or the separation of the observer from the data being analyzed, along with absolute objectivity in examining the results.

His studies tended toward objective and impartial detachment from social analysis, with the aim of maintaining a scientific approach, in the spirit of modern culture proper to the early twentieth century.

2.1. Preliminary Remarks

To a certain extent, the duties of investment arbitrators do not substantially differ from those of commercial arbitrators. Indeed, the proceedings are remarkably similar, and, as will be seen in this chapter, there is a significant overlap between what is required of commercial arbitrators and what is necessary, in terms of personal and professional qualifications, to sit in an ICSID tribunal or in another arbitral tribunal hearing a dispute between an investor and a host state. Independence, impartiality and respecting the confidentiality of proceedings are all characteristics of any arbitrator, regardless of the nature of the dispute brought before them. While the literature on these aspects (especially impartiality and independence) is sufficiently developed, the personal qualities of investment arbitrators have been seldom discussed in the context of a tribunal; and even though the international commercial arbitral case-law is slightly richer in instances in which the personal characteristics of arbitrators have been addressed, the confidentiality of arbitral awards makes it quite hard to conduct a systematic study of what are all the principles applicable to the conduct of an arbitrator. There is, moreover, no explicit provision in the ICSID Convention – or, in fact, in other international law instruments – analytically addressing the principles governing the conduct of investment arbitrators. The International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) have jointly developed a Code of Conduct for Arbitrators in International Investment Disputes, which establishes principles and guidelines to ensure arbitrators’ independence and impartiality, as well as their obligation to conduct proceedings with integrity, fairness, efficiency and respect.

Unlike many sociologists who have preferred to construct an organic and defined system of thought, Zygmunt Bauman is never systematic: he lets himself be carried away by the solicitations of the moment, ready to grasp the signs and tendencies, but always free of any coercion, any self-imposition, any academic obligation. His thought, multiform and complex, can nevertheless be traced back to five fundamental matrices: the holocaust, Marxism, social marginalization, liquidity, and modernity. All unified and, so to speak, held together by a universal glue that represents his most characteristic trait, modernity. Modernity, loved and criticized, excavated and turned inside out, analyzed in depth, is the hallmark of his work, which makes it—together with Max Weber, the other great modern thinker—the necessary complement for understanding our time.

It is no coincidence that this volume starts with Weber and ends with Bauman, marking an intense and tragic century of history, full of dramatic upheavals, accompanied by an unprecedented series of innovations, scientific discoveries, and social and economic changes, which have become the subject of sociological analysis. More so than in the nineteenth century, when it was born from a rib of philosophy, within Auguste Comte's Course of Positive Philosophy, sociology was later able to find the right tools to understand social change.

Introduction

In 2017, the Australian government surveyed the Australian people on whether they supported a change to the law to allow same-sex marriage. Despite the non-binding nature of the survey, there was a widespread expectation that the government would implement the result. In the end, more than 60 per cent of survey participants voted ‘Yes’. On the day that the result was announced, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared: ‘The people have voted “Yes” for marriage equality, now it's our job to deliver it’ (Turnbull 2017). A few weeks later, the Commonwealth Parliament amended the Marriage Act 1961 (Cth) to make same-sex marriage lawful.

The marriage survey illustrates one of the curious features of the advisory referendum, or ‘plebiscite’ as the device is often called in Australia.2 The result is not binding on the parliament but may nonetheless be treated as if it is. Lawmakers remain free to respond as they wish, but there is a strong political incentive for the parliament to act in line with the result, as disregarding it could risk a severe backlash from voters. For this reason, some view the plebiscite as ‘effectively binding’ (Gallagher 1996, 246). Viewed in this way, the plebiscite can be seen as a device that empowers citizens and, potentially, weakens parliaments (Suksi 1996; Psycharis 2022, 233).

However, others challenge the idea that plebiscites are politically binding and question their value as a mechanism for citizen participation in the making of policy decisions. They point to examples where advisory votes have been ignored by political actors (Cheneval and El-Wakil 2018). Some view plebiscites as nothing more than official opinion polls given that they provide a mechanism for people to express a view on a policy proposal but deny them the final say (noted by Setälä 1999, 87). And it is said that advisory votes, if anything, empower politicians at the expense of citizens, as political actors remain free to manipulate the results to their own advantage (Cheneval and El-Wakil 2018). On this account, the plebiscite offers an illusion of popular control but preserves the power of political elites.

