Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (Paris, 1857 – 1939) was a French sociologist and anthropologist trained in philosophy. He is remembered above all for his studies of the mentality of peoples then considered primitive, work that shaped how Western culture came to think about differences between societies and forms of knowing. He worked within the circle of Émile Durkheim and, like him, treated social facts as something to be studied from the outside and with method.

His early output was in the history of philosophy, including a History of Modern Philosophy in France (1899) and a study of Auguste Comte (1900). Around 1910 he published Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, known in English as How Natives Think. In it he proposed that human thinking rested on two basic mindsets, the "primitive" and the "modern". In his account, the primitive mind does not sharply separate the supernatural from reality and works through what he called "mystical participation", a link between people, objects and forces that explains events. It also did not trouble itself with contradictions in the way modern logical thought does.

Later books, such as Primitive Mentality (1922), The "Soul" of the Primitive (1927) and Primitives and the Supernatural (1931), refined these ideas. His notebooks, published posthumously in 1949, show that he did not hold a straight evolutionary path from primitive to modern, since he recognised non-logical thinking in modern societies too, for instance in gambling.

His influence is broad and ambiguous. Concepts such as collective representations and participation mystique shaped the psychology of Carl Jung, and the sociologist Stanislav Andreski argued that How Natives Think was a valuable contribution, perhaps more so than better-known work by Claude Lévi-Strauss. At the same time, his notion of primitive mentality has been criticised as Eurocentric, and his name remains tied to debates about rationality and cultural difference.