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A World Out of Key

An Interview with Michel Foucher

by Pauline Peretz & translated by John Zvesper, 16 May

Although today’s world is more interdependent than ever, it is still a jigsaw puzzle of sovereign states. One consequence of globalization is that we have to update our own mental maps, and to (...)

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Essays

Giving Gifts

Debate between Anne Bory, Nicolas Guilhot, Sabine Rozier and Olivier Zunz

by Pauline Peretz & translated by Michael C. Behrent, 20 April 2012

There is a long-standing tradition of contrasting the French and American models of philanthropy. According to four scholars invited to discuss the matter for Books and Ideas, this contrast, (...)

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Essays

Small States, Big Credit?

An interview with David Stasavage

by Stéphanie Novak & Will Slauter, 29 March 2012

In States of Credit, David Stasavage explains why city-states were able to create long-term debt as early as the 13th century, whereas territorial states began to do so only in the 16th century. (...)

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Reviews

And War Gave Birth to the American Leviathan

About: James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government, Oxford.

by Stephen W. Sawyer, 27 March 2012

World War Two marked the beginning of a new relationship between state and society in America. Turning away from a focus on regulation and welfare, the new state based its vastly extended (...)

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Essays

The Greek State: Its Past and Future

An interview with Anastassios Anastassiadis

by Nicolas Delalande, 20 March 2012

The Greek crisis is above all a crisis of the Greek state and its legitimacy. One must look back to the nineteenth century to understand its people’s defiance of bureaucrats and the role of (...)

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Essays

China: Back to the Imperial Sense of the State

by Pierre-Etienne Will, 17 February 2012

Historian Pierre-Etienne Will decodes the current official reevaluation in China of some Qing dynasty officials as great patriots and paragons of bureaucratic ethics.It may be attributed to the (...)

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Reviews

Participating Is Not Enough

About: Nina Eliasoph, Making Volunteers. Civic Life after Welfare’s End, 2011

by Julien Talpin & translated by Michael C. Behrent, 5 January 2012

In the United States, empowerment strategies emphasizing commitments that are brief, informal, and fun have proved tone deaf to the political importance of associations. If civic engagement is to (...)

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Essays

The American State: Power Obscured

An Interview with William Novak & James Sparrow

by Thomas Grillot & Pauline Peretz, 15 November 2011

Finding the American state where historians never looked before: this could be the motto of the new history of the state, of which William Novak and James Sparrow are two of the strongest (...)

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Reviews

Predatory Power

About: G. Chamayou, Les chasses à l’homme, La Fabrique.

by Jean Bérard & translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 3 June 2011

Might manhunting—from helots to undocumented immigrants—be the paradigm of all power? This is the hypothesis that Grégoire Chamayou puts to the test in an ambitious and devastating essay that (...)

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Reviews

The Unobtrusive Action of Femocrats

About: L. A. Banaszak, The Women’s Movement: Inside and Outside the State, Cambridge University Press.

by Laure Bereni, 25 May 2011

Lee Ann Banaszak examines the case of the ‘feminist insiders’ who fought for the feminist cause both inside and outside the American state. Her study questions the assumption that protest activism (...)

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Reviews

A French New Deal?

About: P. Nord, France’s New Deal:

From the Thirties to the Postwar Era, Princeton.

by Marc Olivier Baruch, 21 January 2011

France, too, had its New Deal: that is the thesis argued by the American historian Philip Nord, in a book that clarifies both political and cultural aspects of the strengthening of the French (...)

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Reviews

Absolutism and Its Judges

About: J. Krynen, L’État de justice. France (XIIIe-XXe siècle), Gallimard.

by Katia Weidenfeld, 10 January 2011

Jacques Krynen shows, in an excellent overview, that judicial power was not a recent invention: in the Old Regime, high court judges already claimed a share of royal power. This erudite yet (...)

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Reviews

From the Rights of Man to Human Rights?

About: S. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Harvard.

by Justine Lacroix, 1 December 2010

If human rights are our last utopia, it is only if we understand, says the American historian Samuel Moyn, that they are not the same as the rights of man as proclaimed at the end of the 17th (...)

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Reviews

What is a Federation?

About : O. Beaud, Théorie de la Fédération, PUF.

by Renaud Baumert, 19 November 2009

When explaining European construction the Federal model is often alluded to, whether as a point of reference or as an ultimate goal. However we do have to be clear what this model means. For (...)

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Reviews

Deconstructing globalization

About: S. Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization, Norton.

by Martin Albrow, 4 June 2009

In her latest book, Saskia Sassen undertakes a ruthless demystification of economic globalization. She argues that globalization is embedded in institutions and places and reveals the nature of (...)

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Essays

“All things are possible”. About Obama’s future policy

by Dick Howard, 26 March 2009

Two months after taking office, is it possible to outline some elements of Obama’s future policy? Dick Howard examines the new political conditions brought about by his election. Obama has (...)

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Essays

Virginity and Burqa: Unreasonable Accommodations?

Considerations on the Stasi and Bouchard-Taylor Reports

by Cécile Laborde, 30 October 2008

Setting side by side the Stasi Report on secularism and the recent Bouchard-Taylor Report published in Quebec in 2008, Cécile Laborde brings out the inconsistencies in the French position and its (...)

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Essays

Immigration, knowledge and power

An interview with Gérard Noiriel

by Nicolas Delalande & Ivan Jablonka, 27 May 2008

At a time when immigration and national identity have been publicly bundled together as partaking of the same conundrum, historian Gérard Noiriel revisits for laviedesidees.fr the scientific and (...)

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