Institut français

What is anthropology, and what type of knowledge does it produce? Gérard Lenclud applies his background in epistemology and questions the future of anthropology in relation to other disciplines as a means of highlighting both the similar challenges they face and the different methodologies they employ.

Democracy is not the government of the people, by the people. Rather, it is a permanent process of conquering new rights. This is the argument of Catherine Colliot-Thélène’s book, which examines the tension, found throughout democracy’s history, between individual emancipation and political affiliation.

Representations of “the people” tend to be highly policed: they smother its inherent diversity and particularity, and typically distort it. Such is the conclusion reached, each in his own way, by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière. This is also the reason why, they argue, one must pay attention to images which demonstrate the people’s singularity and power.

Revisiting the history of the New Deal, Ira Katznelson argues that it was a key moment in the reinvention of American democracy. Placing the South and the Congress at the heart of his narrative, the American historian reconsiders a period about which everything seemed to have been said.

How do the elites manage to commit crimes without being seen, or seeing themselves, as criminals? This overview by P. Lascoumes and C. Nagels shows the means deployed by the powerful to define, use, sidestep, or avoid criminal law according to their interests.

Does secularist rhetoric secretly lend itself to a discourse on social order and the exclusion of formerly colonized peoples? François Dubet argues that it is important to recognize French secularism’s rigid and conservative turn. But he also believes that we must qualify this claim if we are to find alternative secularities.

Was Socrates a martyr for philosophy, a victim of inquisition and intolerance? Or was he a dangerous oligarch, a subversive troublemaker, overthrowing Athenian morals and pedagogical practices? Historian Paulin Ismard picks up the investigation, placing the trial of Socrates within the intellectual context of 4^th-century Athens and considering the history of its reception over the centuries.

Putin is anti-modern, conservative and expansionist. He is convinced that the Western world in general and Europe in particular are decadent, and advocates a “Russian way”, which he views as an alternative political and social model. Michel Eltchaninoff has analysed this doctrine for us.

Enlightenment philosophy was invented in salons and coffee houses. It was spread by men and women of letters, but also in the dynamic context of major cities. In his book, Stéphane Van Damme explores the history of these Enlightenment practices.

How should one interpret the “Allegory of Good Government”, a fresco painted by Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena in 1338? Is it praising the law that preserves the peace within the city and protects individuals, or the wisdom that naturally guides men towards the common good?

Valérie Erlich’s analysis of academic mobility across Europe identifies higher education as a vehicle for greater European integration and indirectly sheds light on the relations amongst European states and between Europe and the rest of the world.

At a time when gender is on the debating table, the Dictionnaire genre et science politique [Dictionary of gender and political science] does more than just summarise current knowledge in the field. The book reminds us that politics has always had gender-related divisions that define it, and that the recent inclusion of gender issues in the political arena raises new questions.

Sylvain Venayre responds to politicians who, only yesterday, were asking historians to define national identity. With an exploration of the French nation’s roots, hedeliberately shifts the question by proposing a history of how historians are themselves involved in the production of a collective identity.

How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.

A new essay collection considers the relevance and stakes of a contemporary re-reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction, which was first published in 1979. The result is a critical discussion that is particularly vibrant, as much in terms of the positions the authors take vis-à-vis Bourdieu, as in terms of the themes and origins of the scholars who appropriate his arguments.

How can we produce a history of power and violence in the colonial context that is not confined to the discourse of the State, but takes full measure of the historicity of ethnographic and archival sources? Michel Naepels answers this question on the basis of extensive research in New Caledonia.

The Syrian civil war has entered its fourth year and continues to take a very heavy toll on the Syrian people. In his book on Bashar Al-Asad’s authoritarian regime, Souhaïl Belhadj shows how this conflict is rooted not in ethnic and religious identity, but in a profound social crisis.

Starting with a discussion of three related but distinct ideas – sex, gender and sexuality – Elsa Dorlin summarizes forty years of feminist theories. She also traces these three categories back to practices that are inseparable from a context of domination.

In Émilie Hache’s view, protecting the environment implies taking into account economic and social issues. But this political approach demands that we also question more profoundly our idea of nature and the relationship that we have with it.

In his last published essay, Jacques Le Goff, who recently passed away, examines the problem of historical periodization. He defends the idea of a “long Middle Ages” and refuses to see the Renaissance as a distinct period in its own right. His book is a reflection on our chronological frameworks.

In the lecture delivered between January and March 1980, Michel Foucault, after completing his studies of “power-knowledge,” attached new importance to the subject—specifically, to a form of subjectivity experienced in the injunction to speak of oneself, to better submit onself to others.

Bruno Trentin’s last book, which has just come out in French, fifteen years after it was published in Italy and five years after his death, explores the failure of the European left to respond to the jobs crisis of the final decades of the 20^th century. Will the modern-day left succeed in forging a new nexus between citizens’ rights and workers’ rights?

When the world ruled by aristocracies fell apart, there emerged a felt need for leaders. In an authoritative new book, Yves Cohen studies the historical and theoretical aspects of this emergence, which was related to modern management ideas and was developed both nationally and internationally. He focuses on four countries that were to play major roles in the first half of the twentieth century.