3. Moscovici’s intellectual ‘age of innocence’ was also the age of uncertainties. Aware that his work did not fit into the current trends in social psychology, he tried not to overstep the expectations of his political and intellectual masters. After all, he was a ‘réfugié et apatride’ (refugee and stateless) until 1958 (Moscovici, 2019, p. 299). This, to my mind, may explain why he hesitated in adopting the idea of ‘cognitive polyphasia’, although throughout the whole of Psychoanalysis, he constantly referred to multifaceted forms of thinking and language.

In contrast to the generally adopted belief that Moscovici’s ancestor in the theory of social representations was Emile Durkheim, there is no evidence of that in the first edition of Psychoanalysis. Moscovici was aware of some of Durkheim’s work but his references to it were negligible.

Focusing on Moscovici’s historical, philosophical, and cultural resources, this chapter shows that, in his ‘age of intellectual innocence’, continental philosophy and anthropology, Marxism, and the psychology of Jean Piaget played a vital role in his development of the theory of social representations. I suggest that there is a remarkable similarity between Moscovici’s ideas and those of Ernst Cassirer, with whose work he was well acquainted.

The previous themes reach into modern debates about freedom and necessity, which are still central in education and psychology today. Contributing to the rise of formal disciplines of developmental and child psychology, educational psychology, clinical psychology and cognitive psychology, as well as psychiatry, empirical approaches based on sense perception began in the mid-eighteenth century; but they are equally the outcome of broader religious and cultural influences. The book therefore concludes with an overview of the direct traces on the modern disciplines of the religious ideas discussed in earlier chapters: in Britain through David Hartley, Joseph Priestley and Francis Galton, and the nature-versus-nurture formula; and in France Hippolyte Taine, Alfred Binet (creator of the ‘mental age’ score, subsequently IQ measurement) and Jean Piaget himself.