The revolutions of 1848 have gotten renewed attention in light of this year's "Arab Spring" uprisings. (The amazing photo above depicts the barricades in Paris, 1848.) The parallels are obvious -- uprisings in a number of countries, similar grievances across countries, and a degree of cross-communication among the movements and leaders. And, of course, widespread …
New thinking about taxes in France
The structure of the tax code in France is getting new attention these days. President Sarkozy has made fiscal reform a key issue in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2012. The Nouvel Obs has a very good section this week on a recent book by Camille Landais, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, economists …
Deciphering French society
Louis Maurin recently published a valuable book on contemporary French society, Déchiffrer la société française, which is intended to shed light on the social realities of France in a way that is genuinely accessible to the public. There are chapters on population, the family, schooling, immigration, unemployment, consumption, and social values, among other important topics (link). …
France as Theodore Zeldin saw it
Histories of France have been written from many points of view. Emmanuel Todd's The Making of Modern France: Ideology, Politics and Culture (1988), Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (1976), and Robert Darnton's Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968) have all brought a distinctive perspective to their interpretations of …
French economic inequalities
France is one of the more affluent countries in the OECD, but it continues to contain significant poverty and meaningful inequalities of income, wealth, and life outcomes. The past several years of rising unemployment have worsened these circumstances. A lot of this variation occurs across the lines of ethnicity and national origins; immigrant communities in …
French philosophy?
Is there such a thing as "French philosophy"? Or is philosophy a purely universal discipline, raising the same abstract questions no matter whether the philosopher is Chinese, English, French, or Brazilian? One way to address this question is to consider the collective intellectual practice of "philosophy" from the point of view of sociology -- that …
Anthropology as a discipline
Several posts have focused recently on the meandering pathways through which the social science disciplines have developed in the past century or so -- within and across nations (link, link). Anthropology is a particularly interesting example because of its proximity to power and empire. And Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar's recent World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations …
Public intellectuals in France and the US
What is the role of the intellectual in France in 2010? And has that role declined in the past several decades? Have the media and the internet profoundly eroded or devalued the voice of the intellectual in public space? The Nouvel Observateur takes up these questions in a recent issue devoted to "Le pouvoir intellectuel" …
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Marc Bloch and the French social sciences
Marc Bloch was one of the twentieth century's most important and pathbreaking historians. Several features of his work are particularly important: his attention to the specifics of medieval economic institutions, his interest in historically specific customs and practices, and his interest in uncovering the social and technical characteristics of medieval agriculture. He helped to define …
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Patient safety — Canada and France
Patient safety is a key issue in managing and assessing a regional or national health system. There are very sizable variations in patient safety statistics across hospitals, with significantly higher rates of infection and mortality in some institutions than others. Why is this? And what can be done in order to improve the safety performance …
Understanding Society 