Translated with the support of the Institut français
Activists supporting alter-globalization recently met in Tunis for this year’s World Social Forum. This is a good point from which to look back over the history of the alter-globalization movement, from the 1990s to 2013.
Education, microcredit, health policy…. How can we really measure the effectiveness of a public policy? Esther Duflo talks about the principles of the experimental method she has developed and perfected in several situations around the world.
Is there not a contradiction between the aims of sustainable urban development, which inflates the cost of housing, and the requirements of fairness in access to housing? Analysing the situation in France and comparing it to neighbouring European countries, Vincent Renard provides answers to this question.
Urban philosopher Thierry Paquot’s synthetic work maps out the historical development of the notion of public space. It highlights the diverse representations and uses of the public which structure citizens’ lives, with a fair share of hesitations and conflicts.
For two thousand years, according to James Scott, the mountains of Zomia were a place of refuge for the people of Southeast Asia. For the author, this region, as a centre of resistance to the state, holds up a mirror to our destructive and self-confident civilisation. A fascinating and intriguing anarchist history.
Although today’s world is more interdependent than ever, it is still a jigsaw puzzle of sovereign states. One consequence of globalization is that we have to update our own mental maps, and to understand other people’s. In this interview, the diplomat and geographer Michel Foucher explains the world’s new geography.
Though the age of historic upheavals and major political crises seemed to be over, the word “revolution” has made a recent comeback in Georgia, in the Ukraine and in the “Arab Springs” of 2011. Should we revise the concept of revolution? What, if anything, do these contemporary revolutions have in common? Can they be compared to the great revolutions of the past: namely the French and Soviet revolutions?
2012, Terminator, Blade Runner, Melancholia. There is no shortage of films portraying the end of the world; in fact, they are becoming ever more successful. But what is their real meaning? Are they pure entertainment, allowing us to play with the idea that everything could stop from one day to the next? Peter Szendy believes that we should be taking them very seriously, because they express the fundamental nature of cinema itself – and because they tell us, in their own way, what a world is.
Although urban poverty in the USA is a subject that was largely absent from the 2012 American presidential campaign, it has reached very high levels. For a new generation of ethnographers now addressing this issue, exploitation is replacing abandonment as the explanation for the reproduction of urban poverty, in particular in the case of Afro-Americans.
A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history.
Creating connections has been the aim of Jean Starobinski’s work for more than half a century. His body of work is large and shifting, created in response to life, lying somewhere between the critical and the clinical. Books & Ideas met this citizen of the world at his house in Geneva, following the recent publication of three important books.
What are the political characteristics of the internet revolution? Plunging into “internet democracy,” Dominique Cardon explores the tensions running through this vast network of networks, including the radical equality of its users, their very conspicuous subjectivity, the creation of new kinds of solidarity, and the construction of legitimacy.
Are human rights a cornerstone of democracy, or a threat to social ties? Are they a precondition for the existence of a public space, or a triumph of individualism? Political thinkers have debated these questions during the last three decades. In this essay, Justine Lacroix explains the issues and the current situation.
A specialist in monetary and financial issues, André Orléan has written a synthesis of his research that is intended as a handbook for the renewal of economic thought. His approach asks us to rethink the place of economics within the social sciences and its relationship to politics.
Since April 2011, a collective of Syrian filmmakers has been working on behalf of a people fighting for its freedom. Their short films invent a new cinematographic language adapted to the urgency of the situation. Abounaddara tells the story.
Approved in 2048, the abolition of marriage turned upside down not only the sexual organization of society but also the idea of lineage. This historical transformation was carried forth by a utopian group that no one, around 2010, had taken seriously. This article looks back at a movement that transformed our lives.
The attention given today to the armed uprising in Syria must not conceal the fact that there also exists a peaceful revolutionary dynamic, which is deeply rooted in society. The new generations, mainly urban and more educated than their parents, are at the forefront of a movement of political contestation that is trying to occupy public space through various means.
Replacing the modern liberal concept of the free and sovereign subject with the interdependent, vulnerable and responsible subject, Corine Pelluchon bases politics on an ethical ontology. But does she not thereby disregard the actual organization of the social world, our critique of which makes it possible for us to think about the relationship between ethics and politics?
Mayotte joined the ranks of French departments in 2011. Although it passed almost unnoticed, the event reflects an integration that began in the 1970s but that is likely to continue for many years to come. The case of this small island raises the question of how colonial modes of governance can be ended in France’s overseas territories.
Whether they live in French Guyana, Mayotte, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, or Polynesia, indigenous peoples have been largely forgotten during France’s 2011 celebration of its “Year of the Overseas Territories.” Yet their long-standing presence in the French national community has made these remnants of empire laboratories of national belonging—and the heart of France’s political diversity.
