institutions

Hakeem Jefferson argues that the United States is experiencing a democratic backsliding. He calls for deep institutional reforms that aim at better reflecting the American public, such as expanding the number of judges in the Supreme Court or having a US Senate apportionment based on state population.

The treaty proposed by Piketty et al. makes it possible to overcome the sterile opposition between sovereignists and federalists. Yet, rather than democratizing Europe, the creation of a new assembly risks increasing the prevailing institutional confusion.

Sociologist Luc Boltanski situates his most recent publications and their main concepts within his broader intellectual trajectory, examining critical sociology and the sociology of critique, and what they can tell us about today’s social situation.

In their discussion of crime and the best ways to curb it, French politicians have relied on a crude opposition between “the culture of results” and neighborhood policing, a doctrine whose American origins they seem to ignore: for sociologist Fabien Jobard, more than creating a new force, reforming the police implies better coordinating between central and local authorities.

Alain Ehrenberg believes that Robert Castel’s review of his book in La Vie des Idées is grounded in a misunderstanding about his approach. As opposed to presenting America as a model, Ehrenberg’s comparative approach attempts to describe the social meanings of autonomy in order to transcend the opposition between liberalist and antiliberalist orientations. His objective is to replace an individualistic sociology with a sociology of individualism.

According to Justine Lacroix, European institutions will never be able to provide a political forum for the kind of complex and lively democratic debate that takes place within European nation-states. However, the extension and universalisation of identical rights for all European citizens is what constitutes the European Union’s main contribution to democracy, and could, if Europe manages to resist the temptation of closing in on itself, provide a model or example for the rest of the world.