Under the French Third Republic, the gender of “citizenship” and “philosophy” was masculine. Yet women pioneers managed to obtain university degrees and rise to positions of responsibility from which they had been excluded.
According to Jean-Fabien Spitz, republicanism’s foundational ideals have been betrayed by the very people who purport to defend them against liberalism. An overemphasis on questions of identity makes it possible to forget that the republic was, from the outset, a principle of social justice.
Whether at work, at school, or in personal relationships, implicit gender biases are still very much alive and well. What is more, despite numerous attempts to prevent stereotypes and their effects, they continue to affect people’s performance, preferences, and opinions.
Inequality has a history that is always complex and often contradictory. The story needs to be told, because it is this story, enriched by the contributions of all the social sciences, that can help to shape realistic proposals for greater social justice.
Is the project of deliberative democracy unrealistic? Against the cynical assimilation of democracy to a set of voting procedures aimed at satisfying the interests of the greatest number, Charles Girard argues that deliberation is a relevant ideal for a society of equals.
Despite the many measures designed to promote inclusiveness, it is a struggle for disabled people to exercise their rights. In the face of these vulnerable rights, individuals protest and seek solutions to escape the feeling that they are treated as second-class citizens.
How did the French Revolution, after abolishing privilege, also become the foundation of modern inequality? Thomas Piketty’s latest book focuses on the evolving ideological constructions of property across the ages and offers ways to solve the problem of inequality without challenging to the individual right to private property.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection questions the relationship between gender and politics.
With the population aging in the US as in many Western countries, COVID-19 has only revealed an increasingly urgent need for care. But the lack of support for caregiving is an ongoing and increasingly shared struggle. How can we care for the caregivers, and build a society that values care?
As protests against racism break out all over the world following the murder of George Floyd, Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts examining the history of these multifaceted discriminations and of the struggles for racial justice.
Paradoxically, feminism was named by its adversaries. Thus, the history of feminism is closely connected to antifeminism. An interdisciplinary work examines their parallel journeys.
The ways in which political parties are funded, in France and elsewhere, tend to reinforce the invisibility of certain groups and the political influence of the wealthiest people in society, in particular through right-wing parties. Are there, Julia Cagé wonders, more democratic ways of funding democracy?
While many see the United States as a land of freedom, Sean Wilentz questions the passion for American equality. He takes a new look at the country’s political life and the deep antagonism to political parties, periodically played out in the country.
Few histories of the African American fight for equality manage to shed their ideological bias. Caroline Rolland-Diamond offers an impressive overview that goes beyond oppositions to highlight the structuring lines of a two-century-old struggle that continues today.
In the 18th century, the free market emerged as a vehicle for equality, giving people freedom from managers’ authority. However, as Elizabeth Anderson explains, this is no longer the case: corporations’ power over their employees is now entirely dictatorial.
Retracing the genealogy of the idea of human ‘races’, Claude-Olivier Doron returns to the role of the Enlightenment, and particularly Buffon, in the emergence of monogenistic racial thought. He examines how the idea of ‘race’ and the affirmation of universalism appeared concomitantly.
At a time when the French government has reignited the debate over a universal minimum income, Philippe Askenazy reconsiders the question of wealth redistribution. He maintains that intervention must occur at a much earlier stage, not through taxation or generalized access to property, but by making base incomes equal through a revalorization of work.
Thirty years ago, Pierre Bourdieu’s La Distinction laid the groundwork for a reintegration of cultural factors into our thinking about capital. Is this argument still valid today? Philippe Coulangeon talks about the metamorphoses of distinction in a world defined by inequalities in wealth and by the mutations of cultural legitimacy.
According to Nancy Fraser, the renewal of socialism requires a conflation of activism and political theory; indeed, emancipation can only exist on the basis of equal participation in all spheres of life, and can only be understood in terms of social struggles, which today appear in multiple forms.
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.
Ronald Dworkin’s innovative and politically ambitious work has become essential reading in political and legal theory. Taking issue with classical political liberalism, he argues that liberty and equality are not mutually exclusive, and are indeed inseparable. And against traditional interpretations of law, he argues that law must be understood by comparing it to a collective novel, a mixture of creativity and interpretation.
Why has the right to workplace representation been historically denied to millions of employees in the United States? In his highly original history of the category of “employee,” Jean-Christian Vinel lays bare the political stakes embedded in this term. In this way, he fills an important gap in the social history of the United States.
