From Mitterrand’s “rigueur” to Hollande’s “mandate,” Bruno Amable charts the transformation of French capitalism and reveals the making of a political crisis.
The most influential doctrines (Liberal, Socialist, Marxist) that have competed since the 19th century to define the future of industrial society are all designed to support a productivist society. This hegemony has marginalised the ecological alternatives. Is their dominance coming to an end?
Andreas Glaeser’s Political Epistemics is an account of the rise and fall of the East German Socialism as a field of consciousness. Relying on extensive archival research and interviews (including Stasi officers, secret informants & political dissidents), Glaeser offers a “theory of understandings” to provide a new angle on the question of how worldviews become institutionalized.
Based on new material and a subtle analysis of individual experiences, Ducoulombier’s book offers a refreshing look at the birth of the French Communist Party in 1920. The historian argues that the Congress of Tours followed the development of a marginal culture of political dissent within French socialism during the Great War.
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 The publication of a number of essays by economist Karl Polanyi hitherto unpublished in French gives us the opportunity to re-discover democratic socialism as championed by the author of The Great Transformation.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.
