La Politique du peuple. Racines, permanences et ambiguïtés du populisme, Roger Dupuy, Paris : Albin Michel, 2002, 251 p.

Taxée d'“ infra-politique ” ou de “ populiste ”, l'idée d'une capacité politique des couches populaires ou plébéiennes se heurte, depuis toujours, à de fortes résistances au sein de la communauté des chercheurs aussi bien en histoire qu'en science politique. Que ce soit dans les travaux d'un historien du XIXe siècle tel A. Aulard ou d'un politologue du XXe siècle tel P. Rosanvallon, le peuple demeure soit un simple figurant dans l'Histoire (Aulard), soit “ introuvable ” puisque les élites politiques sont incapables de le définir (Rosanvallon). Contre ces deux visions étriquées du peuple et de sa capacité politique, mais aussi contre la condescendance qui sous-tend de tels jugements, l'historien français Roger Dupuy tente de retracer les grandes lignes de ce qu'il appelle la “ politique du peuple ”.

Real Libertarianism Assessed: Political Theory after Van Parijs, Andrew Reeve and Andrew Williams, eds., London: Palgrave, 2003, pp. x, 223

Philippe Van Parijs' Real Freedom for All (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) is one of the most stimulating contributions to left-libertarianism published in the last decade. It is, therefore, not surprising that an edited volume that critically examines his ideas has now been published. The contributing authors (two of whom, Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, are other well known left-libertarians) raise interesting and often pointed questions, but they all have some good things to say about Van Parijs' original proposal.

Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 215

The originality of Charles Taylor's thought can be seen in the fact that it is not easy to “place” his work over the last fifteen years in the categories of standard academic disciplines. It is not really political philosophy. It is not really sociology (though it perhaps leans more towards sociology than towards political philosophy). It is something else. But what? Cultural history and the history of philosophy clearly provide the materials for Taylor's enterprise, but whatever it is, it aims for something intellectually more ambitious than mere intellectual or cultural history. The term “social imaginary” in fact captures quite well this “unplaceability” of his work between philosophy and sociology.

Plato Through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues, Zdravko Planinc, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003, pp. xii, 134

Professor Planinc analyzes in this monograph three of Plato's dialogues: the Timaeus, the Critias and the Phaedrus. His primary aim is to show that their structure and poetic imagery is modelled after that of important episodes of Homer's Odyssey. In Planinc's words, Plato consciously “refigures” the “literary tropes” of the Odyssey, and this fact is of central importance to interpreting these dialogues properly (13).

Toleration as Recognition, Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. viii, 242

In Toleration as Recognition Anna Elisabetta Galeotti offers up a sympathetic critique of liberal toleration and suggests a modification to the theory that she believes necessary in order to bring cultural minorities into the public sphere as equal citizens. This carefully argued book marks a timely contribution to the debate over group rights and multiculturalism.

Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory, Paul W. Ludwig, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. xiii, 398

In Eros and Polis, Paul Ludwig explores a rich array of issues relating to eros, homosexuality, and pederasty and their implications for republican political life. He examines ancient accounts of eros and its relation to other forms of desire, to tyranny and aggression, to spiritedness and the love of one's own, and to bonds of affection between citizens. He discusses ancient attempts to overcome the divisiveness of the private realm by controlling erotic relations between citizens, both in practice (such as at Sparta) and in theory (Plato's Republic). He concludes with a critique of the attempt of Thucydides' Pericles to stir up erotic desire and harness it in the service of the city, and of the erotic passion implicit in the attraction to foreign customs and sights. Ludwig draws upon a wide range of ancient sources including Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Lucretius, and many others. But he does not limit himself to textual analysis; much of the book is devoted to putting these texts in historical context, and much is also devoted to drawing connections between ancient thoughts and practices and the concerns of contemporary political theory.

Interventions, 1961-2001. Science sociale & action politique, Pierre Bourdieu. Textes choisis par Franck Poupeau et Thierry Discepolo, Collection “ Contre-feux ”, Marseille et Montréal : Lux Éditions, Agone, Comeau et Nadeau, 2002, 487 p.

“ J'ai toujours pour principe de dire ce qu'il y a de plus difficile à avaler pour le public auquel je parle - ce qui est le contraire de la démagogie. ” (Bourdieu, 2002 [1989] : 74). Cette devise véhémente résume éloquemment l'esprit de cet ouvrage colossal de plus de 80 entretiens, conférences et articles, rapports et documents d'archives, tous écrits (ou quelquefois co-rédigés) par le sociologue Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). La plupart de ces textes étaient initialement parus dans diverses revues, françaises ou étrangères (et même au Japon), et à l'occasion dans Les Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, revue dont Bourdieu a été le fondateur en 1975. Or, presque aucun de ces textes choisis n'était jusqu'ici disponible sous forme de livre, ce qui rendra son contenu pratiquement inédit.

Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One's Life to the Truth, Christopher Kelly, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 182

Christopher Kelly's latest book makes an important contribution to the study of Rousseau. Kelly investigates Rousseau's attitude towards authorship in the light of his motto, “consecrating one's life to the truth.” He maintains that for Rousseau this motto implies the need for two kinds of authorial responsibility: “it meant both publicly taking responsibility for what one publishes and only publishing those things that would be of public benefit” (1). Kelly then uses this two-pronged conception of responsible authorship to investigate Rousseau's understanding of the practices of citizenship and of philosophy.

Hegel on Ethics and Politics, Robert B. Pippin and Otfried Höffe, eds., translated by Nicholas Walker; The German Philosophical Tradition Series; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 358

In a better world, all books involving Kant or Hegel might come with a reverse price tag. Instead of making prospective readers pay for the privilege, they would encourage and reward the gruelling labour facing those who would brave the convoluted prose, the merciless grind of thousand-word paragraphs lecturing in German no matter the language in which they appear to be written. In our own world, of course, such learned works tend to be especially expensive, a whopping hundred dollars in this case.

Ethics and Foreign Intervention, Deen K. Chatterjee and Don E. Scheid, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. xiii, 301

The 1990s saw the gradual, but steady, expansion of the doctrine of humanitarian military intervention in places like northern Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. This process culminated in the 1999 Kosovo war which saw NATO bomb Serb targets to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. Ethics and Foreign Intervention uses the Kosovo case as its reference point to dissect the concept of humanitarian military intervention from a moral perspective. Although there are chapters on the legal implications of intervention, most notably the chapters by Tom Farer, Christine Chwaszcza, and Allen Buchanan on intervention and secession, the focus of this edited collection is to apply just war theory to the concept of humanitarian military intervention. George R. Lucas, Jr., even suggests that because the use of force in humanitarian cases is much closer to the use of force in domestic law enforcement than it is to traditional warfare the concepts of jus ad bellum and jus in bello need to be joined by jus ad pacem (or jus ad interventionem).

No More Killing Fields: Preventing Deadly Conflict, David A. Hamburg, Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004, pp. v, 365

David Hamburg, a physician, scholar, and policymaker, came to think preventively in the 1950s, when he saw the impact of the first polio vaccine. He built on this experience later when, as president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (1982-1997), he became interested in preventing mass violence—“the prime problem of the twenty-first century” (vii). One of the most important questions he poses in this work is whether it is “beyond human capacity to create secure and decent living standards for people everywhere and to foster just interactions among diverse peoples” (1). Hamburg believes that an evolving worldwide awareness of unprecedented dangers and of equally unprecedented advances in science and technology can help humanity transcend “the ancient habits of blaming, dehumanizing, repressing, and attacking …” (5).

Kant and Liberal Internationalism, Antonio Franceschet, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 164

Few political notions are at once so normative and so equivocal as liberal internationalism. Today, the official discourse of the West resounds with appeals to a term that was long a trademark of the Left. Whatever sense is given it, the meaning of internationalism logically depends on some prior conception of nationalism, since it only has currency as a backward construction referring to its opposite. Yet while nationalism is of all modern political phenomena the most value-contested—judgements of its record standardly varying across a 180-degree span, from admiration to abhorrence—no such schizophrenia of connotation affects internationalism: its implication is virtually always positive. But the price of approval is indeterminacy. If no one doubts the fact of nationalism, but few agree as to its worth, at the entry to the millennium the status of internationalism would appear to be more or less the reverse. It is claimed on all sides as a value, but who can identify it without challenge in the form of force?

L'organisation mondiale du commerce : où s'en va la mondialisation?, Christian Deblock, sous la direction de, Québec : Éditions Fides, 2002, 298 p.

Depuis quelques années, l'Organisation mondiale du commerce (l'OMC) connaît des moments difficiles. À l'échec monumental de la troisième Conférence ministérielle à Seattle en 1999, et l'émiettement du consensus simulé qui déboucha sur le soi-disant “ cycle du développement ” à Doha en novembre 2001, s'ajoutent l'hostilité affichée par l'administration Bush au multilatéralisme de toutes formes et l'opposition de plus en plus obstinée des pays en développement quant à l'élargissement du mandat de l'organisation, sans oublier, bien sûr, les manifestations populaires qui pourchassent ici et là les réunions ministérielles. L'avance du cheval de Troie des programmes de libéralisation et de régulation économique créé en janvier 1995 suite aux négociations du cycle Uruguay semble sérieusement déroutée, du moins pour l'instant. D'où la justesse de la question que pose le sous-titre de cet ouvrage dirigé par Christian Deblock. En effet, si la question est bien posée, c'est plutôt son traitement, mis en rapport au déroulement des négociations depuis la quatrième réunion ministérielle à Doha, qui marque la contribution majeure de l'ouvrage. L'objectif principal des textes est donc de faire le point sur les développements les plus récents au sein du système commercial multilatéral tout en soulignant les principaux enjeux. Or, il s'agit bel et bien d'un ouvrage d'économie politique qui s'adresse non seulement aux universitaires et aux étudiants francophones de niveau post-secondaires, mais aussi au grand public qui, depuis un certain temps, semble suivre de plus près l'évolution de l'économie mondiale.

