Institut du monde contemporain

Now a well-known Chinese lawyer of the democratic dissidence in China, Zhang Sizhi was once a young nationalist, a high-ranking official in the court of Beijing and a victim of anti-rightist repression. In his memoirs, he provides a detailed and fascinating description of the profession and China in the second half of the 20^th century.

Did French soldiers really experience a union sacrée (“sacred union”) in the trenches of the First World War, or did intellectuals simply erase their memories of the social distinctions they encountered at the front? Through an analysis of intellectuals’ discourse about other social classes, Nicolas Mariot revisits the myth of the Great War as a patriotic melting pot—an analysis which merits further exploration, on the eve of the First Armistice’s anniversary.

Jacques Bouveresse has written a book on religion in the thought of Russell and Wittgenstein. While the position of the atheist Russell on religion’s obscurities is clear, Wittgenstein’s is far more difficult to elucidate.

Through a comparative study of France, India and the United States, Jules Naudet’s book shows how certain “instituted ideologies” specific to each country are either a barrier or a resource when it comes to moving from a dominated social situation to a dominant occupational position.

What do we actually mean when we say we want our identity to be recognized? How much do our identities depend on the choices we have made? How are collective identities constructed? These questions are addressed in the work of Vincent Descombes, who although acknowledging the multiplicity of our affiliations tends to give priority to the national one. Stéphane Haber’s review here is followed by Decombes’ reply.

While women are first and foremost seen as victims of violence, C. Cardi and G. Pruvost show that they can also perpetrate it. Women’s violence tends to be sidelined, downplayed or made invisible, and is inextricably linked to their image, testifying to the sexual dimension of the notion of violence itself.

Are we better able to make decisions and to produce knowledge as a group? Do the many have virtues that elude the individual? In this volume, the authors attempt to provide a collective answer to this question, thus laying the foundations for a theory of collective wisdom.

What does the science of the brain tell us about our moral judgments and behavior? Two books address that question in presenting a new discipline: neuroethics.

Although we know today that Ancient Greek art was rich in colour, a mistaken belief in its whiteness has prevailed since ancient times. Philippe Jockey retraces the colourful story of this myth of a white Greece and examines its aesthetic, moral and ideological implications.

“Can Wagner the composer only be loved in spite of Wagner the man?” To answer this question, Timothée Picard points out that music is not “in and of itself anti-Semitic or nationalistic,” and his encyclopedic dictionary of Wagner goes a long way towards proving the point.

When, and in what historical and conceptual context, did the notion of public opinion make an appearance? What theoretical role has it taken on? Can it be considered a concept, or is it among those words that are if not empty then at least ambivalent and volatile, and whose unmasking is incumbent upon philosophy?

Should politics be left to the people or to specialists? In 2010, Raison Publique, a French journal dedicated to the arts, politics and society published an issue devoted to the notion of collective wisdom, defending the competence of majorities and justifying democracy’s greater rationality. Confronting American political sociology to French political science, issue 12 of Raison Publique shows different approaches to democracy.

In this monumental work, three historians study the political, military, cultural and economic interactions between Europe and the Muslim world over the past millennium and a half. One of the original sides to their approach is that they don’t confine themselves to the religious divide, which enables them to refute the theory of an inevitable clash between the European and Arab Muslim worlds.

“Take on the color of the dead,” the Delphic Oracle said to Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who took that exhortation to mean he should read the old philosophers. Roger Chartier’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France underscores the link between the history of written cultures and that of practices of reading and transmission.

Adopting an original double perspective, the legal scholar Mireille Delmas-Marty and the historian Henry Laurens summon history to the service of law in defining the elusive phenomenon of terrorism. They identify its past forms in order to shed light on its contemporary specificities.