How do you renounce unanimity to embrace the majority principle? How do you ward off the dissastisfaction of a minority defeated by vote? Those problems haunted the Middle Ages, the system of orders and ranks of which made room for the majority principle in many of its central institutions. For historian Olivier Christin, we need to reassess this era’s contribution to the origins of the kind of political decision-making that is associated with the democratic revolution.
We promise a lot and we are promised a lot. Promises lie at the heart of our social life. They are also the foundation of electoral democracies, in which political programs take the form of commitments. Why do we keep our promises? To what do they commit us? And why is it that, every now and then, we keep them?
The practice of using representative samples in decision making in contemporary political regimes creates an opening for re-establishing sortition (making decisions or filling offices by drawing lots). The diversity that sortition adds to political procedures helps reinforce democratic legitimacy. In Yves Sintomer’s view, we could even introduce sortition into elections.
Sociologists Jean-François Laé and Numa Murard have returned to the field where they previously conducted research on the poor and money. In contrast, their new book sheds light on the impact of processes of individualization and fragmentation on contemporary working classes.
Where does ones moral compass come from, nature or nurture? Successfully avoiding all reductionism, Vanessa Nurock reflects on the natural origins of ethics, using both the history of philosophy and empirical research on psychology and cognitive science to present her argument.
What do we really know about the costs and benefits of redistribution for the middle class? Two recent studies demonstrate that while it is certainly heavily taxed, so is the vast majority of the population—including people with low incomes. The real issue lies elsewhere—notably in the privileged situation of the richest 1% and the future of public spending.
Should East Asia’s economic takeoff and the new hegemony of capitalism in that region be interpreted as parts of a convergence towards a global model based on Anglosphere economic liberalism, or should we see them rather as the onset of a process by which a new form of capitalism is being constructed, based on the region’s economic integration? The two books reviewed here tackle this issue head on, from the angle of regulation theory.
By reconstructing the historical circumstances in which the first contacts between the Dutch, the Malays, and the Javanese occurred at the turn of the seventeenth century, Romain Bertrand offers us a field-defining study, while also demonstrating the heuristic utility of “connected history.” At a time of intellectual timidity and spineless caution, Bertrand’s book brings a breath of fresh air to the discipline of history.
When it comes to delinquency, the press, as well as political discourse, tends to emphasize the “crime angle” over the “sociological angle.” Moreover, when quantitative data is used in public debate, trust in statistics is low. Philippe Robert’s and Renée Zauberman’s new book may suggest a way out of this unfortunate situation.
French programs of “positive discrimination” are supposed to help open elite education to socially disadvantaged students. While challenging the idea that diversity is truly promoted in the United States, a comparative study of current trends in Paris and Chicago show the opacity of the selection criteria in Paris, and the existence of a clear geographical segregation.
There is a long-standing tradition of contrasting the French and American models of philanthropy. According to four scholars invited to discuss the matter for Books and Ideas, this contrast, which is too quickly reduced to a difference between market and the state-based approaches, is no longer valid.
Karine Berger and Valérie Rabault don’t go along with the usual rhetoric of commentators on current economic developments. Instead of catching our attention with an alarming vision, they present their book as a piece of optimism. However, although their book does suggest an action plan for the future, it is based on a strong critique of recent economic policies.
The history of Emmaüs, a major movement against homelessness made famous by its charismatic leader, Abbot Pierre, is representative of postwar voluntary solidarity associations in France. By describing the stages of its development, Axelle Brodiez-Dolino proposes a typology of conflicts in the voluntary organizations sector.
Are the demands of indignados of all countries fundamentally the same, or does each movement have its distinctive style? For Sylvaine Bulle, Israel’s J14 movement must be understood as a critique of the state of exception.
According to the American historian Michael Bess, political ecology in France does not have the dark-green hue of ‘deep ecology’, but instead is a light-green colour that combines organic produce and technological modernity. Is this not, however, rather too optimistic a picture of a country that is struggling to implement a real policy for sustainable development?
Far from being natural, the compatibility between the legal orders of the European Union and member states is the result of arrangements and decisions through which judges ensure the preeminence of European norms over national legislation and extend the rule of law over an ever-widening realm.
Sociologist Bénédicte Zimmerman’s empirical studies of employer groups and participative management reveals how the tension that exists between the individual and the collective is being reshaped in today’s flexible organizations. “Flexicurity” is not a mere word. And freedom at work is not just a matter of autonomy.
Sociologist Luc Boltanski situates his most recent publications and their main concepts within his broader intellectual trajectory, examining critical sociology and the sociology of critique, and what they can tell us about today’s social situation.
Simply by analysing the moral problems of each and every one of us, Ruwen Ogien takes the stance of ‘minimal ethics’. His book reads like a good mystery novel in which the detective proves against all odds that there may be no crime, no victim, and no murderer.
Youth gangs are often discussed but rarely investigated. In an ethnographic study that examines families, schools, and the street, sociologist Marwan Mohammed reconstructs the principles according to which these groups are formed in the Paris region.