‘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.
Are we free, or are our actions determined by natural causes? The problem thus posed is a metaphysical construct: From late antiquity onwards, the authentic meaning of freedom as a principle of action has been obscured by the invention of free will and the excessive importance given to the concept of the will.
According to Jean-Fabien Spitz, republicanism’s foundational ideals have been betrayed by the very people who purport to defend them against liberalism. An overemphasis on questions of identity makes it possible to forget that the republic was, from the outset, a principle of social justice.
A new book uses an ethnological approach to shed light on the spaces of freedom and solidarity created by citizens in rural Belarus, Europe’s last dictatorship. But these spaces, in some cases, also accommodate the regime.
Accumulation in a world of finite resources: Such is the vortex into which the moderns are thrown. Current ecological concerns, however, should also be viewed as a metamorphosis of the social question.
This collective book, which studies feminisms through the prism of intersectionality and gender, recalls the dynamism of struggles from the Revolution through to current debates, for instance around single-sex spaces and means of action.
Sartre promoted a new form of psychoanalysis that refused to relegate impulses to the unconscious and the infantile past. Neither deterministic nor arbitrary, human freedom is a “fundamental choice” that according to Raoul Moati must be thought in the light of realism.
By insisting on the need to consider philosophical works as interventions in the general, ongoing political debates of their time, Quentin Skinner has profoundly renewed the history of ideas. In this interview, he revisits the main themes of his work.
Was the French Revolution bound to become authoritarian? Do revolutionary ideologies always lead to violence? Annie Jourdan’s book reconfigures mainstream narratives of the Revolution and provides an alternative interpretation of the ‘Reign of Terror’.
The state of exception has a long history in France. Intended as a measure for dealing with crises of any sort, it is now used as a response to terrorism. According to legal expert François Saint-Bonnet, however, there is no evidence that it is the right solution to the kind of terrorism that strikes today.
Starting from the experimentations of three European ensembles playing improvised music at the turn of the 1970s, Matthieu Saladin defines an aesthetics of free improvisation, whose genuine political dimension he brings to light.
Launched over a century ago, the war on drugs has been a resounding failure. Not only has it increased trafficking, but it has also reinforced drug use and drug production while cracking down on drug users and peasant producers. The time has come to promote coherent projects of alternative development.
How should one interpret the “Allegory of Good Government”, a fresco painted by Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena in 1338? Is it praising the law that preserves the peace within the city and protects individuals, or the wisdom that naturally guides men towards the common good?
André Gorz’s multiform thought is entirely centred on liberation: from work, which prevents individuals from thriving; from consumption, which grows ever higher; and from the social system, which reduces individuals to mere pawns in a “megamachine”.
The patient’s access to information is viewed today as a fundamental principle in the ethics of health care. However, this essay shows that in the case of presymptomatic diagnosis, exercising one’s right to know can in fact be working against the patient’s liberty.
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.
Claude Lefort, who died in October 2010, was the author of a great number of titles in political philosophy, working both on history of ideas and interpretation of events, unceasingly questioning the political conditions of freedom.
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 17th century. But while the distinction is stimulating, it might appear to be conceptually too cut-and-dried.
What is citizenship? Not only a status, it derives above all from acts and practices. The collective volume Acts of citizenship advocates for a new approach of civic action, by focusing for instance on case studies about the political struggles of illegal immigrants.