This chapter investigates which of these two accounts of the plebiscite is most applicable to Australia. It does this by examining the immediate aftermath of the 44 plebiscites that have been held by federal, state and territory governments since federation in 1901.

Back to Contingency

For Plato, human reason “sees” abstract ideas and concepts that are necessary, whereas concrete objects and appearances of objects, as long as their existence is not explained through reason, are contingent. Real is only what can be rationally explained. Laplace's determinism continued to build upon these convictions. But despite the popularity of this powerful paradigm, science and philosophy never entirely neglected the idea of contingency. On the contrary, it remained a relevant philosophical topic during a time span ranging from Aristotle to Descartes. As mentioned, Aristotle was opposed to any deterministic denial of contingency: coincidences were not just subjective perceptions but real. Aristotle even created an ontology of contingency in which an aggregative totality called “the world” was composed of both necessary essences and contingent beings. For centuries, contingency would be discussed along these lines, and most of the time, this happened in theological contexts. It is only after Descartes that contingency would disappear from major philosophical debates—though not because it had been scientifically solved, but, paradoxically, because science and philosophy had abolished divine determinism. Contingency was worth targeting only as long as it represented the opposite of providentialism. Once philosophy was de-theologized, the modern world was freed from contingency much as it would later be freed from God. For the historians of philosophy Graevenitz and Marquard (1998), the intellectual history of contingency is therefore a major philosophical episode that ends with Descartes. In the aftermath of this long episode, contingency could still be seen as an antidote against scientific determinism. However, compared to earlier theological projects, these new discussions remained relatively marginal. It would only be with the rise of Darwinism and other important scientific theories such as atomic theory in the nineteenth century (which put forward the coincidence) that discussions of contingency once again became more prominent. In the twentieth century, relativity theory and chaos theory theorized contingency in their own ways. None of these sciences ever claimed to have solved the problem of contingency; they merely reformulated it in different fashions.

The Greeks did not accept cosmological contingency and believed that the universe had always existed as an eternal and unchangeable being. As has been shown above, in the Middle Ages, the theory of contingentia held that, though the world was created out of nothing, it was still sustained by a divine will.

Introduction

In a ‘constitutional legitimacy crisis’ (Appleby, Levy and Whalan 2023), two or more parties view the values underlying a constitution markedly differently, such that there is no single, practically authoritative view of how a constitutional disagreement between them should be resolved. The parties disagree not only about a constitution's essential normative foundations but also about who is authorised to resolve the disagreement. There are many kinds of constitutional legitimacy crises. But our interest in this chapter is in competing claims to constitutional sovereignty of Indigenous groups and the settler state – in particular, the Australian Commonwealth and its federal subunits.

Sovereignty claims are claims to legitimate ownership and authority over the land, law and political life within a given territory or in relation to a set of people (Cobb 2005, 118). Sovereignty conflicts raise a particularly caustic form of constitutional legitimacy crisis, due partly to divergent ideas about the foundations and implications of sovereignty. As Davis and Williams write, the ‘term “sovereignty” is a widely used but contested term that can mean different things to different people’ (2023, 165). Indeed, competing visions of sovereignty were mainstays of the rhetoric leading up to the 2023 referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. All sides made claims based on distinct perspectives of sovereignty. In this chapter, we focus on this competition of ideas in the Voice debate.

Claims of the state's exclusive sovereignty commonly arose. However, a close look reveals these claims’ normatively problematic foundations. Some varieties of exclusive claims understood exclusivity as self-evident. Others relied for support on the authoritative statements of state institutions, notably courts. Neither type of argument could escape the problem of self-reference – or ‘normative bootstrapping’ (Levy 2025). Claims to the state's exclusive sovereignty relied on state perspectives, or on state institutions themselves, to justify the state's normative primacy.

The consequence of such bootstrapping rhetoric first may have been to contribute to the Voice reform's rejection by generating fears about creating (Albrechtsen 2023b) or amplifying Indigenous sovereignty. This rhetoric misunderstands the status of Indigenous sovereignty, which – as a normative and political matter, rather than positive law – is already widely understood by Indigenous people and their supporters as existing. The bootstrapping perspective overlooks this normative and political reality.

