CFP - GIS Sociabilités International Conference 2026: 'Sociability, Progress and Innovation (1650-1850)'

CFP - GIS Sociabilités International Conference 2026

'Sociability, Progress and Innovation (1650-1850)'

Thursday 10 & Friday 11 December 2026

UNIVERSITÉ RENNES 2, FRANCE

 

DOWNLOAD the full CFP in French and English

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Keynote lectures by:

David Bell (Princeton University)

Vincent Bontems (CEA centre at Paris-Saclay)

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While the idea of innovation now guides public policy and seems to be one of the key conditions for the “transition” of our Western societies towards a better future, there is mounting criticism of a rhetoric that lacks substance. According to science and technology philosopher Vincent Bontems (2023), the omnipresence of the term “innovation” in institutional and media discourses, without being precisely defined, raises many questions about its effects on the social future of humanity. Nowadays, the term refers to “the introduction of a new product or process onto the market” (INSEE), but innovation extends to many areas beyond the world of business and corporations. For Marie-Françoise Chevallier-Le Guyader and Paul Maitre, the current logic of innovation is one of short-term thinking and efficiency “at the expense of the long-term investments necessary for the advancement of knowledge” (2018). The notion of innovation has thus gradually eclipsed the idea of progress that Enlightenment philosophy defined in relation to the perfectibility of human beings and societies (Bury, 1920; Nisbet, 1980; Spadafora, 1990; Grange, 2022). 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, deep mistrust, even resistance, towards innovation stemmed from this problematic relationship with time. Francis Bacon, the “prophet of time” (Durel, 1983), devoted an essay to this subject in 1625, in which he stated that any innovative approach must be designed to stand the test of time in order to allow the social and institutional forms that embrace it to adjust to the changes brought about by the novel element. During the Enlightenment, the term “progress”, based on a stadial conception of history (Ferguson, 1767; Robertson, 1769), became more common than that of “innovation” and was conceived of as a slow, gradual, and civilizing historical process working towards a desirable future.

Following in the footsteps of thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, the eighteenth century based the idea of progress on a genuine system of values centered on the quest for “useful knowledge” promoted by science and the circulation of ideas. In its ideal form, progress was not solely the preserve of science and technology as it was inseparable from moral, social and civil improvement. Thus, David Hume (1741-42) saw the combination of the arts, commerce, consumption, and sociability as the conditions conducive to both material and moral progress in society. In a world on its path to modernity, Enlightenment sociability was seen by some as the driving force behind social progress and an indicator of the “civilizing process” (Elias, 1939). For others, such as Rousseau (1750), unbridled technical development, far from guaranteeing human progress and social happiness, corrupted moral virtue, increased social inequalities and fueled imperialist ambitions justifying slavery. Thus, economic, technical, and political transformations were sometimes perceived as disruptions or threats rather than as improvements. The ambivalent stance regarding innovation and the figure of the inventor will indeed become a crucial theme of nineteenth-century literature.

For 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, Joel Mokyr, technical progress was the driving force of economic growth in European societies in the early modern period. Using the phrase “Industrial Enlightenment” (2009), he argues that technical progress was correlated to the intellectual climate or “cultural capital” which thrived in some nations more than in others. Science and technology historian Liliane Hilaire-Perez has also placed technical progress at the heart of the Enlightenment project. Based on the experience of inventors, her work compares French and English societies grappling with the competing pressures of industrial capitalism and social justice. Their work thus raises the question of the impact of the industrialization of Western societies, driven by technical innovations, on the very meaning of the idea of progress.

This conference aims to interrogate the uses and meanings of the ideas of “progress” and “innovation”—whether in relation to technology, economics, politics, religion, or culture—during the long eighteenth century and how they relate to social practices. It will examine the effects of innovation in all its forms (technical, political, economic, aesthetic, literary) on sociability in European and colonial societies. It will also be interesting to consider sociability itself as a conceptual and social innovation. 

With the pioneering work of Maurice Agulhon (1968), the concept of sociability became a historiographical tool for identifying, through the study of brotherhoods and Masonic lodges, an intensity of associative practices that heralded popular support for the revolution of 1848. Sociability as a “conceptual innovation,” to use Antoine Lilti's words, was part of the historiography of mentalities. Daniel Roche's work has firmly established the notion of sociability at the heart of Enlightenment studies and made it a key tool for the social history of culture. For more than 10 years, the interdisciplinary work of the GIS Sociabilités has confirmed this “social anchoring of the Enlightenment” (Roche, 1979) and enabled, through comparative, transnational, and global approaches, the study of European and colonial sociabilities by looking at the dissemination of new practices and new discourses. Considering sociability as a driver of progress or social innovation also leads us to question the relationship between the individual and the group, as well as to measure its impact on social hierarchies and distinctions, on political practices and discourses, and on representations and imaginaries.

