Counterfactual history is a matter of ‘what ifs’. What if the Allies had lost the Second World War? What if there had been no transatlantic slave trade? Two French historians analyse the intellectual merits of this use of the past, long established in the Anglo-American world.
Over the last twenty years, some of the social and bio-medical sciences have had to face the impossibility of replicating some of their most famous experiments. Although this situation raises serious concerns, it is an opportunity to fundamentally renew the scientific methodology in these disciplines.
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?
The first two years of Bourdieu’s teaching at the Collège de France were less a general introduction to his concepts than a long immersion in his method, at the intersection of reflexivity, symbolics and structural analysis.
Two recent books explore the importance of quantification in contemporary technologies of power and forms of resistance to them. But is activism on behalf of an emancipatory rather than subservient use of numbers possible or even desirable?
