Reviews

How should one interpret the “Allegory of Good Government”, a fresco painted by Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena in 1338? Is it praising the law that preserves the peace within the city and protects individuals, or the wisdom that naturally guides men towards the common good?

The translation into French of Nicholas Evans’ book Dying Words. Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us is a timely reminder for Francophone readers of the magnitude and, particularly, the severity of a phenomenon on which very little has been written in the French language and of which there is still far too little awareness: the mass extinction of languages currently underway.

Two books take stock of the impasse at which European construction has arrived. Who is the culprit? The market, as Robert Salais believes, or, as Philippe Herzog contends, the state? Both declare the postwar model bankrupt and call for a new framework, one that would more effectively involve Europe’s citizens.

Valérie Erlich’s analysis of academic mobility across Europe identifies higher education as a vehicle for greater European integration and indirectly sheds light on the relations amongst European states and between Europe and the rest of the world.

Why do people migrate? How can they live in several worlds and many nations at once? Tracing the history of the Lebanese migration to West Africa, Andrew Arsan offers a brilliant reappraisal of diaspora, nation and empire in the first half of the twentieth century.

Cosmopolitanism seems to have lost its critical edge. While it used to be a critical ideology prescribing a more universal world, it now appears to merely describe the globalized world we live in. But has cosmopolitanism really lost touch with its radical roots ? Could it not reconnect with its previous ability to challenge arbitrary exclusions? Revisiting demanding theories of democracy in a post-national light, James D. Ingram sketches the possible contours of a new radical cosmopolitics.

At a time when gender is on the debating table, the Dictionnaire genre et science politique [Dictionary of gender and political science] does more than just summarise current knowledge in the field. The book reminds us that politics has always had gender-related divisions that define it, and that the recent inclusion of gender issues in the political arena raises new questions.

Sylvain Venayre responds to politicians who, only yesterday, were asking historians to define national identity. With an exploration of the French nation’s roots, hedeliberately shifts the question by proposing a history of how historians are themselves involved in the production of a collective identity.

At a time when “Disability Studies”—a multidisciplinary approach to physical incapacities that blends scholarship and activism—were first establishing themselves, Robert Bogdan protested the reduction of individuals to purely medical definitions. The translation of his book may contribute to overcoming this position, which remains dominant in France.

Laurent Gayer’s book, Karachi. Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, tells the story of a city described seven decades ago as the “city of lights”, but now often portrayed as one of the world’s most chaotic and dangerous metropolises.

During the Belle Époque, the women who took on “men’s work” – doctors, journalists, and lawyers, but also coach drivers and postal workers – met with incredulity, hilarity, and more generally hostility. Postcards began to spread as a medium during the rise of early feminism and offer a striking representation of these reactions.

The Age of Enlightenment was not the fruit of European inspiration alone, and should also be considered in the context of a much wider space. A collection of articles reveals all the intensity of the French tradition of the critique of Orientalism.

Emma Spary’s new book Feeding France explores the rise of the food expert as public figure from the eighteenth century onwards, considering in particular the life-story of Antoine Parmentier, who introduced the potato into the country. The history of food consumption trends, which remains largely unexplored, tells a tale of persuasion, food crises and controversy.

Though race is socially constructed, it nonetheless really exists: consequently, Magali Bessone argues, the concept of race must be taken into consideration when fighting racism. But what positive content can be given to the “critical republicanism” she advocates?

A new essay collection considers the relevance and stakes of a contemporary re-reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction, which was first published in 1979. The result is a critical discussion that is particularly vibrant, as much in terms of the positions the authors take vis-à-vis Bourdieu, as in terms of the themes and origins of the scholars who appropriate his arguments.

With the publication of a book on the environmental history of Russia, Étienne Forestier-Peyrat analyses the link between politics and environment in Russian and Soviet history, from the Czarist campaigns to expand territories to the current and highly controversial construction of the Sochi Olympic Village.

Patrick Zylberman examines how the concept of health security has developed over the last thirty years, focusing nowadays on global pandemics and the threat of bioterrorism. Such threats, which transcend national borders, require new surveillance systems to be put in place and call into question the very nature of state sovereignty.

How can we produce a history of power and violence in the colonial context that is not confined to the discourse of the State, but takes full measure of the historicity of ethnographic and archival sources? Michel Naepels answers this question on the basis of extensive research in New Caledonia.

The Syrian civil war has entered its fourth year and continues to take a very heavy toll on the Syrian people. In his book on Bashar Al-Asad’s authoritarian regime, Souhaïl Belhadj shows how this conflict is rooted not in ethnic and religious identity, but in a profound social crisis.

