Translated with the support of the Institut français
The term ‘logistics’ refers to work connected to warehouses: storage, order packing, handling etc. These activities, which are often too arduous to be carried out over the long term, now structure the condition of the working classes and their career paths.
Men and women have been wearing veils for over a millennium in the West. Nicole Pellegrin shows that, far from always being a response to religious or moral precepts, head coverings also tell us about the aesthetic experiences of a Western world hungry for transparency.
In the period between 1865 and 1931, economists were already questioning coal and the exploitation of “exhaustible” energies. Can their analyses shed light on the current environmental crisis?
Conceived by its inventors as the basis of a new monetary order, Bitcoin seems to have been overtaken by finance and become the object of lucrative speculation.
Using a variety of documents and sources, Louis Pinto traces the genesis of the category of “the consumer” as a central feature of market economy and society. But in doing so, he risks downplaying the insights of critical theory and the opportunities for politicization tied to this distinct form of social participation.
By enmeshing infrastructures, power is able to curtail local particularities, exploit resources, and fight group autonomy. Inhabiting territories engaged in struggle makes it possible to resist power. “Being a forest,” whether in Notre-Dame-des-Landes or Borneo, means becoming ungovernable.
Just as an international treaty on the social responsibility of multinational corporations is being negotiated at the United Nations, Marieke Louis reveals how corporations are involved in the arenas of global governance, and highlights the ambivalent relationships between states and multinational corporations.
Alarmist predictions about African migration are all the rage. François Héran shows that they are based less on a demographic approach than on an economic conjecture, and on the fallacy that development in Africa can only be achieved at the expense of Europe.
The religious convert is a figure of fear and fascination today. Looking beyond clichés, Juliette Galonnier’s investigation in France and the United States shows the daily struggles facing converts who, in the absence of established social frameworks, often experience their religion in great solitude – while at the same time trying to reinvent it.
Last summer, bikini-wearing women on Algerian beaches were a hot topic in the French news. Presented for a while as a feminist revolt against the rise of Islam, this issue is above all symptomatic of the gender relations, but also the class and race relations, structuring Algerian society.
Why do we consider killing and letting someone die to be two different things? Why do we believe that a doctor who refuses to treat a terminally ill patient is doing anything less than administering a lethal substance? After all, the consequences are the same, and perhaps the moral status of these acts should be judged accordingly.
From ethnological objects to contemporary installations, everything is now susceptible to being restored. According to Jean-Pierre Cometti, this is the mark of an era in which artistic and cultural objects are “transitive” and reversible, in the sense that they can exchange positions.
Ronald Coase (1910-2013), the 1991 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is famous for his oft-quoted and just as often misunderstood “theorem.” His seminal works on transaction costs, property rights, and regulation continue to stimulate a rich reflection in economics and beyond.
Peronism, a political and social movement, has structured life in Argentina since the 1940s, and has been emulated elsewhere in Latin American. But it eludes any precise definition. Neither a dictatorship, nor a democracy, this plebiscitary regime is based on the army and trade unions.
Paris, 1933. Oscar Dufrenne, a music hall mogul and notorious homosexual, was found murdered in his office. Even though a suspect was arrested, the investigation led nowhere. The case paints a portrait of interwar France in its desire to restore order, its political violence, and the slow evolution of social mores.
How did people living in Paris, New York and London slowly gain access to running water? Although private companies shared the water market from the 17th to the 18th centuries, cities slowly realised the need for a public network.
Miguel Abensour profoundly renewed thinking about democracy. His political philosophy paid close attention to the desire for emancipation and was based on an original conception of utopia breaking with the mythology of the ‘ideal city’ or of a ‘good society’.
How does big data contribute to our understanding of Hugo, Balzac or Flaubert? A great deal, because far from being a mechanical accumulation of data on literary texts, the digital humanities transform our relationship to works and the way we read them.
Why do people strip naked in the public space? Under French law, public nudity is considered a form of indecent exposure, however more often than not it is in fact about the pleasure of a lifestyle or about conveying a message.
How do children perceive the world around them, from the circles closest to them – their friends and family – to the most distant spheres – work and politics? In a recent book, two French sociologists open up a critical dialogue with psychology to describe the socially differentiated processes through which children learn to think and think about themselves.
