Download or read book Le capitalisme utopique written by Pierre Rosanvallon and published by Média Diffusion. This book was released on 2017-07-28T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Le concept de marché tel qu'il se forme au XVIIIe siècle ne définit pas seulement un mode de régulation de l'économie. Il a surtout une dimension sociologique et politique. La société de marché renvoie à la perspective d'une société civile autorégulée, la confrontation des intérêts étant censée mener à une "harmonie" que ni la politique ni la morale ne savaient réaliser. Elle s'oppose de la sorte aux théories du contrat social qui impliquent une organisation volontariste du lien social. D'où la notion de capitalisme utopique. Depuis deux siècles, ce dernier n'a cessé de constituer à la fois une tentation et une illusion : substituer au face à face des individus et au débat des citoyens le règne de procédures anonymes et impersonnelles. Dans cet ouvrage (dont une deuxième édition avait été donnée sous le titre Le libéralisme économique), Pierre Rosanvallon ne retrace pas seulement l'histoire intellectuelle de cette idée de marché. Il éclaire de façon neuve tous les débats contemporains sur le libéralisme et sa critique.
Download or read book Democracy Past and Future written by Pierre Rosanvallon and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy Past and Future is the first English-language collection of Pierre Rosanvallon's most important essays on the historical origins, contemporary difficulties, and future prospects of democratic life. One of Europe's leading political thinkers, Rosanvallon proposes in these essays new readings of the history, aims, and possibilities of democratic theory and practice, and provides unique theoretical understandings of key moments in democracy's trajectory, from the French Revolution and the struggles for universal suffrage to European unification and the crises of the present. In so doing, he lays out an influential new theory of how to write the history of politics. Rosanvallon's historical and philosophical approach examines the "pathologies" that have curtailed democracy's potential and challenges the antitotalitarian liberalism that has dominated recent political thought. All in all, he adroitly combines historical and theoretical analysis with an insistence on the need for a new form of democracy. Above all, he asks what democracy means when the people rule but are nowhere to be found. Throughout his career, Rosanvallon has resisted simple categorization. Rosanvallon was originally known as a primary theorist of the "second left", which hoped to stake out a non-Marxist progressive alternative to the irresistible appeal of revolutionary politics. In fact, Rosanvallon revived the theory of "civil society" even before its usage by East European dissidents made it globally popular as a non-statist politics of freedom and pluralism. His ideas have been shaped by a variety of influences, ranging from his work with an influential French union to his teachers François Furet and Claude Lefort. Well known throughout Europe as a historian, political theorist, social critic, and public intellectual, Pierre Rosanvallon was recently elected to a professorship at the Collège de France, Paris, a position held at various times by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. Democracy Past and Future begins with Rosanvallon's groundbreaking and synthetic lecture that he delivered upon joining this institution. Throughout the volume, Rosanvallon illuminates and invigorates contemporary political and democratic thought.
Download or read book Utopia in the Age of Survival written by S. D. Chrostowska and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book shows how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique might be leveraged in response to humanity's looming existential challenges. Utopia in the Age of Survival makes the case that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as something still possible. S. D. Chrostowska looks to the vibrant, visionary mid-century resurgence of embodied utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists writing in their wake, reconstructing utopia's link to survival through to the earliest, most radical phase of the French environmental movement. Survival emerges as the organizing concept for a variety of democratic political forms that center the corporeality of desire in social movements contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions across the globe. Vigilant and timely, balancing fine-tuned analysis with broad historical overview to map the utopian impulse across contemporary cultural and political life, Chrostowska issues an urgent report on the vitality of utopia.
Download or read book States and Collective Action written by Pierre Birnbaum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the influence of each type of state upon the development of various collective action and mobilization processes. The author aims to establish the crucial importance of the state as a quasi-independent variable.
Download or read book Globalization and Its Enemies written by Daniel Cohen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counters the argument that the global economy forces a system on people who do not want it, contending that globalization shows people material prosperity that they do want, and that poor countries have been excluded, not exploited.
Download or read book Pierre Rosanvallon s Political Thought written by Oliver Flügel-Martinsen and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Pierre Rosanvallon has increasingly found itself at the center of debates in democratic and political theory - although only few of his numerous monographs have thus far been translated from French. This interdisciplinary volume, the first comprehensive collection on his political thought in English, seeks to lay the groundwork for the study of this eminent political thinker and historian. Following a hitherto untranslated opening essay by Rosanvallon, the chapters - written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including political theory, political science, philosophy, and history - cover a wide range of topics from the history of democracy to sovereignty, populism, and the function of the press in liberal democratic regimes.
