I compare Christopher Lasch's thought to specific features that research in political science attributes to contemporary populism. Lasch openly favoured a historical form of populism but is rarely considered when current forms of populism are discussed. The research literature characterizes populism as superficially tied to democracy while undermining it, as committed to the moral binary of people and elites, and as intellectually “thin” because it does not engage with the complex theories that ground other ideologies. These characters make populism incoherent and inimical to democracy. Lasch manifests all three characters while connecting them to a sustained worldview. Humans’ awareness of death is the core feature that makes them rational, ethical and equal. Attempts to dilute that awareness are inimical to the equality at democracy's basis. Experts and professionals encourage this dilution by promising remedies and progress. Democracy depends on ordinary people who resist elites and their complex phraseologies.

Depuis plusieurs décennies, la laïcité subit en France une transformation profonde qui remet en cause sa dimension libérale. Le principe de séparation du politique et du religieux se dilue au profit de la promotion de la notion récente du « vivre‑ensemble », qui voudrait associer garantie de la liberté religieuse et défense des valeurs républicaines. Ce processus d’érosion s’appuie sur le développement d’une logique concordataire et sur l’émergence d’une conception « communautariste » de la laïcité.

This paper argues that conceptualizing Western state citizenship from the vantage point of advancing liberalism is insufficient. Instead, recently restrictive trends may be summarized under the umbrella of earned citizenship. Conceived of as privilege not right, this is a citizenship that is simultaneously more difficult to get and easier to lose, and it inheres elements of neoliberalism and of nationalism in tandem. One could even call it an instance of neoliberal nationalism, which is neither ethnic nor civic but including on the basis of merit and desert. The rise of earned citizenship is a convergent trend across Western Europe and the classic immigrant nations of North America and Australia.

Cet article retrace l'histoire du concept de « double pouvoir », qui désigne une situation transitoire où deux pouvoirs s'affrontent au sein d'une même société. Suivant une approche inspirée des réflexions de Reinhart Koselleck, nous montrons comment l'expérience particulière des bolchéviques en 1917, incorporée dans ce concept, nourrit les attentes des réformateurs libéraux russes au début des années 1990 et éclaire leurs choix stratégiques alors même qu'ils démantèlent le régime communiste. Ce faisant, nous restituons le mécanisme de cristallisation conceptuelle par le discours savant qui rend possible cette troublante filiation du bolchévisme vers le libéralisme en Russie.

This article analyzes the corporate citizenship (CC) practices by which multinational corporations (MNCs), which have invaded the public arena, impose new standards, forcing the collectives to retire from democratic spaces. In order to verify whether this new relationship to the law fosters the emergence of a citizenship regime for everyone, the research studies its configurations based on a MNC, hailed as a role model, in a plant in Canada and a mine in Ghana. The results, which reveal a fragile autonomy in one case and a heteronomy in the other, raise the question of effectiveness of the CC torn between economic liberalism and industrial democracy. The article concludes that, under its neoliberal posture, the CC is far from conciliating its workers’ individual aspirations for equality in their difference and their collective tendency towards homogeneity; both principles articulate liberalism and democracy but do not solve the opposition between liberal individualism and collective action, including union actions, in a flexible business in the era of economic globalization.

There has been much talk about the retreat or even death of multiculturalism. Much of this discussion confounds multiculturalism with explicit policy under that name. I argue in this paper that liberal law itself, in particular majority-constraining constitutional law, requires multiculturalism, understood as multiple ways of life that cannot and should not be contained by a state that is to be neutral about individuals’ ultimate values and commitments. The workings of legal multiculturalism are demonstrated through a comparison of benchmark jurisprudence on gays in America and Muslims in Europe. An interesting difference is that for Muslims, liberal law has also functioned as constraint, not only as resource, especially in the post-2001 period of heightened integration concerns.

Comparing the treatment of Islamic veils and Christian crucifixes by the European Court of Human Rights, this paper re-examines the charge of “double standards” on the part of this guardian of the European legal order, which is seen as disadvantaging Islam and favoring Christianity. While this is proved partially correct, the paper calls for a more differentiated treatment of the issue. For one, there is a modicum of consistency in the European Court’s decisions, because they are all meant to further “pluralism”. Only, Islam and Christianity fare differently in this respect, as “threat” to and “affirmation” of pluralism, respectively. This distinction hinges on Islam’s compatibility with the liberal-secular order, on which the jury is out. A possible way out of the “pluralism v. pluralism” dilemma, I argue, is signaled in the European Court’s recent decision in Lautsi v. Italy (2011), which pairs a preference for “culturalized” Christianity with robust minority pluralism.

This paper scrutinizes the paradox of the increasing objective yet diminishing subjective value of citizenship in Western states. The decreasing subjective value points to an inevitable lightening of citizenship, which persists despite states’ recent efforts to upgrade and re-nationalize citizenship by ceremony, civic integration tests, and more exclusive rights. I discuss some features of citizenship light, most notably instrumentalism and a dissociation of citizenship from nationhood. The recently court-empowered European Union citizenship serves as an illustration.