20 books to read in January 15 books to understand Italy

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Florian Louis

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Camille Lefebvre, In the shadow of the history of others, EHESS editions

“How does a historian look at a past? who is close to him, so close that it is his own or that of his family? How can family memory and the historical profession be linked to each other, without being confused?

Between public and private archives, interviews and recent scientific work, Camille Lefebvre reconstructs the trajectories of her four grandparents, ordinary men and women who stumbled upon extraordinary events. Routes of flesh and bones emerge, linking Oran to the borders of Bessarabia, the countryside of Seine-Inférieure to Franco's prisons.

The story of these lives marked, sometimes shattered, by pogroms, colonization, wars, the Shoah, communist involvement and the Resistance, illustrates what history can do to us, but also what we can make her. »

Coming January 20.

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Matthias Bormuth, Schreiben im Exile. Porträts, Wallstein

“Writing in exile is a political subject in the “century of extremes” to which the essays brought together in this book bear witness. Gottfried Benn and Felix Hartlaub wrote for the cash drawer in Germany, while Hans Scholl did intellectual resistance. Thomas Mann took a largely wrathful look at "domestic emigration" and only briefly returned from exile in both parts of Germany. Erich Auerbach sketched from 1942 in Istanbul the motif of passion in world literature. For Stefan Zweig, it ends in Brazil with his suicide. Karl Popper studied the philosophical premises of totalitarian thought in New Zealand from 1945, while the works of Ossip Mandelstam and Gustaw Herling demonstrate its political effects after the October Revolution and during the Cold War. »

Coming January 5th.

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Sonia Bledniak, Isabelle Matamoros and Fabrice Virgili (ed.) – Chronicles of Europe, CNRS Éditions

"Tracing six centuries of European history in some 120 dates and several hundred documents: such is the challenge that these Chronicles take up.

Far from listing the "great dates that have made history", this book prefers to highlight those that we know less about. We discover, among other things, the adoption of Roman writing in the printing press from 1470, the entry of the tomato into European cuisine in 1613, the execution of the last witch in 1782, the struggles for the reduction working time in 1817, the vote for women in Finland in 1906, the first victim of the Berlin Wall on August 22, 1961, the launch of the Europa II rocket in 1971.

The historians – of techniques, politics, the environment, ideas, gender, the arts, the economy – gathered here have agreed to take part in an original exercise: choose an event that makes sense on a European scale, then, with supporting documents and chronological markers, tell the story and report on its resonances through time and space. »

Coming January 20.

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Pierre Bourdieu, Microcosms. Field Theory, Reasons for Action

"This book is a unique opportunity to grasp one of the most innovative dimensions of Pierre Bourdieu's work, less known but no less important than the notions of habitus or cultural capital: field theory, partial formulations of which can be found in many of his works since La Distinction (1979).

The notion of field actually underlies in a more or less explicit way all his work and provides an instrument of analysis that he mobilizes on a set of very diversified fields: religion, culture, literature, art, the academic world, the economy, the family, power, employers, etc. All of these particular social objects are indeed amenable to an analysis in terms of field, a relational analysis that reveals the forces that differentiate and separate them at the same time as the specific struggles that underlie their internal unity.

Pierre Bourdieu wanted to offer a provisional synthesis in the form of a book to show the operational force and the theoretical coherence of this concept, which was tirelessly tested by social reality throughout his scientific life. Interrupted in 1995, this project remained unfinished and the present work is an attempt to propose an approximate realization based on the notes he left, on the original texts he wrote for this purpose and on a reasoned collection of articles that he wanted to rework as usual with a view to integrating them into his book.