How can you fight for your country while being denied citizenship? Christine Knauer uncovers the paradox of African-American soldiers in the twentieth century, and their role in the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

It took the revolutionary meritocracy for the military, organizational, and administrative genius of the future emperor to emerge. In the first volume of his biography (up to 1802), Patrice Gueniffey shows that Bonaparte was at the same time a “king of a new kind”, an enlightened despot, a revolutionary, and a post-revolutionary, always driven by an iron will.

Before we start to lament the triumph of celebrity culture over the most basic civic literacy, we might ask if things were truly better in the past. Antoine Lilti’s brilliant book shows that modern celebrity culture had its origins in the age of revolutions, when selfhood and personal authenticity emerged as new notions.

Now a well-known Chinese lawyer of the democratic dissidence in China, Zhang Sizhi was once a young nationalist, a high-ranking official in the court of Beijing and a victim of anti-rightist repression. In his memoirs, he provides a detailed and fascinating description of the profession and China in the second half of the 20^th century.

Starting with a discussion of three related but distinct ideas – sex, gender and sexuality – Elsa Dorlin summarizes forty years of feminist theories. She also traces these three categories back to practices that are inseparable from a context of domination.

Fred Block & Margaret Somers, two key members of an international network of scholars appealing to Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece of 1944, forcefully argue that it constitutes a critical resource for understanding not only the nature and origins of the market economy but also its recurrent crises, including the current one.

In Émilie Hache’s view, protecting the environment implies taking into account economic and social issues. But this political approach demands that we also question more profoundly our idea of nature and the relationship that we have with it.

In his last published essay, Jacques Le Goff, who recently passed away, examines the problem of historical periodization. He defends the idea of a “long Middle Ages” and refuses to see the Renaissance as a distinct period in its own right. His book is a reflection on our chronological frameworks.

Was Max Weber a champion of modern capitalism and the triumph of Western rationality? Two recent books reply with a resounding “no,” as they seek to correct, on very different grounds, exaggerated interpretations of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Did French soldiers really experience a union sacrée (“sacred union”) in the trenches of the First World War, or did intellectuals simply erase their memories of the social distinctions they encountered at the front? Through an analysis of intellectuals’ discourse about other social classes, Nicolas Mariot revisits the myth of the Great War as a patriotic melting pot—an analysis which merits further exploration, on the eve of the First Armistice’s anniversary.

Is the American government’s drone warfare a radical kind of manhunting, or just a military tactic that can be used for various ends, ranging from highly legitimate to barbarous?

What’s in an individual once under the public gaze? Building on recent academic trends, two books – one in English, one in French – explore the historical construct of the self in the context of eighteenth-century France.

According to Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, animals are far more than just creatures to whom we have a duty; they are indeed our fellow citizens. The theory is radical yet fragile: it misconceives the nature of both the animal and the citizen. The problem is the lack of responsibility, accountability and liberty – in other words, the irreducible innocence of animals.

Acknowledging that the world is in dire need of religion, Roberto Unger’s latest book envisions something ambitious, namely the creation of a “religion of the future”, which will not only revolutionize the way humans think about and practice religion but will also lead to a political revolution.

Intellectual history and global history have both experienced a welcome revival in recent years, but is there a way to reconcile these two (re)emerging trends? This collection of essays offers a stimulating guide for future research, as well as some salutary warnings about the limitations of a global approach.

The tragedy of Lampedusa has shed a harsh light on the effects of border control, which Europe is outsourcing and privatising in order to make responsibilities more opaque and sustain a market of fear. Claire Rodier reveals the ideological and economic implications of this process, and its perverse effects.

Two recent books, focusing on the American corporate elite & high-technology innovation in the US, reveal much about the particular characteristics and operation of the US state. With diverging but compatible approaches, they provide bases for understanding why the US is in decline.

Between the start of the Franco-Prussian War and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, art historians in Germany and France were studying the Italian Renaissance and the Gothic monuments of the Middle Ages. Passini’s recent book analyses the role of French and German nationalism in the shaping of art history.

Antoine Coppolani’s masterful biography offers a carefully constructed account of Nixon’s half-century at the centre of the American scene. The result is a compelling book that tells us much about the post–World War II years in the United States, as well as about Richard Nixon himself.

Denouncing the neglect of the independence era by African historians, Frederick Cooper asserts that a continent of nation-states was not the inevitable outcome of decolonization.