This final chapter explores the ways in which Eastern philosophies avoid the obsessions with necessity that are so common in Western philosophy and culture, and which have led to a conspiratorial mindset, among other things. More consistently than Western philosophies, Eastern philosophies have tried to see the world in terms of contingency, or rather, as a realm in which the contingency/necessity dichotomy has been overcome. These views contrast most clearly with conspiracist ways of thinking, as the conspiratorial mindset's main occupation is to construct permanent and rigid identities, beliefs, foundations, and opinions. The purpose of these constructions is to create security. Eastern philosophies acknowledge that contingency can be difficult to bear, but the contingency-coping devices they offer are usually different from Western ones. Instead of replacing contingency with necessity, they recommend seeing necessities as non-essential. The conspiratorial mindset would certainly be the textbook example of a person in whom Buddhist teachers would try to instill an awareness of impermanence.

Strangely, the conspiratorial mindset can at times sound vaguely “Buddhist” as it tries to bring relief from the so-called real world or asks us to “awaken” to a reality that remains hidden from ordinary people. Such a Buddhist air seems to permeate the conspiratorial mindset because, on top of it, it preaches that the conspiracy must be borne like karma. But it is precisely non-Buddhist, because it is a non-dynamic perception of destiny or karma, or a view that refuses to see the contingency of time and history. The conspiratorial mindset cannot overcome its destiny and declare its shaping forces to be non-essential, but rather reifies destiny through ressentiment, and perhaps even to the point of seeking revenge.

Buddhism

Buddhism is traditionally rooted in doctrines of impermanence (anitya), emptiness (sunyata), no-self (anatta), as well as in conditioned or dependent arising (pratitya-samutpada). It teaches us to let go of such supposed necessities, as we tend to cling to them in the form of rigid images of our selves, or of fixed conceptions of how we think the world should be. The Buddhist philosophical view is that everything is impermanent, conditional, and thus contingent. Buddhism does not presuppose the existence of a god who controls the destiny of humans, with the result that, a priori, concepts of possibility and contingency can enter this philosophy more freely than in monotheistic religions and cultures.

Introduction

Australian politicians introduced compulsory voting to address what was unanimously agreed to be a crisis of falling voter turnout. That decision, waved through the federal parliament, shaped the country's party system and the nature of civic engagement for the next 100 years. In 2024, Australia faces a similar downturn in public attitudes towards politics and politicians, but politicians – led by the two major parties – have shown little interest in acting to stem the tide. We should not be surprised that parties are reluctant to act in ways that undermine their electoral interests; electoral reforms can have unexpected consequences, and the risk of, for instance, enfranchising new voters who support other parties is substantial. This chapter proposes policy solutions – mixed-member proportional representation in the House of Representatives, lower fines for abstention at federal elections and more channels for party membership – that will allow disengaged Australians to better engage with their political system without threatening either major party's strategic interests and without dismantling compulsory voting.

Compulsory voting was introduced in 1924 to arrest a rapid decline in Australians voting at federal elections. A century later, Australians’ voting behaviour and responses to political surveys suggest similar signs of democratic disengagement, but the silver bullet of compulsion has already been used. Moreover, disengagement in 2024 takes more subtle forms: voters keep voting (to avoid sanction under compulsory voting laws), the major parties keep winning, and from a distance Australian politics looks to continue pretty much as usual. But a long-term and monotonic decline in the major parties’ vote share, collapse of political party membership and record-low favourability towards democratic institutions all point to serious malaise.

This chapter examines the context in which compulsory voting was introduced, how it worked to reverse falling voter engagement and helped to solidify the two-party system that has dominated Australian politics, and why the stability of the last 100 years has provided the conditions for current dissatisfaction with the system. Governments and policymakers have a wide range of options to restore engagement with Australian democracy without having to remove the safety net of compulsory voting. The chapter concludes by considering policies that can make engagement easier without incurring electoral disadvantage to either side of politics: introducing (mixed-member) proportional representation to the House of Representatives, lowering the costs of voting (and of abstaining) and expanding the ways in which interested voters can engage with political parties.