This book, wanted by its author and redone without him, for him, is an essential book to grasp the scope of his work. We cannot really understand and grasp the scope of Bourdieu's best-known and most recognized works on the theory of practice (habitus, dispositions, etc.) and on the structuring of social space (according to cultural capitals, economic, social, symbolic), without relating them to the field theory which completes the conceptual, scientific and methodological system of an author who has had a lasting revolution in the social sciences. »

Coming January 21

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Anthony Pagden, The Pursuit of Europe. A History, Oxford University Press

“The Pursuit of Europe tells the story of the evolution of the 'European project', since the end of the Napoleonic wars, which saw the first creation of a 'concert European", until Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internal conflict, to create a united Europe while preserving the political, legal and cultural integrity of each nation. The need to find an answer to this question became more acute after two world wars showed that while the nations of Europe were to continue to play a role in the world, they could now only do so together.

To achieve this, however, they had to be prepared to merge their zealous sovereign powers into a new form of transnational constitutionalism. This is what the European Union tried to do. Anthony Pagden asserts here that she has not created, as her enemies claim, a "super-state", but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not on the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but on a common set of values ​​and aspirations. This, according to Mr Pagden, will allow the Union to defeat its political enemies from within and overcome the difficulties, from mass migration to the pandemic, that it faces from without. But it will only succeed if it continues to evolve as it has over the past two centuries. »

Coming January 13

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Augustin Landier and David Thesmar, The price of our values. When our ideals collide with our material desires, Flammarion

“Moral values ​​are at the heart of our social debates. But the price to pay to defend these values ​​is rarely mentioned. That adherence to a moral good – ecology, diversity, help for the most deprived… – depends on its economic cost makes us uncomfortable. We would like to be able to make right and good choices “no matter what”.

Precisely, defending a value means agreeing to pay the price for it. To have beautiful museums and promote our culture, do we agree to pay more taxes? To preserve social ties, do we agree to subsidize certain companies? Do we want to welcome more refugees at the risk of saturating social services? The answers we provide to these questions shape the “economic-moral” preferences that are decisive in our societies today. Because the more our democracies advance, the more our choices bring into play both our interests and our values.

This book proposes, in an innovative approach, to integrate the non-pecuniary dimension of our lives (freedom, identity, altruism, justice, culture, etc.) into economic analysis. Based on a vast international survey, in which the reader can also participate, it maps the preferences that are decisive in understanding how citizens decide. »

Coming January 12.

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Malika Rahal, Algeria 1962. A popular story, La Découverte

“In Algeria, the year 1962 was both the end of a war and the difficult transition to peace. Putting an end to a long French colonization marked by a rare combination of violence and acculturation, it saw the emergence of an Algerian state primarily concerned with ensuring its own stability and the survival of its population. If, in the countries of the South, this date has become the symbol of all the independence of the colonized peoples, in France, 1962 is known above all by the experiences of the Pieds-noirs and the Harkis. In Algeria, the historiography of the year 1962 is essentially reduced to the political crisis of the FLN and the fratricidal struggles that accompanied it. But we still know very little about the experience of the inhabitants of the country who remained there then.

Hence the importance of this book, which aims to restore the way in which the period was experienced by this majority. The year 1962 was punctuated by three moments: the Evian ceasefire of March 19, Independence in July, the proclamation of the Algerian Republic on September 25. The political history they draw hides lived experiences, which Malika Rahal finely restores over the course of an investigation mobilizing testimonies, autobiographies, photographs and films, songs and poems. Thus emerges a popular history largely absent from traditional approaches: by making room for the despair of the French in Algeria whose world is collapsing – a disarray that fuels the violence of the OAS – it relates the return of 300,000 Algerian refugees from Tunisia and Morocco, the liberation of concentration camps where a quarter of the colonized population was held, or the liberation of prisons, as well as spectacular popular festivities. The work describes the founding collective experiences for the country which was born at Independence: the demobilization and reconversion of the National Liberation Army, the search for the dead and missing by their relatives, the occupation of housing and land left by those who fled the country. An unparalleled fresco, fascinating from start to finish. »

Coming January 6.

