Results for the series Opus
Antoine Garapon
Judging Well Essay on Judicial Ritual
Imagine for a moment that you assist at a trial for the first time. There is no doubt that you would be struck by the strange procedure which happens in front of you, the judicial discussions. It is true to say that before being a moral faculty, judging is firstly an event. According to the author, before there were laws, judges and courthouses, there was a ritual. This book aims to unveil all these facets, showing by example how the public gallery is there to culpabilise and inhibit the defendant, in order to make him submit to the judicial order. Can judges avoid staging trials in order to judge well ?
Robert Darnton
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
At the beginning of 1778, Franz-Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris where he set about expounding his rather exotic theory - that the universe was swimming in a fluid which was responsible for occurences such heat, light, electricity and magnetism, but it was this fluid's relevance to medicine which he wished to highlight. In order to restablish health and man's harmony with nature he undertook strange healing sessions which became the origins of an extraordinary craze. Quickly, mesmerism became a disguised political theory. In demonstrating the links of mesmerism to politics, and the scientific notions of the age, Robert Darnton provides in this work a decisive contribution to the study of the diffusion of ideas in French society at the end of the 18th century. Robert Darnton is a professor at the University of Princeton