FMSH

After several years of field work in a Chicago black ghetto, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh gives a lively and thorough analysis of the survival strategies of its inhabitants. Halfway between solidarity and predation, the underground economy of the ghetto relies as much on money as on networks built on trust and exchange.

The French literary magazine Esprit evaluates the work of Ivan Illich. It first focuses on his denouncing the perverse effects of industrial society. It also analyzes the symbolic effects of the system of modern technology. Despite the thematic and methodological eclecticism of the two periods in his life, there is one central preoccupation that runs throughout, that of man and his autonomy.

How did it come about that by 7 April 1994 a political faction had decided on and initiated the Tutsi genocide? André Guichaoua’s book investigates the Rwandan state’s genocide strategy, which was carried out by an extremist government after it had eliminated the legitimate authorities.

Does the globalization of the economy inevitably imply a lowering of our social protections? As Jean-Fabien Spitz shows, this would mean considering them as a mere luxury that we must give up during a period of crisis, whereas they are really and more deeply what gives a democratic society the basis for its own legitimacy.

Against the widespread view that links the post-‘68 period to hedonism, sociologist Lilian Mathieu paints a broad range of protest movements and offers an incisive political analysis. But this period is also of interest for understanding the present: a look at the recent past enables us to analyze today’s social movements.

What institutional means are available to the Chinese people for expressing their displeasure with officialdom? Isabelle Thireau and Hua Linshan’s book is the first Western study of the xinfang, the Administration of Letters and Visits, a government agency that currently processes in excess of 13 million complaints a year.

According to the historian Dan Edelstein, the violent phase of the Terror arose directly out of the French revolutionaries’ fascination with natural right theory. This new interpretation is unpersuasive to Annie Jourdan; in particular, she questions the relevance of analysing the French Revolution in Schmittian terms.

While sociological and philosophical studies of social suffering are proliferating, the psychiatrist Jean Furtos casts a clinical eye on the relations between mental health and precariousness. He presents the syndrome of self-exclusion as a pathology of precariousness, consisting of a radical reduction in psychic functioning. This lesson is not limited to psychiatry or to the study of insecurity.

Jacques Krynen shows, in an excellent overview, that judicial power was not a recent invention: in the Old Regime, high court judges already claimed a share of royal power. This erudite yet accessible book thus revises the myth of absolutism. What about other magistrates and lawyers?

Ex-philosopher Matthew Crawford celebrates the virtues of manual labor, lamenting the alienation that he argues is inherent in ostensibly intellectual occupations. Crawford is convinced that only manual work is truly intelligent, and he challenges current educational policies while arguing for a rediscovery of the value of hands-on activity.

How a culturally avant-garde company gradually came little-by-little to be part of Big Business: Vincent Chabault recounts the story of the FNAC, from its Trotskyite origins to the present.

Transformations of work disrupt family time. Relying on a rigorous statistical approach, Laurent Lesnard draws attention to the consequences produced in family life by the turmoil of atypical working hours. While his demonstration of this phenomenon is convincing, his interpretation of it is more questionable.

From the faubourg Saint-Germain to the concert halls in which he gave the first “recitals,” Franz Liszt helped to bring music into a new era. Heralding the end of the musical Old Regime, the success of his fantasias for piano reveals some of the social and cultural institutions that shaped musical production under the July Monarchy.

How did physician-chemists go about putting public hygiene on the agenda during the nineteenth century? Constructing a panorama of their ambitions and projects, Gérard Jorland gives us a sweeping summa that favours the grand narrative at the expense of explaining social complexity.

From medieval disapproval of gluttony to the modern obsession with fatness, corpulence has always provoked criticism whilst also remaining in line with logics of social distinction. Georges Vigarello’s history of ‘fat’ adds some weight to previous research into the history of beauty and the body.

The history of the American census is also that of the institutionalization of racial and ethnic categories. In a detailed study of the practices of classifying the U.S. population from 1790 to 1940, the historian Paul Schor demonstrates the instability of the categories produced and the way in which forms of classification of blacks were extended to other categories.

An interview with a Chinese political scientist trained in American universities gives us an insight into China’s pragmatic policy of local experimentation. It chronicles how officials in the municipality of Chongqing have seized the opportunity offered by its special status to launch a unique blend of liberal and socialist economic policy.

The failure of the vaccination campaign against the H1N1 virus has sometimes been blamed on the ‘wild rumours’ circulating on the Internet. According to Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, this interpretation misses the point. He offers a stimulating historical parallel between the inoculation against smallpox in the 18^th century and the H1N1 outbreak of 2009. His analysis highlights the limitations of risk as a method of persuasion and body management.

If human rights are our last utopia, it is only if we understand, says the American historian Samuel Moyn, that they are not the same as the rights of man as proclaimed at the end of the 17^th century. But while the distinction is stimulating, it might appear to be conceptually too cut-and-dried.

As Friedländer notes in The Years of Extermination, Hitler lost the war against the Allied forces but not the one he unleashed against the Jews. Within a few years, Nazism had succeeded in destroying a civilisation, a heritage, a language. The executioners spoke German but they also invented a whole propaganda lexicon, complete with coded language and circumlocutions designed to conceal the extermination scheme. Conversely, in the face of imminent destruction, the victims accumulated testimonies. Are there such things as languages of life and languages of death? Dialogue between a historian and his translator.

What does it mean to be modern? Is the modern era over, as proponents of post-modernism claim? Flying in the face of conventional definitions, Pierre-Damien Huyghe defends a conception of the modern based on the transformative power of technology, which has always been a characteristic of man.

Two books devoted to slander during the Age of Enlightenment highlight the explosive nature of speech and literature when they are given free rein. The attacks aimed at the King and Marie-Antoinette quickly started to pose a threat to the new democratic power. Then, how can we ensure that the principles of the freedom of press are compatible with the protection of individual reputations?

Examining and comparing recent books by Peter Kraus and Neil Fligstein, Jean-Claude Barbier explores scenarios for the future of the European Union. His analysis makes it clear that cultural issues, the formation of identities, and the issue of language all have a central role to play in the legitimation of the unique institutions of the EU.

Although less well known than Gandhi and Nehru, Ambedkar occupies a unique position in India’s collective imagination. Father of the Constitution and virulent critic of the caste system, he remains today a key figure for the Dalits, who have a hard time finding their way into the official narratives of the struggle for independence.

A special issue of the journal Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science edited by the American sociologists David J. Harding, Michèle Lamont, and Mario L. Small examines the relations between culture and poverty. The authors return to “the culture of poverty,” a concept that became taboo in the 1970s because of its conservative and racist recuperation. Their pluralist and supple view of culture allows them to untie the knot between culture and race that feeds conservative rhetoric.

While some Arabs supported the Nazi regime for a variety of reasons, others sided with the Allies and rose up against anti-Semitism. Gilbert Achcar’s timely book brings new depth to a historiographic field that is still prone to caricatures.

For Amartya Sen, a consensus around rejecting injustice is preferable to a general theory of justice. Although his critique of the Rawlsian approach may be useful, his arguments for a comparative approach to justice are not completely persuasive.