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Timothy Tackett, The Glory and the Sorrow. A Parisian and His World in the Age of the French Revolution, Oxford University Press

“What does it mean to live through one of the most transformative periods in the history of the world? In The Glory and the Sorrow, Timothy Tackett answers this question by recreating the world of Adrien Colson, a small lawyer who lived in Paris at the end of the Ancien Régime and during the first eight years of the French Revolution.

Based on more than a thousand letters written by Colson to his closest friend, this book vividly chronicles the daily life of an "ordinary citizen" in extraordinary times, as well as the life of a district of a small street in the center of Paris. It explores the real, everyday experience of a revolution: not only excitement, joy and enthusiasm, but also uncertainty, confusion, anxiety and disappointments. While Colson reported on major events such as the storming of the Bastille and the king's flight to Varennes, his correspondence underscores how the vast majority of Parisians – and arguably the French population more generally – had no anticipated the Revolution; the incessant circulation and power of rumors of impending disasters in Paris, not only during the summer of 1789 but continuously from the autumn of 1789 and throughout the revolutionary decade; and how it affected popular psychology and behavior. In doing so, this story demonstrates how a Parisian and his neighbors became radicalized during the Revolution. »

Coming January 13.

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Luciano Canfora, La democrazia dei signori, Laterza

“How is it that the legislative power passed de facto into the hands of the executive, reducing the functions of the elected assemblies to mere ratification tasks? And above all: does a political system remain “democratic” even when the “demos” has disappeared? Or does it become a democracy of the lords?

For more than thirty years, Italy has seen the periodic implementation of “irregular” solutions to political crises. Ciampi, Monti, Draghi. For some time now, the Presidents of the Republic have acted as if the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic were in force. One cannot help wondering if one of the immediate causes of this drift is not the occasional and repeated recourse to the so-called "national unity" and the consequent assembly of political formations considered as antithetical but destined to lose, over the course of these experiences, a large part of their connotations. The inescapable problem with which we are confronted is the following: at what cost and with what reorganization of our international role has such a mutation been produced, and is it irreversible? »

Coming January 13.

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Pierre Birnbaum, Tears of History. From Kchinev to Pittsburgh, Gallimard

"Writing the history of Judaism, is it telling the story of a valley of tears? No, answered for a long time one of the greatest historians of Judaism, Salo Baron (1895-1989). Born in Galicia, part of the Habsburg Empire, invited to teach in New York in 1926, he discovered what he thought was American exceptionalism.

As a new society, the United States did not experience the Crusades, the horrors of the Middle Ages, the misfortunes of the Inquisition, the pogroms of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, including that of of Kishinev in 1903 marked everyone's mind; they escaped the worst, the expulsion of European Jews. Baron is convinced of this, the United States alone denies what he calls “the tearful vision of history”, the story of the fate of Judaism as the uninterrupted list of persecutions and massacres. At most, American Jews come up against prejudice, social barriers in clubs and universities, but never anti-Semitism theorized in political ideology like Germany and France.

However, in April 1913, the Leo Franck affair broke out in Atlanta, the lynching of a Jew accused of the ritual murder of a young girl. First manifestation of an anti-Semitism of hatred that will hatch until today, carried by white supremacists. Hundreds of synagogues burned down over the decades, leading up to the Pittsburgh massacre in 2018 and anti-Semitic slogans during the attempted Capitol coup in January 2021.

Is the romance of exceptionalism sanctified by Salo Baron and later by historians of American Judaism thus permanently denied? Is this also the return of tear history? »

Coming January 6.

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Guillaume Blanc, Decolonizations. Histories from Africa and Asia from the 19th-21st century, Éditions du Seuil

“This book traces the history of decolonization by adopting a point of view: that of the South. Departing from an agreed chronological break, colonization-decolonization, it begins in 1850 and ends in 2013: from the invention of continents and races to the sinking of refugees from East Africa.

