La société scythique avait-elle des classes fonctionnelles?

Sans résumé La matière de cette discussion a été exposée au Collège de France dans plusieurs conférences de janvier et de février 1961. Je remercie M. A. Minard, qui a sensiblement amélioré les propositions de la troisième partie.     

The Société Européenne de Culture's Dialogue Est-Ouest 1956: Confronting the ‘European Problem’

This essay, which is part of an ongoing monographic study of the Société Européenne de Culture, looks at the SEC's relationship with Europe's communist intelligentsia during the first phase of the Cold War. European intellectual life during this period is generally associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet the SEC, the membership of which included some of Europe's most eminent figures, ranging from Camus and Jaspers, to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, to Lukács and Sartre, can be seen as having provided a reference point particularly for the European left, not least because of its unique openness to communist participation. Giving special attention to the Dialogue Est-Ouest (Venice, March 1956), one of the earliest encounters between Europe's eastern and western intellectuals since before the war, this essay considers how the SEC's engagement with contemporary Marxist theory there not only embedded the dialectic as the SEC's operational method. It also provided an early indication of that institution's imminent shift from a preoccupation with universal values to an awareness of cultural difference and diversity, as a result of the critique of current western liberal ideology and its cultures, undertaken by the SEC in light of the Thaw.     

Relativité et réalité Nottale, Simondon et le réalisme des relations

The exhaustion of the controversy about realism in physics, which is an epistemological consequence of the radical discrepancy between quantum mechanics and relativity, indicates the irrelevance of the traditional opposition between realism and antirealism. Since its purpose is the reunification of microphysics and macrophysics by the means of fractal space-time and scale relativity, Laurent Nottale's theory of Scale Relativity gets over this opposition by postulating the ontological value of the physical relations. The physicist's relational realism hence confirms spontaneously the intuitions of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of nucleation, which considers the necessary recognition of the ontological value of relations in order to establish the «great synthesis of relativity and quantum physics».     

Diversité des réactions réformées à la révocation

Starting from the analysis of the reactions of the Protestant groups to the Fontainebleau edict, this paper examines the development of two main concepts that are at the origin of political modernity, i.e. the distinction between religious and political domains on the one hand, and the popular sovereignty on the other. These two concepts emerged separately as a result of crossed and apparently paradoxal thoughts, whose coherence is to be sought in the anthropological positions underlying them. Therefore the study of the theological debates in the XVII^th century is a way by which the modern political concepts arose.     

Pour une sociologie de la société transnationale

Proposing a general framework for the study of the emerging transnational society, the article critically surveys predominant disciplinary perspectives in this field, and outlines an approach based on a core/periphery model with oligopolistic competition. Within this general framework, sociology finds its specific subject in the ties that connect human beings across national borders, directly or mediated by transnational institutions. An elaborated and amended version of this approach is illustrated, among others, by the dynamics of cultural globalization and the «world language system».     

Une Histoire de L’universalité des Matrices Mathématiques

International matrix theory of the 1930s is influenced by multiple phenomena and may be analyzed by looking at how local practices were globalized via pathways which manifested a short-term reappropriation between the two world wars of work developed over the long term. This article interrogates the constitution of the universality of matrix terminology and focuses particularly on phenomena of the collective circulation of texts which present cultural aspects proper to networks with complex identities.     

Rex imago dei: Charles V of France and the Livre des propriétés des choses

The subject of this paper is the Livre des propriétés des choses, the fourteenth-century French translation of the thirteenth-century encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum. The translation was made for Charles V of France, and the original copy is lost. Here a reconstruction is offered of the appearance of the frontispiece of the royal exemplar. The textual additions of the translator and the iconography of this frontispiece reveal a new conception of the meaning and usage of the encyclopedia, as well as a concerted attempt to draw this authoritative work into the orbit of royal aims and aspirations. The reconstructed frontispiece also allows us to correct an error, which originates with Montfaucon, concerning the illustration of the original copy of the Livre des propriétés des choses.     

Mobilité Universitaire et Circulation Internationale des Idées. Le Cas du Brésil Contemporain

In Brazil, considerable changes have affected the fields of social sciences and humanities. The growing number of advanced students studying abroad after the 1960s and later the creation of PhD programs have turned the road to national political power into an international one. As a result, academic fields have evolved and Elite formation has largely been transformed. Using these elements as a contextual framework, this article seeks to analyze the recent dynamics of the debate over the political and economic evolution of Brazil.     

