recognition

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.

How can historians measure and analyse the fluctuations of trust and civic feeling? In spite of the remarkable success enjoyed by Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc’s La société de défiance, the book’s argument is based on a very fragile opposition between the Third Republic, seen as the golden age of trust, and bureaucratic state intervention established at the end of the Second World War. In this article, Nicolas Delalande shows how slight and ideologically biased the authors’ historical arguments are.