Few would deny the importance of an active citizenry in a democracy. In 2014, for instance, the International Social Survey Programme asked around 50,000 citizens in 34 countries to rank on a scale of 1 to 7 how important it is for citizens to ‘always vote in elections’. About 80 per cent gave a ranking of 5 (11.2 per cent), 6 (16.4 per cent) or 7 (51.8 per cent) (ISSP 2016). Many of us, moreover, are deeply impressed by citizens active within the democratic process in other ways. Organising campaigns, attending demonstrations, petitioning government, knocking on doors and so on – such acts seem to exemplify the promise of democracy as ‘rule by the people’.

Presumably, such attitudes stem partly from the fact that democracies are nothing more or less than elaborate systems of norms governing the exercise and distribution of political power. Norms persist only where a sufficient proportion of the citizenry both (a) personally adhere to them and (b) have sufficient confidence that other citizens also do so (Bicchieri 2017). Those who seek to advance their political objectives through the demo-cratic process (rather than by circumventing it) thereby express allegiance to the norms constitutive of that process. This, in turn, plays a vital role in sustaining such norms and, as such, protects and promotes the democratic form of life most of us value highly.

Moreover, virtually every theoretical account of the nature of democracy emphasises the importance of participation.2 Carole Pateman (1970, 2012), for instance, holds that participation is nothing less than the fundamental purpose of democratic government. For her, it is only by positively engaging with matters of public significance that individuals may come to develop the virtues necessary for a desirable form of collective life. Only in a democracy of the right kind – one in which citizens not merely enjoy extensive rights of participation, but wherein such rights are exercised – will this be possible. Pateman’s, of course, is a particularly expansive view of democracy. But even so-called minimalists, who see democracy as merely a process through which elites acquire power ‘by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote’ (Schumpeter 1950, 269), nevertheless have reason to hold that broad participation is essential if democracies are to deliver desirable outcomes.

Before proceeding to the analysis of contingency-necessity problems in conspiratorial thought, the term “conspiracy theory” needs to be clearly established. Given that the definition of the conspiracy theory has been a hotly debated topic in recent years, it is necessary to carefully present the methodology that I intend to use. I define a conspiracy theory as a framework of analysis that seeks to explain events through a conspiration. Often, conspiracy theories lean toward a belief that a group of people who share a common ethnic, political, national, or religious origin plot to harm another group’s interests. These theories can be warranted or unwarranted, though in common language the assumption that they are unwarranted is most current. It does not mean that the warranted ones are rare. Often, conspiracy theories that are labeled as unfounded have later been substantiated. Very often, attempts to point out illegal acts and atrocities authored by governments and big corporations are too easily discredited by labeling them conspiracy theories. Famous cases are the Watergate affair, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, the Iran-Contra affair, or, more recently, the vast surveillance program by the NSA. Multinational companies have a history of plots and counterplots to benefit themselves at the cost of the general population. Another example is Enron’s conspiracy to manipulate the supply of electricity to inflate rates in California (see Orr and Husting 2018). Or a classical case is that of the tobacco industry when, in 1999, a Florida jury declared the seven largest American tobacco companies guilty of misrepresentation and conspiracy to conceal the addictiveness and dangers of cigarette smoking. It is certainly true that the U.S. government regularly lies about its programs and agenda and famously misled other governments into the Iraq War through a conspiracy. These patterns are systemic and theorizing about them means revealing them. Governments and companies lie and dub those who reveal their barbarities “conspiracy theorists” as if that alone were proof enough for the irrelevance of their concerns. “Peaceful, law-abiding people ought to be allowed to freely assemble and pursue their inquiries without infiltration,” writes Hagen (2022: 140).

The meaning of “conspiracy theory” is ambiguous (warranted or unwarranted), and the question arises whether the term should be dropped from academic vocabulary altogether. The ambiguity already concerns the term “conspiracy.”

Recent years have witnessed a sharp increase in early voting in Australian elections. In the 2004 Federal election, just over 10 per cent of voters cast their ballot early (whether by mail or pre-poll) (Muller 2022). In 2019, however, over 40 per cent of voters did so. In 2022, over half of all voters cast their ballots prior to election day (Coma and Smith 2023, 413). This rise appears to have been largely driven by changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act (1918) passed in 2010. Schedule 2 of the Act outlines a list of circumstances in which citizens are eligible to vote early (e.g. being a patient in hospital). However, the 2010 reforms enabled pre-poll ballots to be counted as ‘ordinary ballots’, removing the requirement for citizens to submit a declaration that they were formally eligible to vote early.