Download or read book From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers written by Robert Castel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this monumental book, sociologist Robert Castel reconstructs the history of what he calls "the social question," or the ways in which both labor and social welfare have been organized from the Middle Ages onward to contemporary industrial society. Throughout, the author identifies two constants bearing directly on the question of who is entitled to relief and who can be excluded: the degree of embeddedness in any given community and the ability to work. Along this dual axis the author locates virtually the entire history of social welfare in early-modern and contemporary Europe.This work is a systematic defense of the meaningfulness of the category of "the social," written in the tradition of Foucault, Durkheim, and Marx. Castel imaginatively builds on Durkheim's insight into the essentially social basis of work and welfare. Castel populates his sociological framework with vivid characterizations of the transient lives of the "disaffiliated": those colorful itinerants whose very existence proved such a threat to the social fabric of early-modern Europe. Not surprisingly, he discovers that the cruel and punitive measures often directed against these marginal figures are deeply implicated in the techniques and institutions of power and social control.The author also treats the flipside of the problem of social assistance: namely, matters of work and wage-labor. Castel brilliantly reveals how the seemingly objective line of demarcation between able-bodied beggars those who are capable of work but who chose not to do so and those who are truly disabled becomes stretched in modernity to make room for the category of the "working poor." It is the novel crisis posed by those masses of population who are unable to maintain themselves by their labor alone that most deeply challenges modern societies and forges recognizably modern policies of social assistance.The author's gloss on the social question also offers us valuable perspectives on contempo
Download or read book Why Neo Liberalism Failed in France written by Kevin Brookes and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book fills a gap in the literature on economic liberalism in France as it strives to resolve a paradox. How do we reconcile the fact that while France has been among the most fertile of soils for the liberal intellectual tradition, the theoretical ideas it has produced has little impact on its own public debate and public policies? Using a wide range of data on public policies, it demonstrates that neo-liberal thought has had far less influence in France than in other European nations during the period from 1974 to 2012. The failure of neo-liberalism to propagate in public policies France is shown to be mainly due to the strong resistance of public opinion towards it. In addition, the structure of French institutions has reinforced the effect of "path dependence" in the making of public policy by valuing state expertise above that of actors likely to question the post-war consensus, such as academics and think tanks. Finally, the book identifies other more incidental factors which contributed to neo-liberalism marginality: the fragmentation and radicalism of neo-liberal advocates, as well as the absence of charismatic political actors to effectively embody these ideas. This book is a useful educational tool for students of economics, sociology, political science, and of French political history. This book is also of interest for journalists, think tank researchers and professionals of politics and administration.
Download or read book Global Exchanges and Gender Perspectives in Africa written by Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2011 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global perspectives adopted in this volume by the authors, from different academic disciplines and social experiences, ought not to be locked in sterile linearity which within process of globalisation would fail to perceive, the irreversible opening up of the worlds of the south. There is the need within the framework of the analyses presented here, to quite cogently define the sense of the notion of the market. The market here does not refer to saving or the localised exchange of goods, a perspective which is imposed by normative perceptions. In fact, a strictly materialistic reading of exchange would be included, since every social practice and interaction implies a communitarian transaction; meanwhile the exchange system under study here broadens to root out the obligation of the maximisation of mercantile profit from the cycle of exchange. Trade here would have a meaning closer to those of old, one of human interaction, in a way that one could also refer to 'bon commerce' between humans. In one way, trade places itself at the heart of social exchanges, included the power of money, and is carried along by a multitude of social interactions. The reader is called upon to take into account the major mercantile formations of the social trade system, the market society, without forgetting the diversity of exchange routes as well as the varying modalities of social construction, at the margins and within market logics - those of implicit value in trade between humans - which the texts herein also seek to review. The age-old project of restructuring the domestic economy, the market society as it has developed in the West, - whence it has set out to conquer the whole wide world - places at the very centre of the current capitalist expansion the challenge of imperatively reshaping gender identity, inter alia, in market relations.
Download or read book The Shaping of French National Identity written by Matthew D'Auria and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shaping of French National Identity casts new light on the intellectual origins of the dominant and 'official' French nineteenth-century national narrative. Focussing on the historical debates taking place throughout the eighteenth century and during the Restoration, Matthew D'Auria evokes a time when the nation's origins were being questioned and discussed and when they acquired the meaning later enshrined in the official rhetoric of the Third Republic. He examines how French writers and scholars reshaped the myths, symbols, and memories of pre-modern communities. Engaging with the myth of 'our ancestors the Gauls' and its ideological triumph over the competing myth of 'our ancestors the Franks', this study explores the ways in which the struggle developed, and the values that the two discourses enshrined, the collective actors they portrayed, and the memories they evoked. D'Auria draws attention to the continuity between ethnic discourses and national narratives and to the competition between various groups in their claims to represent the nation and to define their past as the 'true' history of France.
Download or read book The Birth of Biopolitics written by Michel Foucault and published by Picador. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixth volume in Foucault's prestigious, groundbreaking series of lectures at the Collège de France from 1970 to 1984.