Le négationnisme économique. Et comment s’en débarrasser (Economic Denialism, and How to Get Rid of It) has sparked lively discussion in France. What can we draw from this book for a reflection on social science methods and the terms of scientific debate?
To make their highly original interactionist sociology widely accessible, Randall Collins and Maren McConnell revisit the careers of Statesmen and entrepreneurs. Their ambition is to resolve an old problem: what are leaders made of?
Has the digital economy definitively made the main tools of Marxist analysis obsolete? This is Mariano Zukerfeld’s argument, in a lively essay that suggests rethinking the critique of capitalism around the question of knowledge rather than labour. However, his demonstration lacks a convincing theory of value.
Media, publishing, photography, theatre and political discourse are now shifting their attention to the lives of ordinary people. Does this move serve the need to better understand contemporary society? Sylvain Bourmeau, an actor and observer of these changes, offers some explanations.
At a time when the refugee issue is highly topical, a collection of essays offers a history of asylum administration and its actors and practices. A first step towards a European history of asylum in the twentieth century.
Since Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, cinematographic representations of the extermination of the European Jews have seemed impossible. Son of Saul has challenged this assumption. Nonetheless, the aesthetic and narrative choices this film makes are problematic.
“Parricide”, “tyrant”, “monster”: it would be an understatement to say that the last Julio-Claudian emperor is not highly regarded. Making use of some impressive documents, Donatien Grau analyses the image of the hated emperor from the first century AD to the present day. The story of Nero reads like a history of the West.
Can journalism advance knowledge in the field of social science? Two investigations published by the New York Times have highlighted racial inequalities and their links to prison. By contrast, these rigorous investigations emphasize the lack of knowledge of this situation in the French context.
Though they share the diagnosis of an unprecedented democratic crisis of the European project, our critics remain firmly rooted in a “communitarian” tradition that is no longer able to meet the challenges faced by the government of the euro area.
The proposal by a group of academics to institute a parliament of the euro area has garnered considerable attention. However, according to S. Vallée, this institutional reform would hinder the development of a transnational European democracy. What follows is the first part of a debate between the authors and their critics.
Ancient philosophy offered consolation for loss, separation, and death. Modern philosophy no longer does so, considering that it should limit its role to the quest for truth. This renunciation has, according to Michaël Fœssel, deep consequences for our current politics and their lack of any broader perspective.
In economics, the study of behavior has been enriched by a productive dialogue between theory and experiments. Challenging the model of rationality associated with “homo economicus,” it is shedding new light on decision-making in situations of strategic interaction.
French law is not always very clear when it comes to punishing racist speech. Judges, aware that this prohibition is crucial in a democracy, are forced to interpret the law with the utmost rigour.
What determines the value of a drug? Quentin Ravelli’s ethnographic study of the pharmaceutical industry reveals the ubiquity of drugs manufacturers, from university training programmes to doctors’ practices, and the commercial logic that underpins the medical use of drugs.
A meticulous historical enquiry reveals the liberties taken by the author of Journey to the End of the Night in recounting his war experience. These flattering inventions made it possible for him to disseminate his pamphlets in the 1930s and clear his name in the purge.
While the spotlight is focused on the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe, researcher Kamel Doraï reminds us that the main countries concerned are primarily those in the region. Jordan is among the countries that has received the highest number of Syrians, sharpening economic and social tensions in a country already gripped by the presence of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees.
In a desire to write a total history, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel proposes a novel sociocultural and transnational approach to the artistic avant-gardes. Beyond a mere history of styles, the avant-gardes appear in her book as genuine political and social events, caught in complex networks of influence.
Through an ethnographic investigation behind the closed doors of the European quarter in Brussels, Sylvain Laurens studies the relationships between the business community and European institutions, showing that their proximity derives less from ideological complicity than from a shared history.
It is now incongruous to imagine Vietnamese people identifying themselves as “Indochinese”. For a long time, however, the colonial territory served as a framework for the expression of Vietnam’s national identity. This phenomenon does not illustrate so much the effectiveness of the education given in schools under the French empire as the negotiated nature of colonisation in Asia. A fresh look at a classic work.
The recent success of books on economic history – at a time when this specialism often seems disregarded in universities – coupled with parallel developments in both history and economics gives hope for new links between the two disciplines.