What does it mean to “decolonize knowledge”? What is the difference between “anticolonial,” “postcolonial,” and “decolonial”? To address the semantic confusion surrounding the term “decolonial,” Lissell Quiroz and Philippe Colin propose a genealogy of this current of thought, which emerged in Latin America in the 1990s.
Sarah Gensburger dismisses the idea of the French state being overwhelmed by the fragmentation and proliferation of memory-related demands. Rather, the state is the primary creator of society’s memorial frameworks, even using them as a powerful means of reasserting its own legitimacy.
Faced with the risk of losing man to the self, Pierre Guenancia says that we should abandon the self to rediscover man.
A sociologist and an economist who oppose green industrial policy advocate ecological planning based on democratic foundations.
The ritual massacre perpetrated by the Natchez against several hundred French settlers in Louisiana on 28 November 1729 was the starting point of a colonial violence against a tribe that lasted until its near disappearance.
How should we characterize the regime of Tunisian President Kais Saied since his 2021 power grab? To get a sense of what is happening “inside the country,” an edited volume provides an informed and engaged interpretation of the situation.
Throughout the nineteenth century, ecological currents in the agricultural world promoted organic farming and the defense of small producers. The story of these “ecological farmers” sheds light on the forward-looking contract forged between agriculture and society.
Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz provides the first genealogical study of the concept of energy transition. In the face of discourses that keep postponing “the transition” to a later date, Fressoz takes up the unprecedented political challenge of a complete phase-out of fossil fuels.
To achieve energy transition, we will need to extract as much metal in the next 20 years as we have done in the entire history of mankind. This is ‘one of the great paradoxes of our times’.
Hayek always presented his reconstruction of liberalism as a utopia, based on the idea of a spontaneous, self-regulating social order, against the chimera of social justice.
Why did 5,000 Europeans join the jihad in Syria? The volunteers who left between 2011 and 2014 displayed a form of religious solidarity and a desire for revolution, which were later exploited by Daesh.
In the tradition of Marcel Mauss, Pierre Lemonnier examines the male initiation rites of the Baruya of New Guinea not in terms of the signifier that can be attached to them, but rather the action on matter that they make possible.
In ancient times, mythological and historical criminals were not always inhuman. They show us that there is nothing universal about our self-evident truths, particularly when they concern such fundamental concepts as good and evil.
The “Europe of the market” has dominated European social and economic policy since 1945. Yet three other models have opposed the liberal paradigm: solidarity, neomercantilism, and ultra-liberalism.
Time is the hardest thing for us to understand, as we cannot be sure whether it exists in and of itself, or whether it can even be defined. This is an age-old conundrum, but Francis Wolff offers a new answer rooted in neither physics nor phenomenology.
Maritime spaces are the focus of the major economic, ecological, and geopolitical challenges of our time. Lest they become the site of routine legal violations (ranging from pollution to overfishing), a government of the seas is necessary.
Philosophy has something to say about wine: about its definition, how to savor it, what it inspires, but also about the virtues of inebriation.
Contemporary uses of the word “Muslim” in France illustrate the variety of ways in which minorities identify themselves. In a book that straddles semantics and ethnography, Marie-Claire Willems sheds light on the diversity of forms of belonging available to populations exposed to exclusion.
The encounter between British miners and gay and lesbian activists during the strikes of 1984-85 was explored in the celebrated film Pride. A historian looks back at this memorable period and reveals the continuities between the two movements.
The question of original sin no longer concerns us as much as that of diet. But what if it were the same?
Experience can only lead to knowledge if it is organized by concepts that are not derived from experience. This is the paradox at the heart of Kant’s metaphysics, which Antoine Grandjean gives an entirely new interpretation.
After 1946, the process of “decolonization by assimilation” ensured that the French Antilles remained part of France. The departmental framework, seen as the source of all the rights associated with citizenship, had a profound influence on Antillean politics and society.
In the Volta region, there is no such thing as land ownership: Land is not traded but shared. Why, then, do our societies consider the right to appropriate land to be perfectly legitimate?
The plaza in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem was the scene of intense conflict between Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century. Paying unique attention to the faintest traces, historian Vincent Lemire traces the successive episodes of violence and destruction that unfolded at the foot of the wall.
How have French women of Arab and North African descent become the subject of a collective fantasy? If the language of immigration reveals collective imaginaries and social and discursive practices that are worth analyzing, then the word beurette also deserves our attention.
Some exceptional experiences give us access to a different reality from the one we encounter in our everyday lives. In the twentieth century, a number of philosophers explored these experiences in the pursuit of a new form of empiricism.
In this analysis of animal behavior, Florence Burgat brilliantly examines a continent that Freud left unexplored: the animal unconscious. But is psychoanalysis the right framework for such a project?
Patrick Chastenet examines the anarchist roots of political ecology. He considers five authors who connected the defense of nature to the defense of freedom: Reclus, Ellul, Charbonneau, Illich, and Bookchin. Chastenet offers a rich and instructive presentation that leads to many questions.
Despite repeated proclamations of the death of metaphysics, the contemporary philosophical landscape is marked by the proliferation of ontologies. Sébastien Motta sets out to demonstrate the sterility of the ontological enterprise through a logical analysis of their assumptions.
Whether conceived as advocacy of disorder or as “the highest expression of order,” as the abolition of the state or as state-led deregulation, anarchy feeds on every ambiguity. This is the case even in contemporary philosophy.
Following in Paul Ricœur’s footsteps, Olivier Mongin proposes an interpretation of politics as a tension between state domination at “the top” and living together at “the bottom.” This tension, he argues, contains a potential for reciprocal violence that poses a threat to democracy.
A new archaeology has emerged whose contributions to our understanding of twentieth-century mass violence oscillate between history and memory. A specialist in the field provides an impressive overview that sounds very much like a plea.
Under the Ancien Régime, salaries were not enough to live on. Many people had to combine activities to make ends meet. Laurence Fontaine paints a vivid picture of this reality.
Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city’s lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.
In ancient Greece, religious rites were designed to produce a unique state of receptivity. This book, which focuses on the tools used in sensory encounters with the gods, contributes to the sensory turn that is currently revitalizing historical studies.
‘Prevent disorder’ is the motto of Russian power, justifying all forms of repression and establishing a partly decentralized system of domination through fear at the hands of local mobs.
The hood-wearing entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are workers subject to often fierce competition. Inequalities abound in the world of innovation.
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.
Arrests, torture, massacres: the Assad clan has been tormenting the Syrian people for the past 50 years. This major collective work provides conclusive evidence of the violence to which Europe turns a blind eye.
What binds people together and turns them into a society? In an ambitious book, the sociologist Serge Paugam wrestles with this question, while bringing sociology into conversation with psychology.
