L’État face au pluralisme des valeurs. Réflexions sociologiques des années 1920 en France et en Allemagne

The contribution draws attention to the figure of the sociologist and philosopher Georges Gurvitch, an important mediator of German phenomenology in Interwar France. In the 1930s, Gurvitch developed a pluralist philosophy of law which gave social groups a decisive role in the development of law. Drawing on the writings of German sociologists (Scheler, Sinzheimer), he criticized French centralism, in which administrative standards take precedence over the plurality of social experience. In the current context, Gurvitch’s writings are an impetus to rethink the problem of cultural diversity and conflicts, and to find an alternative to the opposition between intolerant denial of diversity on the one hand, and a differentialism that tolerates intolerant behaviour in the name of cultural diversity on the other. This attempt to update the reflections on social democracy of the 1920s and 1930s ties in with the way Cecile Laborde uses the tradition of pluralist philosophy to design a republicanism that is more open to diversity, or how Sophie Guerard de Latour refers to Durkheim in order to combine the definition of a common good while taking into account the diverse reality of society.