It is quite shocking that a philosopher who fiercely criticized Gestalt-style “individual–whole” understandings at every turn would adopt such a conservative and external approach to understanding social relations.
Raymond Ruyer's first socially and politically oriented work was his habilitation thesis, in which he revised and continued the futurological ideas of Cournot. Cournot viewed human history as a transitional period characterized by the conflict between biological vitality and mechanical rationalization. Over time, this conflict-ridden history would tend toward complete bureaucratic rationalization of society, in which social operation becomes fully automated and monotonous. The tragic aspect of history would then be replaced by the problems of technical management. The once vibrant and life-filled prehistoric phase would, through a rationalizing historical process, be transformed into a massive mechanical apparatus, understandable through the mathematically expressible laws of a "social physics."
From this work onward, Raymond Ruyer clearly expressed a reserved attitude toward this philosophy of history or so-called “end of history.” He wrote: “It can almost be said with certainty that the reason humanity abandoned what Cournot called delusional utopias is simply because they believed these utopias had already been realized. The real question lies in the extent of human illusion.” As a 20th-century figure and a critic of all ideological discourse, Ruyer was more concerned with the tragic nature of history than with its supposed conclusion. For him, illusion would continue for a long time to outweigh the rationalization of society—and this would likely only lead to worse outcomes.
Although Ruyer criticized Cournot, he retained part of Cournot’s analytical framework. For example, in his understanding of human society, he still distinguished between a vital (living) dimension and a mechanical one. According to the ontology he gradually developed, these two dimensions were reinterpreted in the 1930s as the opposition between the individual and the group: the individual is the subject of meaningful actions, endowed with intelligence, while the group is understood as a “crowd” composed of people, subject to mechanical laws that are ruthless and effective yet lack true wisdom. This idea also originated from Cournot, who proposed a “law of regression from the individual to the collective,” which Raymond Ruyer inherited. Organic life tends toward increasingly complex development, whereas the collective regresses toward simpler, more mechanical laws. Life reaches a (temporary) peak in human spirituality, while society “possesses only a vegetative kind of life.”
“In these large collectives composed of conscious elements, the order or higher purpose borrowed from individual consciousness can hardly resist the purely physical, inhuman order. Against the balance of physical forces, humans attempt to respond with social contracts and laws; against natural economies, they attempt planned economies. Individual consciousness tragically witnesses its role as ‘raw material’ being drawn, one by one, into the machinery of society. It may control a part of it, but the whole almost always follows purely physical laws. Thus, even a healthy, normal human being can become a ‘field’ of social phenomena, which constitute their own kind of order but are blind and ignorant like a violent storm.”
In one essay, Ruyer described this social mechanism as “the fundamental cause of modern war”: no matter how intelligent or morally upright individuals may be, as members of society they will still be swept up in the arms race. Each country pursues maximum security for legitimate reasons, yet when rival societies reach a point of balance, the result is often maximum insecurity. This phenomenon—where psychological motivations are captured by social mechanisms—frequently leads to results contrary to intention, but remains unavoidable. It corresponds to what Ruyer metaphysics identifies as the phenomenon of “the masses,” generated by the interaction among individuals. More importantly, Ruyer argued that any individual’s attempt to psychologically restructure or improve this social mechanism is almost inevitably doomed to worsen the situation and cause chaos. Hence, most political or radical discourse should be understood as “ideological”—that is, as dangerous utopias attempting to escape the inertia and laws of collectivity.
This also explains Ruyer’s stance on economic liberalism. He read liberal economists such as Walras, Mises, and Hayek, and constructed a striking coherence between his ontology and his view of society—so much so that it's hard to say which one reflects the other. For Luye, “nature” consists of associations and dissolutions of multiple individuals, who are closed off from one another, autonomously pursue their own goals, and possess intelligence. Their total interaction can be understood through physical and mathematical laws, and spontaneously generates a kind of harmonious order. It is hard to find a better description for Walras’s concept of a “pure economic” world: in which rational agents interact and spontaneously generate market equilibrium, and any external interference only disturbs this equilibrium. Thus, in the passage cited earlier, Raymond Ruyer seriously referred to this economic idea as a “natural economy” and condemned any political interference in market equilibrium as a dangerous ideology: individual intelligence should be used in individual action, not in restructuring the social mechanism as a whole. In the face of collective impulses that harm both economy and morality, liberal economics represents a “true, realizable and already realized form of anarchism,” rather than the idealism that still lingers in emotional declarations. It naturally aligns with political democracy, civil liberties, and cultural freedom. In this regard, Ruyer belongs to a branch of Cold War liberalism, exemplified by figures like Raymond Aron or Isaiah Berlin: skeptical (as shown in The Firm Skeptic) and pessimistic toward ideology, but not aligned with existentialism.
What does this consistency reveal about Ruyer’s natural philosophy? Perhaps, like the “economic man” (homo economicus) in neoclassical economics, it bears a kind of “monadological” quality: just as Leibniz’s monads have no windows and cannot conceive “relation”—a fundamental dimension for understanding natural reality—Raymond Ruyer’s restriction of “meaningful life” to goal-seeking individuals also makes it difficult to conceive of true social life, i.e., “relational life.” In this, he is clearly different from Gabriel Tarde, who sought to reconstruct monadology from a social starting point. In both his social and ontological thinking, Ruyer could only understand “relation” as a kind of disturbance (like the chance collision of two particles or strangers) or as the formation of a higher-level individual—in other words, reducing “otherness” to “sameness,” and reducing “relation” to “unity.”
Modern social life, understood as technological advancement in the continuation of biological evolution, is accompanied by regression in intelligence and adaptability.
Therefore, in Ruyer’s social and life philosophies, we find the same tension: he is troubled by a world fragmented, lacking harmony and meaning, broken into identical elements. Yet at the same time, he attempts to develop a philosophy of the individual—viewed as the bearer of meaning—while the collective is always “the masses,” always a mechanized organization.
But is it not precisely in ideology that we find this claim to social unity? Ideology can be understood as “the social version of idealism”: both attempt to unify the world from the outside, relying on a transcendent consciousness to organize diversity.
Just as in the natural world we should not seek “harmony” within diversity—because diversity can only approach harmony in the form of statistical equilibrium—so too in society, we should return to the individual and their moral values. Thus, Raymond Ruyer did not propose a normative political philosophy but was committed to a social critique of the ideologies of his time, aiming to return to values considered universal and eternal to humanity.
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