Maps, testimonials and freeze-frames accompany this synthesis: rather than a grand narrative on “Africa” and “Asia”, situated stories shed light on the singularity of African and Asian societies. It shows how much we live in a postcolonial world: the colonial past still weighs on the present, but history allows us to understand it serenely. »

Coming January 14

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Frédéric Charillon, Wars of Influence. States out to conquer minds, Odile Jacob

“What do the panda kissers (the zealots of Chinese politics), the “Putin mania”, the Turkish or Qatari “networks”, the K -pop (Korean pop music), German foundations, Confucius Institutes or "Young Leaders" invitational programs in the United States? In any case, it is a question of displaying, of seducing, of convincing, of finding relays, in a more global state strategy which aims to conquer minds.

Because – this is the thesis of this book – influence, and no longer power, is the new key to deciphering the game of international relations. Influence mobilizes increasing resources from states. It allows them to change the global balance of power, to control third countries or to prosper there without hindrance.`

We can denounce these influence strategies as so many unacceptable manipulations, point the finger at their sponsors, especially when they practice nuisance and intimidation. But they have become the geopolitical norm.

Are France and more broadly Europe well equipped to wage these wars of another type? »

Coming January 5th.

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Emily Greble, Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe, Oxford University Press

“From 1878 to the period following World War II, more than one million Ottoman Muslims became citizens of new European states. In Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe, Emily Greble follows the fortunes and misfortunes of several generations of these natives, men, women and children, merchants, peasants and landowners, muftis and preachers, teachers and students, believers and non-believers. , from the port cities on the shores of the Adriatic to the mountainous villages of the Balkans. Drawing on a wide range of records, from ministries in capital cities to madrasas in provincial towns, it uncovers Muslim negotiations with state authorities – about the limits of Islamic law, the nature of religious freedom and the meaning of minority rights. It shows how their story is that of Europe: Muslims have gone through the continent's turbulent history, from imperial order to the ideological programs of fascism, socialism and communism, through the political experiences of liberal democracy and the authoritarianism of the interwar period. In doing so, they shaped the grand narratives upon which much of Europe's fractured present is based today. »

Coming January 27.

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Shlomo Sand, A Brief Global History of the Left, Discovery

“What’s Happening to the Left? Is she actually dying? If we have not stopped, throughout its brief existence, to pronounce its requiem, it has so far always thwarted the forecasts. Yet today, all over the world, organized left movements are in serious decline. It is perhaps that we should see in it the symptom of a deeper and much more problematic erasure, that of the "imaginary of equality", which has been the main driving force of the global left since its birth in XVIII^th century… In any case, this is the most disturbing hypothesis of this book.

And to grasp its relevance, Shlomo Sand invites us to go back to the sources of this “imaginary” and to study the shaping, transformations and adjustments of the idea of ​​equality over more than two centuries. From the Diggers of the first English Revolution to the formation of anarchism and Marxism, from Third Worldism to anti-colonial revolutions, from post-MeToo feminisms to left-wing populism today, this book takes a deep dive into the thinkers and movements who built the global left. It shows both the global and transnational dynamics that animated them, often echoing each other, the way in which they thought about equality, but also how they came up against the "wall" of real equality. and were able to draw, or not, the necessary lessons. »

Coming January 20.

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Marco Ferrari, La increíble historia de António Salazar, el dictador que murió dos veces, Debate

“For forty years, Portugal and its immense colonial empire were ruled by António Salazar, a full man of contradictions. This essay traces the particularities of the Estado Novo, from the 1930s with Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, to its final days in the 1970s. When the dictator was incapacitated, an impressive staging was orchestrated around him to conceal the fact that he was no longer in power. This included mock cabinet meetings, fake state visits and, above all, a media system tailor-made for Salazar, with radio and television interviews and copies of his favorite newspaper just for him. A former seminarian and creator of a subtle system of repression, Salazar got out of the Second World War by ceding bases to the Allies in the Azores and selling equipment to the Nazis. He built harsh penitentiaries on remote islands and in ancient medieval fortresses, and turned Lisbon into a city full of spies. The corporatist and authoritarian regime he created was overthrown by the Carnation Revolution, which brought Portugal back to Europe. »Coming January 13.

