Mixtures

Essays & debates

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The social protection system for the elderly in China

by Nanzhi Wei (09-09-2010)

The modernization process that China is carrying out has significantly affected the family system and the status of the elderly in China. The traditional Chinese social structure has been destabilized, and the responsibility for the Chinese state to provide social assistance to the elderly has increased. This article details the reasons that led to the emergence of the reform of the social protection system for the elderly.

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The denial of caste in India

by Satish Deshpande & Mary E. John (12-10-2010)

Satish Desphande and Mary John return to the arguments against taking caste into account in the Indian census and defend the idea that the refusal to see caste contributes to the maintenance of this institution. Their plea for the integration of caste into the census echoes French debates on ethnic statistics.

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Lula, father of the poor ?

by Frédéric Louault (29-10-2010)

Lula had promised to be the president of the poor. Buoyed by a favorable economic situation, he was able to reduce poverty by upgrading and expanding social minimums. But having failed to tackle the roots of social imbalances, he leaves his successor a country still undermined by inequalities.

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Social movements, laboratories of democracy

by Daniel Snitch (07-09-2010)

Daniel Mouchard analyzes recent work on the social movements of marginal populations or “ excluded » as true laboratories of social democracy. Through the study of the dynamics of subjectivation at work in these movements, the internal contradictions of these collective actors as well as the modalities of irruption into the public space, it places the social movements in the history of social criticism .

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The social state and globalization

by Jean-Fabien Spitz (02-11-2010)

Does the globalization of the economy inevitably imply a reduction in our social protections? ? To think so is, as Jean-Fabien Spitz shows, to consider that they are only a luxury that should be renounced in times of crisis, whereas they are more profoundly what allows a democratic society to found its own legitimacy.

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Rethinking the culture of poverty

by Nicolas Duvoux (05-10-2010)

A special journal issue coordinated by American sociologists David Harding, Michèle Lamont, Mario Small examines the relationships between culture and poverty. The authors return to the culture of poverty, a concept that became taboo in the 1970s because of its conservative and racist recovery. A plural and flexible vision of culture allows them to unravel the link between culture and race that fuels conservative rhetoric.

Interviews

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What the pictures show

by Philippe Simay (08-30-2010)

Exhibition curator The image factoryPhilippe Descola offers an innovative approach to pictorial representations present on five continents. The anthropologist shows how four major visions of the world (naturalism, totemism, animism, analogism) are manifested in the images that human societies produce.

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Growth, education and environment

by Julia Cagé & Éric Monnet (15-09-2010)

In this interview, Philippe Aghion, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, discusses the contributions of the new economic theories of growth that he has helped to develop since the end of the 1980s. He examines the role of the financial system and banking, the State (budgetary, industrial and education and research policies) and ecological innovations for growth. It also presents its recommendations for improving research policy in France and Europe.

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Being a sociologist in China

by Emilie Frenkiel (08-31-2010)

In this interview, the sociologist and sinologist Jean-Louis Rocca describes the evolution of Chinese sociology since its renaissance at the beginning of the 1980s. He also discusses the transformations of Chinese society through the analysis of the representations of the middle classes.

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Put to the test of politics

by Pierre Rosanvallon (15-10-2010)

Claude Lefort died on October 4, 2010. Author of a large number of works on political philosophy, attentive both to the history of thought and to the interpretation of the event, he never ceased to question the political conditions of freedom.

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Caste and democracy

by Jules Naudet (11/19/2010)

In this interview, Christophe Jaffrelot returns to the issues posed by the institution of caste in contemporary India. From the countercultural inclinations of Dalits to “ ethnicization » caste groups, he reminds us that, since independence, India has experienced a real “ silent revolution » characterized by the increasing access of low-caste groups to political power. The reservation system (quotas) notably played a decisive role in this dynamic.

Reviews

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Think like Gaia

by Gérald Hess (08-09-2010)

The environmental crisis is a major political challenge. It also results in a questioning of our fundamental ethical categories. Because we must now think differently about responsibility, justice, value – which is what the collection of articles edited by Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa allows us to understand.

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The Eden of a shared culture

by Peter Marquis (09-17-2010)

What if culture hadn’t always been hierarchical ? By focusing on the United States of XIX^e century, Lawrence Levine shows that popular audiences and elites enjoyed the same spectacles. It is an opportunity to plead for a plural vision of culture, open to forms still too often called “ minor “. Report followed by a point of view from Christophe Charle.

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The History of the Fed Seen by a Monetarist

by Éric Monnet (11-10-2010)

The economist Allan Meltzer offers a three-volume history of the Central Bank of the United States, both an immense work of unearthing new sources and the second great historical manifesto of monetarism.

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How far will care go? ?

by Fabienne Brugère (04-10-2010)

Recently, care has entered the stages of philosophical reflection and political debate in France. Sometimes caricatured, often poorly known, care, between theory and practice, morality and politics, studies in new ways dependence at the heart of the social bond.

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The 993^e man

The quantitative method and the history of the Shoah

by Ivan Jablonka (28-09-2010)

By studying, with supporting statistics, the attitude of the Jews of Lens towards persecution between 1940 and 1944, two historians analyze the trajectories of the victims in quantitative and sociological terms. This unique method opens the way to a social history of genocide.

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From human rights to human rights ?

by Justine Lacroix (20-10-2010)

If human rights are our last utopia, it is on condition of understanding, as the American historian Sam Moyn points out, that they are not the human rights proclaimed at the end of the XVIII^e century. A stimulating distinction, but which may seem too clear-cut conceptually.

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Rock Ontology

by Sébastien Motta (10-18-2010)

What is rock ? Music whose essence is to be produced through its own recording, answers Roger Pouivet. This is what radically and metaphysically distinguishes it from all other musical works of art — and what explains the seduction it exerts.

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The two lives of Ivan Illich

by Augustin Fragnière (24-11-2010)

The review Spirit takes stock of the work of Ivan Illich in two parts: the first, devoted to the denunciation of the perverse effects of industrial society ; the second, to the analysis of the symbolic effects of the contemporary technical system. Despite the thematic and methodological eclecticism of Ivan Illich’s two lives, a central concern remains: that of man and his autonomy.

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A global history of the African diaspora

by Chloé Maurel (10-11-2010)

By extending the concept of “ Black Atlantic » on a global scale, Patrick Manning reinstates Africa at the center of transnational networks that have been formed over the centuries. A place of exchange and mobility, the diaspora would have allowed the development of hybrid countercultures, which participate in the construction of modernity.