Louis Auguste Paul Rougier (French: [ʁuʒje]; 10 April 1889 – 14 October 1982) was a French philosopher who introduced the idea of neoliberalism to France in the 1930s. Rougier made many important contributions to epistemology, philosophy of science, political philosophy and the history of Christianity.
Early life Rougier was born in Lyon. Debilitated by pleurisy in his youth, he was declared unfit for service in World War I and devoted his adolescence to intellectual pursuits. He studied philosophy under Edmond Goblot. After receiving the agrégation in philosophy from the University of Lyon, he qualified as a philosophy teacher in 1914 and worked as a teacher in several high schools, before teaching at the École Chateaubriand de Rome, Besançon, the Cairo University, the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Études Internationales de Genève (Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies), and the Fondation Édouard-Herriot (Édouard-Herriot Foundation) in Lyon. In 1920 he obtained his doctorate from the Sorbonne and published his doctoral thesis as La philosophie géometrique de Poincaré and Les paralogismes du rationalisme. Rougier already had several publications to his name, however, beginning with a 1914 paper on the use of non-Euclidean geometry in relativity theory.
Career Rougier taught in Algiers from 1917 to 1920 and then in Rome from 1920 to 1924. His first university appointment in France was at the University of Besançon in 1925, where he served on the faculty until his dismissal in 1948 for political reasons. Further university appointments were in Cairo from 1931 to 1936, the New School for Social Research from 1941 to 1943 and the Université de Montréal in 1945. Rougier's final academic appointment was to the Université de Caen in 1954, but he retired at the age of 66 after only one year there.
Philosophy Under the influence of Henri Poincaré and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rougier developed a philosophy based on the idea that systems of logic are neither apodictic (i.e., necessarily true and therefore deducible) nor assertoric (i.e., not necessarily true and whose truth must therefore be induced through empirical investigation). Instead, Rougier proposed that the various systems of logic are simply conventions that are adopted based on contingent circumstances. That view, which implies that there are no "objective" a priori truths that exist independently of the human mind, closely resembled the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Many members of that group, including Philipp Frank, greatly admired Rougier's 1920 work Les paralogismes du rationalisme. Rougier soon became the group's main French associate and formed close personal ties to several of its leading members, including Moritz Schlick (to whom Rougier's 1955 book Traité de la connaissance is dedicated) and Hans Reichenbach. Rougier also participated as an organizer and contributor to many Vienna Circle activities, including the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Rougier's own contribution to the Encyclopedia never materialized, however, because he soon became one of many participants who ended up quarreling with Otto Neurath, the project's editor-in-chief.
Religion Rougier's conventionalist philosophical position naturally led him to oppose neo-Thomism, which had been the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church since the 1879 encyclical Aeterna Patris but was gaining particular momentum during the 1920s and the 1930s. Rougier published several works during this period attacking the contemporary revival of scholasticism, thereby earning the personal enmity of prominent Thomists such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Rougier's objections to neo-Thomism were not merely philosophical, however, but formed part of a general opposition to Christianity that he had already begun to develop during his adolescence under the influence of Ernest Renan. His early opposition to Christianity continued to influence intellectual work of Rougier's maturity and led him in 1926 to publish a translation of Celsus that is still in use today.
Politics Rougier was also a political philosopher in the liberal tradition of Montesquieu, Constant, Guizot and Tocqueville. Consistent with his conventionalist epistemology, Rougier believed that political power does rest upon eternally-valid claims, which he called mystiques. The only possible reason to prefer one political system over another, he believed, depends not on such eternal truths but purely on pragmatic grounds. In other words, political systems should be chosen not based on how "true" they are but rather on how well they work. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1932 on a visit sponsored by the French Ministry of Education, Rougier became convinced that a planned economy does not work as well as a market economy. That conviction led him to participate in the organization of the first neoliberal organization of the 20th century, the Colloque Walter Lippmann, in 1938. That year, Rougier helped to found the Centre international d'études pour la rénovation du libéralisme. The political network established by both groups eventually led to the 1947 foundation of the famous Mont Pelerin Society to which Rougier was elected in the 1960s through the personal backing of Friedrich Hayek.
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