Download or read book A Sociology of Modernity written by Peter Wagner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Confusion reigns in sociological accounts of the curent condition of modernity. The story-lines from the 'end of the subject' to 'a new individualism', from the 'dissolution of society' to the re-emergence of 'civil society', from the 'end of modernity' to an 'other modernoity' to 'neo-modernization'. This book offers a sociology of modernity in terms of a historical account of social transformations over the past two centuries, focusing on Western Europe but also looking at the USA and at Soviet socialism as distinct variants of modernity. A fundamental ambivalence of modernity is captured by the double notion of liberty and discipline in its three major dimensions: the relations between individual liberty and political community , betwen agency and structure, and between locally situated human lives and widely extended social institutions. Two major historical transformations of modernity are distinguished, the first one beginning in the late nineteenth century and leading to a social formation that can be called organized modernity, and the second being the one that dissolves organized modernity. It is this current transformation which revives some key concerns of the 'modern project', ideas of liberty, plurality and individual autonomy. But it imperils others, especially the creation of social identities as ties between human beings that allow meaningful and socially viable development of individual autonomy, and the possibility of politics as communicative interaction and collaborative deliberation about what human beings have in common.
Download or read book Revolutionary Commerce written by Paul Cheney and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France. The discovery of the New World and the rise of Europe's Atlantic economy brought unprecedented wealth. It also reordered the political balance among European states and threatened age-old social hierarchies within them. In this charged context, the French developed a "science of commerce" that aimed to benefit from this new wealth while containing its revolutionary effects. Montesquieu became a towering authority among reformist economic and political thinkers by developing a politics of fusion intended to reconcile France's aristocratic society and monarchical state with the needs and risks of international commerce. The Seven Years' War proved the weakness of this model, and after this watershed reforms that could guarantee shared prosperity at home and in the colonies remained elusive. Once the Revolution broke out in 1789, the contradictions that attended the growth of France's Atlantic economy helped to bring down the constitutional monarchy. Drawing upon the writings of philosophes, diplomats, consuls of commerce, and merchants, Cheney rewrites the history of political economy in the Enlightenment era and provides a new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution.
Download or read book Democracy in the Political Present written by Isabell Lorey and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Presentist democracy is without a people and without nation. Rather than regimes of borders and migration, its borders are sexism and racism, homo- and transphobia, colonialism and extractivism.” In the midst of the crises and threats to liberal democracy, Isabell Lorey develops a democracy in the present tense; one which breaks open political certainties and linear concepts of progress and growth. Her queer feminist political theory formulates a fundamental critique of masculinist concepts of the people, representation, institutions, and the multitude. In doing so, she unfolds an original concept of a presentist democracy based on care and interrelatedness, on the irreducibility of responsibilities—one which cannot be conceived of without social movements’ past struggles and current practices.
Download or read book Revolutionary Spring written by Christopher Clark and published by Random House. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • From the bestselling author of The Sleepwalkers comes an epic history of the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe, and the charismatic figures who propelled them forward “Refreshingly original . . . Familiar characters are given vibrancy and previously unknown players emerge from the shadows.”—The Times (UK) A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848 nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to significant changes that continue to shape our world today. These battles for the future were fought with one eye kept squarely on the past: The men and women of 1848 saw the urgent challenges of their world as shaped profoundly by the past, and saw themselves as inheritors of a revolutionary tradition. Celebrated Cambridge historian Christopher Clark describes 1848 as “the particle collision chamber at the center of the European nineteenth century,” a moment when political movements and ideas—from socialism and democratic radicalism to liberalism, nationalism, corporatism, and conservatism—were tested and transformed. The insurgents asked questions that sound modern to our ears: What happens when demands for political or economic liberty conflict with demands for social rights? How do we reconcile representative and direct forms of democracy? How is capitalism connected to social inequality? The revolutions of 1848 were short-lived, but their impact on public life and political thought throughout Europe and beyond has been profound. Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and filled with a cast of charismatic figures, including the social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, the writer George Sand, and the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, who struggled to reconcile his faith with politics, Revolutionary Spring offers a new understanding of 1848 that suggests chilling parallels to our present moment. “Looking back at the revolutions from the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is impossible not to be struck by the resonances,” Clark writes. “If a revolution is coming for us, it may look something like 1848.”
Download or read book People s History and Socialist Theory Routledge Revivals written by Raphael Samuel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1981, this book brings together different types of work by numerous fragmented groups in the field of Marxist history and puts them in dialogue with each other. It takes stock of then recent work, explores the main new lines, and looks at the political and ideological circumstances shaping the direction of historical work, past and present. The scope of the book is international with contributions on African history, fascism and anti-fascism, French labour history, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It also incorporates feminist history and gives attention to some of the leading questions raised for social history by the women’s movement.
