Institut du monde contemporain

Now a well-known Chinese lawyer of the democratic dissidence in China, Zhang Sizhi was once a young nationalist, a high-ranking official in the court of Beijing and a victim of anti-rightist repression. In his memoirs, he provides a detailed and fascinating description of the profession and China in the second half of the 20^th century.

Did French soldiers really experience a union sacrée (“sacred union”) in the trenches of the First World War, or did intellectuals simply erase their memories of the social distinctions they encountered at the front? Through an analysis of intellectuals’ discourse about other social classes, Nicolas Mariot revisits the myth of the Great War as a patriotic melting pot—an analysis which merits further exploration, on the eve of the First Armistice’s anniversary.

The key notion of caste often goes beyond the strict framework of Hinduism, in which it originated, to influence the social structures of other religious groups. Rémy Delage shows us the extent to which caste categories are important for understanding the social organization of Muslims in the region.

Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a controversial figure in Japan. And rightly so, for there are a great many contradictions in both his fictional and theoretical work. He is a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and yet continues to celebrate the heroism of the soldier who finds glory through sacrifice.

One of Albert O. Hirschman’s contributions to economic theory is a richer understanding of the concept of the “rational actor,” which, he demonstrated, possesses the deliberative capacities that democratic market societies require. This following is a profile of an economist who was also a dissident and an activist.

Jacques Bouveresse has written a book on religion in the thought of Russell and Wittgenstein. While the position of the atheist Russell on religion’s obscurities is clear, Wittgenstein’s is far more difficult to elucidate.

Through a comparative study of France, India and the United States, Jules Naudet’s book shows how certain “instituted ideologies” specific to each country are either a barrier or a resource when it comes to moving from a dominated social situation to a dominant occupational position.

What do we actually mean when we say we want our identity to be recognized? How much do our identities depend on the choices we have made? How are collective identities constructed? These questions are addressed in the work of Vincent Descombes, who although acknowledging the multiplicity of our affiliations tends to give priority to the national one. Stéphane Haber’s review here is followed by Decombes’ reply.

Martha Nussbaum has written a prolific body of work, all of it aimed at correcting the failings of political liberalism and constructing a more fully developed democracy. The theory of capabilities is at the root of this endeavour: it allows us to combat all forms of inequality by analysing the conditions out of which they emerge.

While women are first and foremost seen as victims of violence, C. Cardi and G. Pruvost show that they can also perpetrate it. Women’s violence tends to be sidelined, downplayed or made invisible, and is inextricably linked to their image, testifying to the sexual dimension of the notion of violence itself.

Enlargement of the sphere of social disadvantage, conversion of some of the higher social categories to a culture of measuring performance, and opposition in some low-income categories to policies that are too focused on the poorest ones; in Olivier Schwartz’s view, those are three of the main factors that make for difficulties in reconstructing a city of fellow creatures. In this picture, France is both less and more a class society than it was forty years ago.

Are we better able to make decisions and to produce knowledge as a group? Do the many have virtues that elude the individual? In this volume, the authors attempt to provide a collective answer to this question, thus laying the foundations for a theory of collective wisdom.

With the exception of kilts, the skirt symbolises a woman: scatterbrained, seductive or “feminine”, the wearer is well and truly a member of the weaker sex. The historian Christine Bard analyses the introduction of a “Skirt Day”, which would aim to make the skirt an acceptable garment once more. Could this be a new liberation, following the liberation of trousers for women?

The Gezi park uprising of June 2013 emerged in protest against a planned urban development project proposed by the Turkish government as part of its wider policy of attempting to revive the country’s glorious Ottoman past, despite the fact that Turkey is now a modern republic. J-F. Pérouse takes a look at the country’s ambitious urban transformation.

What does the science of the brain tell us about our moral judgments and behavior? Two books address that question in presenting a new discipline: neuroethics.

Although we know today that Ancient Greek art was rich in colour, a mistaken belief in its whiteness has prevailed since ancient times. Philippe Jockey retraces the colourful story of this myth of a white Greece and examines its aesthetic, moral and ideological implications.

Randomized evaluation has become very fashionable. Initially developed in the field of development economics, it has now spread to many public policy areas. Yannick L’Horty and Pascale Petit here discuss the advantages and the limits of this relatively recent tool for evaluating social policies.

In ancient Rome, the State did not meddle in the private religious lives of its citizens, even though the gods were part of the community and lived among them. The Roman religion accepted diverse forms of worship – provided that they did not seek to impose transcendence. In this essay John Scheid restores to the Roman religion its immanent and physical attributes.

“Can Wagner the composer only be loved in spite of Wagner the man?” To answer this question, Timothée Picard points out that music is not “in and of itself anti-Semitic or nationalistic,” and his encyclopedic dictionary of Wagner goes a long way towards proving the point.

When, and in what historical and conceptual context, did the notion of public opinion make an appearance? What theoretical role has it taken on? Can it be considered a concept, or is it among those words that are if not empty then at least ambivalent and volatile, and whose unmasking is incumbent upon philosophy?

Should politics be left to the people or to specialists? In 2010, Raison Publique, a French journal dedicated to the arts, politics and society published an issue devoted to the notion of collective wisdom, defending the competence of majorities and justifying democracy’s greater rationality. Confronting American political sociology to French political science, issue 12 of Raison Publique shows different approaches to democracy.

Behind the commendations of the nonprofit sector and the promotion of “Social and Solidarity Economy”, Matthieu Hély discerns the retreat of public service and the deliberate deregulation of the wage system. The nonprofit sector can no longer be idealized and misconstrued as a compromise between different and antagonistic logics. It must be addressed in light of what it has become: a labor market with increasingly precarious actors who have been stripped of the statute formerly guaranteed by public service.

Claude Lefort, who died in October 2010, was the author of a great number of titles in political philosophy, working both on history of ideas and interpretation of events, unceasingly questioning the political conditions of freedom.

The highest prize of the architectural world was awarded to Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in 2009. His phenomenological approach, paying special attention to natural landscapes and local building traditions, is at odds with the dominant contemporary architectural design. He has the merit of raising the thorny question of what architecture means at a time of widespread urban living and the crisis of place.

In this monumental work, three historians study the political, military, cultural and economic interactions between Europe and the Muslim world over the past millennium and a half. One of the original sides to their approach is that they don’t confine themselves to the religious divide, which enables them to refute the theory of an inevitable clash between the European and Arab Muslim worlds.

“Take on the color of the dead,” the Delphic Oracle said to Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who took that exhortation to mean he should read the old philosophers. Roger Chartier’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France underscores the link between the history of written cultures and that of practices of reading and transmission.

Adopting an original double perspective, the legal scholar Mireille Delmas-Marty and the historian Henry Laurens summon history to the service of law in defining the elusive phenomenon of terrorism. They identify its past forms in order to shed light on its contemporary specificities.