 

Contributions may focus on issues such as the following (non-exhaustive list):

• Progress vs innovation: definitions, continuities and temporalities
• Sociability as a medium of progress and innovation
• Sociability: a linguistic/philosophical innovation
• The notion of “improvement” in Enlightenment thought and culture
• The impact of new scientific discourses on sociabilities
• The notion of “useful knowledge”: science, technology and sociability 
• The circulation of new knowledge: networks of sociability (epistolary, scientific, economic) and learned societies
• Economic growth and sociable progress
• Inventors, innovators and agents of sociability
• The religious and the secular: innovative sociabilities
• Industrial progress, labour and new sociabilities 
• Reformist movements and forms of sociability 
• Enlightenment sociability and political innovation: democratisation and revolution
• Sociability and innovations in education and pedagogy
• Innovation in media and communication (print culture, public sphere)
• Material culture, consumption and refinement (novelties, new fashions and manners)
• Innovation as justification of imperial power and racial hierarchies
• Evolution of gender norms: new gendered spaces, blurring gender boundaries, women’s emancipation
• Innovation represented in literature and in the arts
• The rise of the novel and literary innovations
• Innovations in other artistic fields (painting, poetry …)
• Innovations in sociability studies (new methodologies, digital humanities, etc.)

 

Interdisciplinary round table with:

• Jean-François Dunyach (Sorbonne Université)
• Liliane Hilaire-Pérez (Université Paris Cité/EHESS)
• Frédéric Ogée (Université Paris Cité)
• Céline Spector (Sorbonne Université)
• Stéphane Van Damme (ENS Ulm/Maison française d’Oxford)

 

Deadline for submitting proposals: March 31, 2026

For individual paper proposals, please submit a title, a 200-word abstract, and a brief biobibliography. For session proposals, please also include a title, a 200-word abstract, a brief biobibliography for each speaker, and the email address of the session organizer. 

Selection of contributions: April 2026

Send proposals to: gis.sociabilites@gmail.com

A selection of papers will be published.

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Selected bibliography:

Agulhon, Maurice, Pénitents et francs-maçons de l’ancienne Provence (Paris : Fayard, 1968).

Bell David, “For a New Social History of the Enlightenment: Authors, the Public, and Commercial Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History, 20.2 (2023): 663-687.

Bontems, Vincent, « De quoi l’innovation fut-elle le nom ? », conférence-débat, Mines Paris Tech, Paris, 20 octobre 2015.

Bury, John B., The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan & co., 1920).

Chevallier-Le Guyader, Marie-Françoise et Paul Maitre, « L’innovation : une injonction ? », Raison présente, 206.2 (2018) : 3-10.

Durel, Henri, « Francis Bacon et la science nouvelle : la nécessaire mais impossible polémique », Bulletin de l'Association d'étude sur l'humanisme, la réforme et la renaissance, 17 (1983) : 27-43. 

Elias, Norbert [1939], The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1978 and 1982).

Feuerhahn, Wolf, Progrès (Paris : Anamosa, 2025).

Grange, Juliette, « L’idée de progrès, des Lumières au XIXe siècle », Parlement[s], Revue d'histoire politique, 35.1 (2022) : 25-42.

Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane, L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières (Paris : Albin-Michel, 2000).

Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane, Fabien Simon et Marie Thébaud Sorger (dir.), L’Europe des Sciences et des Techniques. Un dialogue des savoirs, XVe-XVIIIe siècle (Rennes : PUR, 2016).

Lilti, Antoine, Figures publiques. L’invention de la célébrité, 1750-1850 (Paris : Fayard, 2014).

Lilti, Antoine, « Après l’espace public : sociabilité, communication, publicité », in L. Andries et M. Bernier (dir.), L’Avenir des Lumières (Paris : Hermann Editeurs, 2019), pp. 29-45.

Mokyr, Joel, The Enlightened Economy, An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (Yale: Yale University Press, 2010).

Mokyr, Joel, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

Nisbet, Robert, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

Robertson, Ritchie, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (New York: Harper Collins, 2021).

Roche, Daniel, « De l'histoire sociale à l'histoire socio-culturelle », Mélanges de l'école française de Rome, 91.1 (1979) : 7-19.

Spadafora, David, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1990).