FMSH

After several years of field work in a Chicago black ghetto, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh gives a lively and thorough analysis of the survival strategies of its inhabitants. Halfway between solidarity and predation, the underground economy of the ghetto relies as much on money as on networks built on trust and exchange.

The French literary magazine Esprit evaluates the work of Ivan Illich. It first focuses on his denouncing the perverse effects of industrial society. It also analyzes the symbolic effects of the system of modern technology. Despite the thematic and methodological eclecticism of the two periods in his life, there is one central preoccupation that runs throughout, that of man and his autonomy.

How did it come about that by 7 April 1994 a political faction had decided on and initiated the Tutsi genocide? André Guichaoua’s book investigates the Rwandan state’s genocide strategy, which was carried out by an extremist government after it had eliminated the legitimate authorities.

Against the widespread view that links the post-‘68 period to hedonism, sociologist Lilian Mathieu paints a broad range of protest movements and offers an incisive political analysis. But this period is also of interest for understanding the present: a look at the recent past enables us to analyze today’s social movements.

What institutional means are available to the Chinese people for expressing their displeasure with officialdom? Isabelle Thireau and Hua Linshan’s book is the first Western study of the xinfang, the Administration of Letters and Visits, a government agency that currently processes in excess of 13 million complaints a year.

According to the historian Dan Edelstein, the violent phase of the Terror arose directly out of the French revolutionaries’ fascination with natural right theory. This new interpretation is unpersuasive to Annie Jourdan; in particular, she questions the relevance of analysing the French Revolution in Schmittian terms.

While sociological and philosophical studies of social suffering are proliferating, the psychiatrist Jean Furtos casts a clinical eye on the relations between mental health and precariousness. He presents the syndrome of self-exclusion as a pathology of precariousness, consisting of a radical reduction in psychic functioning. This lesson is not limited to psychiatry or to the study of insecurity.

Jacques Krynen shows, in an excellent overview, that judicial power was not a recent invention: in the Old Regime, high court judges already claimed a share of royal power. This erudite yet accessible book thus revises the myth of absolutism. What about other magistrates and lawyers?

Ex-philosopher Matthew Crawford celebrates the virtues of manual labor, lamenting the alienation that he argues is inherent in ostensibly intellectual occupations. Crawford is convinced that only manual work is truly intelligent, and he challenges current educational policies while arguing for a rediscovery of the value of hands-on activity.

Transformations of work disrupt family time. Relying on a rigorous statistical approach, Laurent Lesnard draws attention to the consequences produced in family life by the turmoil of atypical working hours. While his demonstration of this phenomenon is convincing, his interpretation of it is more questionable.

How did physician-chemists go about putting public hygiene on the agenda during the nineteenth century? Constructing a panorama of their ambitions and projects, Gérard Jorland gives us a sweeping summa that favours the grand narrative at the expense of explaining social complexity.

The history of the American census is also that of the institutionalization of racial and ethnic categories. In a detailed study of the practices of classifying the U.S. population from 1790 to 1940, the historian Paul Schor demonstrates the instability of the categories produced and the way in which forms of classification of blacks were extended to other categories.

If human rights are our last utopia, it is only if we understand, says the American historian Samuel Moyn, that they are not the same as the rights of man as proclaimed at the end of the 17^th century. But while the distinction is stimulating, it might appear to be conceptually too cut-and-dried.

What does it mean to be modern? Is the modern era over, as proponents of post-modernism claim? Flying in the face of conventional definitions, Pierre-Damien Huyghe defends a conception of the modern based on the transformative power of technology, which has always been a characteristic of man.

Two books devoted to slander during the Age of Enlightenment highlight the explosive nature of speech and literature when they are given free rein. The attacks aimed at the King and Marie-Antoinette quickly started to pose a threat to the new democratic power. Then, how can we ensure that the principles of the freedom of press are compatible with the protection of individual reputations?

Examining and comparing recent books by Peter Kraus and Neil Fligstein, Jean-Claude Barbier explores scenarios for the future of the European Union. His analysis makes it clear that cultural issues, the formation of identities, and the issue of language all have a central role to play in the legitimation of the unique institutions of the EU.

A special issue of the journal Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science edited by the American sociologists David J. Harding, Michèle Lamont, and Mario L. Small examines the relations between culture and poverty. The authors return to “the culture of poverty,” a concept that became taboo in the 1970s because of its conservative and racist recuperation. Their pluralist and supple view of culture allows them to untie the knot between culture and race that feeds conservative rhetoric.

While some Arabs supported the Nazi regime for a variety of reasons, others sided with the Allies and rose up against anti-Semitism. Gilbert Achcar’s timely book brings new depth to a historiographic field that is still prone to caricatures.

For Amartya Sen, a consensus around rejecting injustice is preferable to a general theory of justice. Although his critique of the Rawlsian approach may be useful, his arguments for a comparative approach to justice are not completely persuasive.

How can a republic be perpetuated and civic virtue maintained? The historian Dan Edelstein responds to the criticisms posed by Annie Jourdan in her account of his book, The Terror of Natural Right. In particular, he defends the thesis according to which natural right is two-sided, at once liberating and violent.

In The Society of Discontent (La société du malaise), Alain Ehrenberg provides an overview of a sociology of individualisms that is based on a comparison between the social meanings of autonomy in the United States and France. While his approach is interesting, he seems to have conceived of autonomy as independent of the social conditions of possibility.

Few academics have taken seriously the contents of the talk and tales that found popular anti-Semitism past and present in Poland. In an arresting book, anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir retraces the phenomenon back to its roots on the strength of a study of the “blood libels” revolving around Host profanations, child kidnapping and ritual murders. An exploration of the Polish catholic subconscious.

What can literature teach us about China’s experience of democracy in the twentieth century? In an ambitious work, Sebastian Veg explores the links between fiction and democracy in his search for a critical reflection on the reader-citizen.

When explaining European construction the Federal model is often alluded to, whether as a point of reference or as an ultimate goal. However we do have to be clear what this model means. For Olivier Beaud, Federation is a special form of political structure that cannot be grasped without detaching itself from the theory of the State.

Is society sentenced to endure the law of the market? The publication of a number of essays by economist Karl Polanyi hitherto unpublished in French gives us the opportunity to re-discover democratic socialism as championed by the author of The Great Transformation. His thinking on political power’s capacity to organise economic exchanges still applies.