L'impensé du marché

The historiography of the United States in the xviii^th and beginning of the xix^th centuries stresses the key role of market development in the economic growth of the area. Various historical schools argue over the role of moral or household economic attitudes, and over the rhythm and extent of market integration. But because of the peculiar chronology of the economic development of the United States, compared to Great-Britain, it has long been assumed that this market integration, more than any technological progress, has been at the root of the industrial revolution and of industrial capitalism. The concept of market, however, has never been itself criticized and historicized. This paper offers a historically relevant modelization of merchant activity, and offers some hypotheses on the transition from this model to industrial capitalism.     

La lutte pour la supranationalité en Europe: un combat contre des chimères? L'engagement de l'Union européenne des Fédéralistes pour la Communauté Politique européenne (1952–1954)

Militant federalism in postwar Europe contrasted with moderate Europeanism by asking for an integrated European society. Its main organ, l'Union européenne des Fédéralistes (created in December 1946), was immediately on the defensive against better organised European movements. Persevering, the UEF maintained its vanguard role and became increasingly heard as European integration progressed after the CED project and Schuman plan. The federalist influence became more prominent through political discourses and events that seemed to favour its integrationist logic. This hope was crushed by the 20 August crime which pushed the federal idea aside as Utopian. Yet federalists undoubtedly broadened their activities and evolved from being advisers to actually influencing the treatise of the Communauté politique européenne (article 38). External events undoubtedly played a role, as did the cold war; by making the European project a more viable solution, the federalists used this opportunity but their relative successes could not hide a weak coalition that would not resist the difficult political climate of the period.

résumé ?Le fédéralisme militant, tel qu'il apparaît dès l'après-guerre, ne peut que trancher par rapport à un européisme majoritairement modéré, dans la mesure où il réclame d'emblée la constitution d'une société véritablement intégrée au niveau européen: son principal représentant, l'Union européenne des Fédéralistes (créée en décembre 1946), entre tout de suite ‘en résistance’ face à des groupes plus prestigieux, qui vont être à la base de la création du Mouvement Européen. L'UEF doit alors défendre son originalité dans une période qui ne semble pas propice aux succès de ses idées. Cette persévérance a permis au mouvement fédéraliste de devenir le mouvement le plus à la pointe du combat européen et le plus écouté de ses pairs, à partir du moment où l'idée d'intégration n'est plus aussi marginale, avec le Plan Schuman puis le projet de CED, auquel vient s'ajouter très vite celui de CPE. L'influence fédéraliste se fait alors sentir à travers des débats, des discours, des faits qui semblent donner raison à la logique intégratrice. La désillusion n'en sera que plus forte lorsque sera perpétré le ‘crime du 30 août’, qui relègue toutes ces hautes priorités au rayon des utopies. Le mouvement a-t-il réellement été entendu des gouvernements, les seuls à même de transformer l'idée en réalité ? On peut remarquer, dans notre courte période, un élargissement de sa sphère d'influence. Cette fonction de ‘conseillers’, dans laquelle les fédéralistes excellent de plus en plus, évolue elle-même avec le temps, de la simple préparation psychologique à l'idée européenne, à laquelle l'UEF n'est pas seule partie prenante, à la fonction d'‘éminence grise’, qui permet au mouvement de contribuer à changer l'esprit du traité politique européen le plus audacieux, celui de la Communauté politique européenne (article 38). Il convient de s'interroger sur le rôle de la conjoncture internationale dans cette évolution. Celle-ci est en effet consubstantielle à l'histoire de l'UEF, comme elle l'est à l'idée d'Europe dans l'après-guerre: c'est la Guerre froide qui rétrécit l'espace européen susceptible de s'unir, mais qui l'érige en espoir. Les fédéralistes, surpris de cette aubaine, sauront en profiter et trouver les bons interlocuteurs. L'impression dominante est cependant que l'action fédéraliste, qui va effectivement profiter des grands débats européens qui émaillent la première moitié des années cinquante, ne repose pas sur des bases bien stables. Peut-être est-ce du à l'hétérogénéité trop importante du Fédéralisme, dont le ‘front commun’ ne pouvait pas sérieusement résister aux aléas et aux révisions constantes entraînés par un contexte dramatique qui échappe aux Européens eux-mêmes.