Despite the fact that Schedule 2 does not list convenience as a reason why citizens may vote early, survey data collected in 2010 and 2013 by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC, hereafter) found that over 30 per cent of early voters cited convenience as their principal reason for casting their ballots prior to election day (Rojas and Muller 2014). It is likely that the proportion is much higher, today. Even in 2013, over 75 per cent of respondents on the AEC survey admitted that had early voting been unavailable, they would have been able to vote on election day (Rojas and Muller 2014, 6). Moreover, rates of early voting in 2010 and 2013 were much lower than in more recent elections – under 20 per cent in 2010 and just over 26 per cent in 2013, as opposed to over 50 per cent in 2022.

Notwithstanding legal technicalities, then, Australians now arguably enjoy virtually universal access to early voting, de facto. This represents a major shift in the way Australians participate in the electoral process. Despite this, the normative considerations raised by early voting have been little discussed.3 In particular, though much has been written about the right to vote, generally, little has been said about the basis of the right to vote early. Or, more particularly, whether that right ought to be extended to all citizens or whether we instead ought to favour arrangements in which opportunities for early voting are restricted to certain citizens only.

The present book concentrates on how the conspiratorial mindset handles the phenomenon of contingency. Contingency can appear everywhere: in science, art, politics, religion, and everyday life. As mentioned, conspiracists tend to search for necessities and are reluctant to attribute certain events to chance. Everything happens for a necessary reason. So, what is contingency? When seen in isolation and abstractly, contingency is a logical and philosophical concept; however, even as an abstract concept, it has various shades of meaning, some of which need to be clarified first. Most basically, when what happens is neither necessary nor impossible, we speak of coincidence or of contingency. Sometimes the coincidence’s causes are known, sometimes they remain unknown. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “contingent” as “of uncertain occurrence; liable to happen or not; happening by chance; fortuitous; conditional; not predetermined by necessity […]” (Stevenson 2007). The coincidence is thus the event, and contingency is the concept trying to grasp the fortuity or the “coincidentality” of the event. In German, the coincidence is characteristically called Zufall, which means that an event unexpectedly “falls” into an environment and potentially determines other events. “Coincidence” expresses here the scholastic accidere, which means “to occur” (which is vorfallen in German) and which obviously gave its name to the accident. In Greek, the coincidence is endechomenon or symbebekos. Aristotle speaks in his natural scientific works (for example Physics, Β 6: 197 b 32–35) as well as in his logical treatises (for example Prior Analytics 46b–47b) and Metaphysics (for example 1025a) of the “kata symbebekos” (chance event),1 which subsequent generations of philosophers saw as an undetermined cause in the sense of the accidens. Scholasticism applied the symbebekos to language by seeing it as that which is not necessarily present in language, but which occurs unnecessarily and is thus accidental (see Mauthner 2012: 61). Aristotle applies the word endechomenon in various slightly differing ways, but most often it is that which is “neither necessary nor impossible” (On Interpretation, 25a37–41, 29b29–32, 32al8–29, 33b17, 22–23). “Contingent” as the modern translation of endechomenon has thus become common.

In modern thought, contingency and coincidence are commonly used interchangeably, a convention that was most probably introduced by Kant. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1974: 119), Kant uses the words “das Zufällige” (and not der Zufall) for what Leibniz, in his Theodicy, had called Kontingenz (I, §39).

It has been said in the introduction that the conspiratorial mindset very often creates its own alternative world. Just as superstitions were part of the medieval lifestyle, in modernity, for many, the unwarranted conspiracy theory has become a way of life. And like all lifestyles, conspiracism is often not a matter of epistemic representation but of acquaintance, repeated perception, and habit. The term “belief” is here justified to some extent. Beliefs are often created not on a scientific or factual basis (believing that) but on a cultural basis (believing in). Many overarching assumptions about how the world works are acquired, not through analysis, but through acculturation. That this is a matter of mindset and not of rational cognition is evidenced by the fact that people who believe in one baseless conspiracy theory do very often also believe in many others. They can even believe in theories that mutually exclude each other. Hagen (2022: 158–60) believes to have shown that writings by Wood et al. (2012) and Goertzel (1994), which attempt to demonstrate that such contradictory beliefs exist, are scientifically flawed. The problem is that both the former and Hagen’s argumentations are purely epistemological. In aesthetic terms it is rather normal that somebody is attracted by two theories that are not entirely compatible. Just like I can like two types of music that “exclude” each other. Unwarranted conspiracy theories are therefore not only false theories, but also cultures, subcultures, or tastes that develop a dynamic of their own. And just like the latter, they cannot be opposed by working with “true” and “false” as criteria, but, at best, with the criteria of “likely” and “unlikely.”

