Charles Péguy’s flu: the metaphor of diagnosis on the crossroads of historical, sociological and philosophical discourses in 1900

Abstract

This article examines how the French socialist thinker Charles Péguy (1873-1914) used the metaphor of diagnosis of social ills in De la grippe (1900). This text serves as the entrance point into the complex history of the metaphor of diagnosis around the beginning of the twentieth century, as it dwelled in the border regions of historical, sociological and philosophical discourses. Péguy seems at first to follow the contemporary tendency to use the metaphor of diagnosis as a means to denounce ready-made historical and sociological theory. However, the metaphor of diagnosis also foregrounds aspects irreducible to epistemological concerns. The diagnostician thus introduced a paradigm for the frank communication of inconvenient truths from an engaged position, at the same time as the Dreyfus Affair imprinted the persona of the “engaged intellectual” on the modern social imaginary.