La Vie des idées suspends its activities during these holidays. We will resume our publication schedule on Wednesday, December 28. In the meantime, we offer you a selection of texts and interviews.
The tests
■ Jennifer Merchant, “The best interests of the child: Same-sex parenting in the United States”
Is the discourse of opponents of same-sex parenthood on “the interests of the child” founded? Recent studies carried out in the United States compare the academic results, personal development and psychological stability of children raised by same-sex couples with those of children raised by heterosexual couples.
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■ Jean-Baptiste Fressoz & Fabien Locher, “The fragile climate of modernity: A short climatic history of environmental reflexivity”
Are humans responsible for climate change? This question is anything but recent, argue two historians, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher. The moderns did not wait for the beginning of the XXIe century to reflect on the consequences of human activities on the environment.
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■ Quentin Deluermoz, “The “community police”, a new project? A look back at the Parisian experience XIXe century “
Already under the Second Empire, a reform aimed to bring the police closer to the Parisian population. Founded on the principles of transparency and circulation, it puts agents in contact with citizens, thus modifying the conditions for producing public order. The legitimacy of the police institution is transformed.
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■ Alexis Vrignon, “Summer will be hot! Militant gatherings in the seventies »
Summer is not necessarily the season of political slack waters and “stupid sunbathing”, as proven by certain environmentalist and alternative gatherings of the 1968s. The summer period is conducive to activism, even if it is festive, as well as to the dissemination of new ideas and practices. A revolutionary parenthesis?
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■ Antoine Bozio, “Are the middle classes being hit by taxes? »
What do we really know about the costs and benefits of redistribution for the middle classes? Two recent studies show that they are certainly heavily taxed, but like the vast majority of the population – including low earners. The real issues lie elsewhere, in the privileged situation of the richest 1% and in the future evolution of public spending.
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■ Vincent Descombes, “Louis Dumont: how to think about politics? »
Of Louis Dumont, we know the anthropological work on India, but undoubtedly less political thought. Vincent Descombes underlines its great originality: defining politics based on comparative work and thus dispelling some of the ambiguities of modern and contemporary philosophy.
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■ Élie Azria, “Humans facing the standardization of medical care”
Originally designed to inform doctors in their decision-making, theEBM (Evidence-Based Medicine) has become, in North America as elsewhere, a method of risk management contributing to the standardization of medical practice, and to the dehumanization of the relationship between patient and caregiver.
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The portraits
■ Clyde Plumauzille, “Joan W. Scott or the critical history of inequalities”
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has informed and transformed our history as well as our way of making history and forces us to rethink our categories, to shift our gaze. From the class struggle to the difference between the sexes, including sexual emancipation and the racial question, it offers a critical analysis of republican rhetoric to thwart the naturalized forms of inequality.
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■ Cyrille Ferraton & Ludovic Frobert, “Albert Hirschman: a self-subversive temperament”
Economic theory owes to Albert O. Hirschman the enrichment of the notion of “rational actor”, of which he showed the deliberative capacities specific to promoting the development of a democratic market society. Portrait of a protest economist and activist.
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■ Stéphane Füzesséry, “Peter Zumthor: an a-contemporary architect? »
The highest award in the architectural world has just been awarded to Swiss Peter Zumthor. The phenomenological approach of this architect, attentive to natural landscapes and local constructive traditions, goes against the dominant contemporary architectural creation. Its merit is to acutely raise the question of the meaning of architecture in the era of generalized urbanization and the crisis of place.
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The interviews
■ Nicolas Delalande, “To put an end to American exceptionalism: Interview with Thomas Bender”
Where does the feeling that Americans have of being an exceptional people and different from others come from? For Thomas Bender, this exceptionalism, of which George Bush’s foreign policy is one of the dramatic consequences, is rooted in the way Americans tell their own history. In A Nation Among Nations, he offers another story, more open to the world, of the American nation.
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■ Ariel Suhamy, “We always believe more than we believe: The President’s voodoo dolls: a conference by Jeanne Favret-Saada”
Who better than the ethnographer Jeanne Favret-Saada, an expert in witchcraft, could dissect the comical affair of President Sarkozy’s voodoo dolls? This conference was delivered at theEHESS on January 19, 2009.
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■ Nicolas Duvoux & Audrey Williamson, “Why the French don’t want to work longer: Interview with Bruno Palier”
Political scientist Bruno Palier provides an overview of the situation of the French pension system. He highlights the challenges of a reform in terms of reducing inequalities and sets out the conditions for an economic strategy which constitutes, according to him, the only real pension reform. On the other hand, Anglo-Saxon examples illustrate the need for regulation of savings, which is now encouraged by tax.
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The reviews
■ Thomas Le Roux, “The century of hygienists”
How, during the XIXe century, did medical chemists put public hygiene on the agenda? By drawing up a fresco of their ambitions and projects, Gérard Jorland delivers an ample amount which favors the grand narrative to the detriment of the explanation of social complexity.
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■ Pierre Charbonnier, “The Anti-Narcissus of Viveiros de Castro”
The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro offers us, with Cannibal Metaphysics, an extremely ambitious work which, based on a long Amazonian ethnographic experience, sets up nothing less than a new definition of the anthropological mode of knowledge.
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■ Robert Castel, “Autonomy, aspiration or condition? »
In La Société du malaise, Alain Ehrenberg develops a sociology of individualism based on the comparative analysis of the social meanings of autonomy in the United States and in France. If decentering is beneficial, the idea seems to conceive autonomy independently of its social conditions of possibility.
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■ Laure Bordonaba, “Questions of framing”
Not all lives have the chance to be seen as such, and some, the most precarious, are lost in indifference. How to explain this demarcation? What to oppose to him? The philosopher Judith Butler returns to the way in which the war and its discourses encircle the liberal left in contradictions that it must invalidate.
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■ Ariel Suhamy, “And the Devil became man”
The traditional figure of the Devil, a composite monster and tempter, suddenly disappeared from the pictorial universe to take on a human face. Through this final metamorphosis, the Demon became secularized, to the point of disappearing as such. Daniel Arasse draws the threads of this story, upstream and downstream.
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■ Édouard Gardella, “Towards a petrification of politics? »
Acceleration, a sign of entry into modernity, was a promise of progress and emancipation. But the acceleration has taken on its own, it has become a systemic constraint to which we must adapt through permanent urgency. We would thus be condemned to rush frantically towards nowhere…
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■ Jean-Fabien Spitz, “The value of equality: Lessons for the European left”
Should we give up defending equality, under the pretext that it is not achievable? The left is tempted to do so, to the extent that it confuses, as has been shown GA Cohen, what is right and what is possible. To claim to inspire action and the desire for reform, political reflection must not renounce the ideal or the utopia.
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