What if the impending ecological crisis required a recommitment to republicanism? This is Serge Audier’s thesis: we must not respond to environmental challenges with an anti-modern or anti-statist reflex, but with a new conception of the general interest.
Ancient philosophy offered consolation for loss, separation, and death. Modern philosophy no longer does so, considering that it should limit its role to the quest for truth. This renunciation has, according to Michaël Fœssel, deep consequences for our current politics and their lack of any broader perspective.
In a desire to write a total history, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel proposes a novel sociocultural and transnational approach to the artistic avant-gardes. Beyond a mere history of styles, the avant-gardes appear in her book as genuine political and social events, caught in complex networks of influence.
Looking at the mutations of photography since its origins, one realizes that contrary to what is often believed, it exalts artificiality, fiction and imagination and relies on an anti-naturalistic aesthetic. Could the 19th century be the matrix of our artistic modernity?
One of the most commonly used concepts in modern humanities and social sciences, capitalism is also one of the most misunderstood. Away from politically biased takes on the subject, Geoffrey M. Hodgson proposes a new, law-based framework for understanding capitalism.
From Vasco de Gama to 11 September 2001, a collection of articles reveals the diversity of registers and themes the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam looks at. Demonstrating a keen sense of sociological observation and a vast culture, what most surprises his readers is his critical mind and freedom of thought.
What place should there be on Earth for the Moderns? Following the publication of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: an Anthropology of the Moderns, author Bruno Latour talks to Arnaud Esquerre and Jeanne Lazarus about the birth and set-up of his masterful study, which uses all of his previous works as the basis for an inquiry into fifteen possible modes of existence that would allow the Moderns to rethink their place on Earth.
The German historian Reinhart Koselleck associated the “age of revolutions” (1750-1850) with a fracture in the social representation of time. Are we currently experiencing a new fracture, as suggested by our constant recourse to the word “crisis”? Books & Ideas interviewed Yves Citton and Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, who have both reflected on the concept.
In Made in America, sociologist Claude S. Fischer develops the idea that voluntarism, not individualism, is the key feature to describe social ties in America and that this notion of voluntarism best helps us understand what makes America exceptional among other Western societies.
In the human and social sciences, the pervasiveness of the notion of disaster is an indication that a true paradigm is developing, which seeks to replace the paradigm of risk on which the modern project was constructed. Within that paradigm, man – far from being the master of nature or of the transformations he forces upon it – is weak, vulnerable and fallible. Is man a ‘being for disaster?
The more disasters there are, the less we seem able to learn from them. Our faith in progress and our concern for economic efficiency make it clear that, contrary to postmodernist claims, we have not escaped from the illusions of modernity.
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.