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Catherine Colliot-Thélène, The common of freedom. From the right of property to the duty of hospitality, Puf

“Going back to the fundamental premises of the Kantian theory of law, this book establishes that the right of private property, far from being for Kant a formal right, whose effectiveness for each would be contingent, is on the contrary the universal condition of concrete freedom: every human being has the right to have a place on earth to live free. In the following century, Marx showed how the capitalist economy transformed this right into an instrument of dispossession which separates the subject, understood as an abstract entity, from its organic conditions of existence. In the finite space of an entirely occupied land, the logics of the capitalist economy and the politics of nation-states combine to perpetuate this separation. They generate exclusions that directly flout the universality of the right to freedom: between repression and paternalistic assistance, public policies targeting the poor and migrants deny in practice their recipients the status of subject of rights. »

Coming January 19.

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Vera Michlin-Shapir, Fluid Russia. Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era, Northern Illinois University Press

“Fluid Russia offers a new framework for understanding Russian national identity by focusing on the impact of globalization on its training. This approach sheds new light on the Russian case, revealing a dynamic identity that is developing like other countries exposed to globalization. Vera Michlin-Shapir shows how the freedoms offered by Russia's embrace of globalization in the 1990s were accompanied by globalization-related disruptions. She describes Putin's rise to power and his plan to reassert a stronger identity not as a specifically Russian diversion from liberal democracy, but as part of a larger phenomenon of challenging globalization. She points to the limitations of the Putin regime in shaping Russian politics and society, which are still very much influenced by global trends. Furthermore, it challenges a prevalent approach in Russian studies that sees Russia's experience of national identity as abnormal or flawed, that is, too weak or too aggressive. This study links Russia's authoritarian politics and nationalist rallying to the flaws of globalization and neoliberal economics, potentially making Russia the "patient zero" of the anti-global populist wave and the rise of neo-liberal regimes. authoritarian. »

Released December 15.

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Dawn C. Murphy, China's Rise in the Global South. The Middle East, Africa, and Beijing's Alternative World Order, Stanford University Press

"China's Rise in the Global South examines China's behavior as a rising power in two key regions of the South, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and analyzes thirty years of China's interactions with these regions across a range of domains: political, economic, foreign aid and military. . From the "Belt and Road" initiative to the creation of new cooperation forums and special envoys, it offers an in-depth look at China's foreign policy approach to the countries it considers as its partners in South-South cooperation. Intervening in the emerging debate between liberals and realists over China's future as a great power, Murphy argues that China is building an alternative international order to interact with these regions. »

Coming January 11.

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Andrea Porciello, Filosofia dell'ambiente. Ontologia, etica, diritto, Carocci

“If human beings are to successfully tackle the environmental crisis, assuming there is still time to do so, they must rethink the ontology in which they placed themselves by perceiving themselves as part of nature, as one of its infinite expressions of life; and nature as a complex system of relationships with intrinsic value, independent of the utility they may derive from it. This laborious work of deconstruction and ontological reconstruction, which is the basis of any turn towards ecology, must be done according to a path that first concerns the way in which individuals conceive of themselves and the world, then public institutions. , primarily legal and economic institutions. A path, therefore, which is partly internal, insofar as it concerns ecological awareness, and partly external, insofar as it rethinks the public management of common goods. »

Coming January 20.

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Paulina L. Alberto, Black Legend. The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina, Cambridge University Press

“Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with the stories that affect them. But when these stories are shaped by enduring racist myths, they wield undue power that ruins lives and tears communities apart. Black Legend tells the story of an Afro-Argentine, Raúl Grigera (“el negro Raúl”), who in the early 1900s boldly transformed himself into an attractive black icon of the bohemian nightlife of Buenos Aires, before defamatory storytellers distorted it. Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive power of racial narratives and tells a new story of black Argentina and Argentine negritude over two centuries. With the extraordinary Raúl Grigera at its center, Black Legend opens new windows into the lived experiences of blackness in a “white” nation. »

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