Professor Raphaël Liogier

Raphaël Liogier, Ph.D. is a Philosopher and Sociologist. He is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the Institut d’études Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, Scientific Director and Head of the Chair of Transitions at the UM6P Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), Appointed Lecturer at the International College of Philosophy (CIPh) in Paris, and Senior Researcher at the University of Paris 10 (Paris-Nanterre).

He serves on the board of the scientific journal Social Compass and was one of the twelve members of the International Commission for Peace Research at UNESCO.

Raphaël has been Professor at Sciences Po Aix since 1998 and has been invited as a visiting professor by several universities, mainly in North America, Europe, India, and Australia.

His work focuses on the construction and evolution of individual and collective identities in the process of globalization. He also works on issues related to Islam and cults and wrote many articles on religious topics including Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and Soka Gakkai. Read Individual-globalism: new believing culture of advanced industrial societies and A Sociological and Political Look at the New Age with Raphaël Liogier.

He also criticizes the work of MIVILUDES, a French government agency created by presidential decree in 2002. It is charged with observing and analyzing the phenomenon of cult movements, coordinating the government response, informing the public about the risks arising from sectarian aberrations, and facilitating the implementation of actions to aid the victims. Read Cultural revolution in the fight against sects, by Raphaël Liogier.

In 2006, he published a book on secularism titled Une laïcité “légitime” — La France et ses religions d’Etat (A “legitimate” secularism — France and its state religions).

His work can be divided into three main areas of study:

1. Why do we need to believe? Where does the desire to believe come from? Is science possible without any belief? What is the difference between “knowing” and «believing»?

2. The construction of new mythologies in our current global world (the importance of the Internet for sharing dreams, desires, and anguish). The global circulation of images, desires, and frustrations (related to new global forms of violence: cyber-terrorism, for instance).

3. The impact of technoscience on human narrative (the significance of human technological enhancement) and on human concrete reality (the evolution of the desire to work; the evolution of the relation with our natural environment).

Read “We Are Scared of Our Own Shadow”: An Interview with Raphael Liogier on Islamo-Paranoia in France

Between 2016 and 2020, he was Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University in the City of New York. In 2015, he had a one-year appointment as Visiting Professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium as the Academic Chair of Prospective Anthropology, with the course title The Evolution of Mankind Narrative in the 21st Century related to the Development of Technosciences.

Raphaël earned his Ph.D. in Social Sciences at the Aix-Marseille University, where he also earned his Master’s Degree of Science in Political Science and Public Law. He wrote his thesis Introduction to a Political Approach to the Westernization of Buddhism under the direction of Bruno Étienne, a professor at the Institut d’études Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence.

He earned a degree in Philosophy from the University of Provence, and a Master’s Degree of Science in Research In Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Raphaël has also studied social sciences as a visiting undergraduate earning his Bachelor’s Degree in Social Science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Raphaël coauthored several articles on the theme of religion. He has published more than a hundred scientific articles and thirty books. He published a book on violence and the evolution of religious and cultural identity in a global world titled La guerre des civilisations n’aura pas lieu. Coexistence et violence au XXIème siècle [The War of Civilizations will not take place. Coexistence and Violence in the 21st Century], 2017.

He also published a book about the necessity to radically transform our social and economic system due to the development of artificial intelligence and the Internet (Sans Emploi. Condition de l’homme postindustriel [Unemployed. The Postindustrial Man Condition], 2017).

Raphaël ran the Observatoire du Religieux from 2006 to 2014, which is the first European Social Sciences Research Center to have studied both the rise of the new Salafism (new Islamic fundamentalism) among young Western Muslims and the rise of new groups of young people using Islam as an anti-social flag to justify violent behavior. Raphaël was the first expert to be interviewed by the French Parliament after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in January 2015.

He appears regularly on French national TV and radio shows. He has published numerous articles in national and international mainstream newspapers. One of his articles published in Le Monde was later translated and published in English on the Blog of the London School of Economics (LSE). Read Hypermodern Religiosity: How young Muslims embrace traditional Islam and why it has little to do with terrorism.

His analysis of the 2017 French election appeared in an op-ed in The New York Times International. Read France’s Neither-Nor Election.

Some of his scientific work is published in English, including the International Social Science Journal. Read The planetarisation of faith positions: the role and importance of religion in global capitalism.

The Stanford University Review Occasion published his article Theater of War… after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in 2015. In 2011, The Harvard International Review published a summary of his study on the “Myth of Islamization and European Decadence”.

Some of his more recent work on hypermodern identities (artificial intelligence and human identity; transhumanist imaginary structure) has been published in the international academic journal Social Compass.

Read Tourist pilgrimage: a new type of social activity in a hypermodern situation, Convergence(s) et singularité(s): À propos des deux concepts clés de l’eschatologie transhumaniste, and Social Compass – Introduction – Techno-Scientific Eschatologies. Watch Raphaël LIOGIER, Transhumanisme et travail 2 and “We Have Never Experienced ANYTHING Like This Before!” | Philosopher Raphaël Liogier.

Read the Review in English of his book on French “laïcité”: Une Laïcité ‘Légitme’: La France et ses religions d’État [‘Legimiate’Laicité: France and its State Religions].

The book Returning to Religion: Why a Secular Age is Haunted by Faith, by British anthropologist Jonathan Benthall, has been explicitly inspired by Raphaël’s work, according to the author himself.

Raphaël authored and published The Myth of Islamization: Essay on a Collective Obsession, The Suez Complex: The True Decline of France (and of the European Continent), Science et religion, Le bouddhisme et ses normes: Traditions — modernités (Société, droit et religion en Europe), Heart of Maleness: An Exploration, and his latest Khaos: La promesse trahie de la modernité.

Watch French Sociologist Raphael Liogier Tackles Complexity of Human Beings, Raphaël Liogier: AESTHETICS PRECEDES ETHICS, and Raphaël Liogier — Buddhism and the Hypothesis on Individuo-globalism.

Read France’s attack on the veil is a huge blunder, “We Are Scared of Our Own Shadow”: An Interview with Raphael Liogier on Islamo-Paranoia in France, and France’s Fake Islamo-Leftist Crisis.

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