What is the conspiratorial mindset more precisely? Before delving into problems of contingency and necessity and their relationship with conspiracism, it is useful to identify the functions and the particular places that unjustifiable conspiracy theories occupy in the lives of modern citizens. Are these theories against any “enlightened” way of thinking, are they compatible with it, or perhaps even products of modernity and Enlightenment? The preliminary argument that I formulate in this chapter is that “Western Enlightenment,” as broadly understood as possible, has always produced a non-Enlightenment thinking or an alternative Enlightenment movement in its margins, and that the unwarranted conspiracy theory is a quintessential product of this development.

Through the death of God and the gradual disappearance of theological determinism, modern humans gained more liberty to shape their world. Their lives were neither predetermined, nor were humans considered victims of what the Middle Ages could still see as “satanic powers.” As philosophy— and with it, all theoretical thought about necessity and contingency—became “detheologized,” humans could feel as they saw fit. Compared with former times, life was less mightily determined by inherited expectations: a new horizon of possibilities opened up, which provided a hitherto unknown freedom. At the same time, it brought about a dramatic loss of order.

Contingency is the “air” that Marx famously speaks of in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto when announcing that in modernity “all that is solid melts into air”: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations […] are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify” (2012: 38). Baudelaire echoes this view in 1863 when framing modernity as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” (2006: 403). The ever-increasing speed of change creates contingency.

On the one hand, contingency had become more prominent than ever because God's will no longer established necessity; on the other hand, contingency was felt and feared less because a larger variety of psychological and technical coping mechanisms had become available. To some extent, the lost order could be pragmatically reestablished by eliminating a big chunk of contingency from public and private life. The above-described post-industrial “perfect world” model represents the latest version of this anti-contingency utopia. From the nineteenth century onward, technology began to compensate for the loss of theological landmarks and created the sober modern certitudes that everybody in the industrialized world is now used to. Insurance companies helped in the handling of accidents, and applied science, with its capacity to foresee the future and to prevent disasters (one can think of meteorology or earthquake foreshock detection), helped reduce contingency. Vaccinations protect against coincidentally contracted diseases and epidemics. In daily life, much bad fortune can now be prevented through more precise and professional planning. This planning is increasingly supported by modern technology of communication that continues to be improved to this day: thanks to cell phones, messaging apps, and GPS, fewer appointments have been missed “by bad luck.”

While German biologists experimented with organic models, France produced an anti-deterministic intellectual current called “la science du hasard” (the science of the coincidence). A related anti-deterministic philosophy had emerged earlier in the nineteenth century, but in the early twentieth cen-tury, about three decades before the publication of Sartre's La Nausée, it would reach its climax. Sartre was indirectly influenced by this philosophy, mainly through Bergson, who was loosely linked to this science of coincidence. What was really more of a French philosophy of contingency (instead of a science of contingency) is interesting because it represents a rare example of a rationali-zation of contingency. While Engels had rationalized history to the point of letting the mystery of contingency disappear under the glaring light of determinism, these French philosophers adopted the opposite approach. They depicted the world as a manifestation of contingency and demystified it to the point of making it coterminous with reality. As will be shown below, this is directly opposed to the conspiratorial mindset, which cancels coincidence and mystifies necessity. The French philosophy of contingency is vaguely reminiscent of Hegel's speculative idealism, which sees chance as a necessary event and conceptualizes it as an “absolute contingency” (see above). Coincidence is real because, without it the world could not be (see Henrich 1971: 164n8).

I introduce the French science du hasard, which is representative of a French Renaissance of philosophy that happened around 1900, not only because it is a rare example of the rationalization of contingency in the Western world, but also for another reason: this philosophy, which has, most of the time, been seen as a philosophy of science, bears resemblances to Eastern philosophies of contingency that will be presented in Chapter 11. The main idea is that contingency is real and that necessities are only abstractions. Despite its name, the French “science of the coincidence” had no intention of being primarily in the service of science, and rather deemed itself to be in the service of life in more general terms.