Du retour. Abécédaire biopolitique. Entretiens avec Anne Dufourmantelle, Antonio Negri, Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 2002, 243 pages

Du retour est un entretien avec Antonio Negri mené par la psychanalyste Anne Dufourmantelle. Negri est sorti des prisons italiennes en 2003, après avoir été accusé d'avoir participé, avec les Brigades rouges, à l'assassinat d'Aldo Moro. Il est l'auteur, avec le philosophe américain Michael Hardt, de Empire—un ouvrage dont il n'est pas exagéré de dire qu'il est désormais la référence théorique principale du mouvement altermondialiste. L'intellectuel et professeur italien, le “ mauvais maître ” , comme on l'a appelé, a livré cet entretien en 2002 alors qu'il était encore en semi-liberté.

Cyber-Diplomacy: Managing Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century, Evan H. Potter, ed., Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002, xii, 208.

We are repeatedly told that we live in a revolutionary age, a time in which dramatic new developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) will fundamentally transform the ways in which we live and work. Even the collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000 has not much dampened the spirits of the techno-utopians. Given these often-exaggerated claims, I approached Cyber-Diplomacy with some trepidation, as the editor cites Marshall McLuhan's ‘global village’ in the first line of his introduction, and speaks of an information revolution in his second paragraph. However, as I pressed on in the text I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the editor and authors of this short volume are well aware of the dangers of overstatement in relation to ICTs, and work very hard throughout to avoid techno-utopianism. Instead, the authors attempt to take a fairly sober look at “how diplomacy is adapting to the new global information order” (7).

Globalization and Human Rights, Alison Brysk, sous la direction de, Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002, 311 p.

Quel est l'impact de la mondialisation sur les droits de l'Homme ? La mondialisation favorise-t-elle la défense des droits de l'Homme ou fournit-elle plutôt de nouveaux instruments, de nouvelles possibilités de violation des droits de l'Homme ? Qu'en est-il des avancées technologiques et des moyens de communication divers ? Selon la vision libérale, la mondialisation serait porteuse de développement, de démocratie, d'autonomisation et d'une meilleure gouvernance mondiale. Cela se vérifie-t-il dans la réalité ? Le but du collectif Globalization and Human Rights est d'apporter des éléments de réponse aux nombreuses questions que soulèvent les bouleversements de notre monde actuel. Les auteurs cherchent ainsi à dégager les grandes tendances de la mondialisation et l'impact qu'elles ont sur les droits de l'Homme. C'est ce qui explique la division du volume en quatre parties distinctes : la citoyenneté (citizenship), la marchandisation (commodification), la communication et, finalement, la coopération. C'est le deuxième chapitre du collectif qui sera traité ici, soit celui qui étudie la mondialisation des marchés. Les auteurs y examinent tour à tour l'impact politique de la mondialisation, les contradictions entre l'économie et le libéralisme politique en ce qui a trait aux droits sociaux, l'impact différencié de l'intégration structurelle sur différents types de droits et la mobilisation contre l'exploitation que pratiquent les firmes multinationales dans certains pays.

Governing Global Trade: International Institutions in Conflict and Convergence, Theodore H. Cohn, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002, pp. xi, 329.

At a time when all eyes are riveted on the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the ups and downs associated with its current round of negotiation initiated in Doha, Qatar, in November 2001, Theodore Cohn's latest publication provides a vivid reminder: The global trading regime is made up of much more than the WTO. The GATT/WTO is still pivotal in Cohn's diachronic overview of the evolution of the global trade regime since the creation of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) in 1947, but unlike several other studies on a similar topic, the author untangles the relationship between the GATT/WTO and other formal and informal international institutions, such as the G7/G8, the Quadrilateral Group (Quad), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the G77, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Each institution, as well as the United States and the European Union, is given relatively equal coverage in this notable study. Yet, as an indication that the GATT/WTO is still primus inter pares, most chapters revolve around the major negotiation rounds of the international organization. Chapter 2 traces the origins and early period of the postwar trade regime (1947–1962). Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on the Kennedy (1962–1972) and Tokyo (1973–1979) rounds of the GATT respectively. Chapter 5 details the uncertainty associated with the survival of the GATT (1980–1986). Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the momentous Uruguay Round of the GATT (1986–1994), and chapter 8 highlights the post-Uruguay Round period (1995–2001).