La Vie des idées is suspending its activities during these holidays. We will resume our publication schedule on Monday 1er January. In the meantime, we offer you a selection of texts.
The tests
■ Pierre Merle, “The false appearances of the sectors of excellence”
The excellence streams in middle school are controversial. Those who defend them consider that they are essential to the school system and to the constitution of elites. But they prove to be ineffective and only serve to widen social and ethnic inequalities.
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■ Eric Charmes, “The Revenge of the Villages”
Contrasting the wealth of cities with the poverty of the countryside is in fact a failure to understand the reality of territorial inequalities. Villages are today often more attractive than a large number of medium-sized towns, which are experiencing major demographic and economic difficulties.
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■ Mathieu Ferry, “The terrorism of the cow”
The sacredness of the cow and the religious prohibition on beef consumption have always been, since their late invention in the medieval period, powerful drivers of the federation of the Hindu community. They continue today to be instrumentalized by the nationalist extreme right, as evidenced by the wave of lynchings that is hitting the country.
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The portraits
■ Salvatore D’Onofrio, “The Militant Structuralism of Françoise Héritier”
By affirming the fertility of structuralism for thinking about kinship relations or the difference between the sexes, Françoise Héritier has profoundly renewed the methods of anthropology. She has also shown that scientific commitment goes hand in hand with involvement in the city.
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■ Élodie Bertrand, “Ronald Coase, a century of economics”
Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991, Ronald Coase (1910-2013) is famous for his “theorem,” as often cited as it is misunderstood. His seminal work on transaction costs, property rights, and regulation continues to fuel a rich debate in economics and beyond.
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The reviews
■ François Jarrige, “The forgotten promises of political ecology”
Political ecology does not date from the 1970s, it was born in XIXe century, from the conviction of progressive thinkers that there could be no emancipation without respect for nature – being on the left then necessarily meant being an environmentalist.
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■ Laurie Lefebvre, “What Nero says about us”
“Parricide”, “tyrant”, “monster”: it is an understatement to say that the last Julio-Claudian emperor does not have a good press. With the help of an impressive documentation, Donatien Grau studies the image of the hated emperor, from the Ier century AD to the present day. Nero’s novel can be read as a history of the West.
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■ Chloé Mondémé, “The wolf for man”
Should we have more diplomatic relations with animals? This is what Baptiste Morizot invites us to do, taking the “return of the wolf” as an opportunity for philosophical reflection. As if to better reaffirm, in the background, the dominant position of humans?
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■ Shahin Vallée, “Europe without government”
The proposal by a group of academics to establish a Eurozone parliament has been noted. But, according to S. Vallée, this institutional reform would harm the development of a transnational European democracy. First part of a debate between the authors and their critics.
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■ Noémie Villacèque, “The time of efflorescence”
To the Ve And IVe centuries before our era, Greece experienced exceptional economic, political and cultural development – to the point that we could speak, with Renan, of a “Greek miracle”. For J. Ober, this is an effect of the numerous relations that the cities maintained.
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■ Mathieu Ferry, “Foie gras under the gunfire”
If in France, duck liver is at the heart of a powerful gastronomic nationalism, in the United States it is the Trojan horse of animal rights activists. Comparative sociology of food practices and morals on both sides of the Atlantic.
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■ Adrien Fauve, “Poutine my love”
How can we explain the attraction of certain French political elites to Vladimir Putin’s Russia? From anti-Americanism to Russophilia, including the defense of French national interest, Olivier Schmitt deciphers the arguments of “French Putinophile.”
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