Human Sciences All books
Christian Stoffaës
Public Services A Question of the Future
French public services need to be modernised. In their present position, they incarnate the Welfare State and its grand projects. They are now being challenged by the opening up of the market, the fall of the controlled economy, deregulation, and privatisations. An open economy now rules the network industries, such as energy, transport, telecommunications, and collective services. Can we really just leave isolated and without a future this cornerstone of our society which represents all at once the infrastructure of the competitive economy, great technical achievements, the republican conception of social equality and the cohesion of the country ? A result of the reflections of the Network Plan 2010 group, led by Christian Stoffaës, the director of the company Elecricité de France, this work identifies the currents of change, assesses the situation in other countries, and traces an outline of a significant project to reform the State. In co-edition with La Documentation française.
Christian Stoffaës
Ends of Worlds
An economic pulse sustains life in the modern world. C. Stoffaës investigates the highs of economic boom and the lows of paralyzing depression. He presents an historical survey of our dominant technological and mental structures from Keynes to Schumpeter, from the steam engine to the microchip, from the American golden age to the new Pacific prosperity.
Alexandre Stern
Monkeys in the Kitchen How Cooking Made Us Human
How the invention of culinary and agricultural practices, the discovery and exchange of products, through the millennia have contributed to civilizing the human being.
Alexandre Stern
Who Are You, Homo sapiens? Understanding Our Nature In Order to Live Better
After telling how the art of cooking had humanized, civilized our ancestral apes, Alexandre Stern explores the roots of our humanity to better examine our modern practices and ways of life.
Hugo Mercier , Dan Sperber
The Enigma of Reason
Ambitious, provocative, fascinating, this book gives readers resources to rethink their own way of thinking.
Manès Sperber
Being Jewish
A non-practicing Jew, Manès Sperber learned to read the Bible at the age of three and continued to re-read it until the end of his life. Neither religious, nor a militant Zionist, nor an aethiest, nor aligned with any cultural Judaism, he professes as his only faith a "religion of good memory." His is a Judaism lived as humanism and as an ethic, as a refusal of all idolatry, of exclusion of others, and a constant combat against hate of any kind. It is a profound attachment to the Israelite nation and a prudent attitude towards the State of Israel that Sperber illustrates in these brilliant essays prefaced by Elie Weisel, where analysis of Jewish thought and identity walk hand in hand with the eternal question: Why anti-semitism?
Dan Sperber
The Infectiousness of Ideas
Where do our ideas come from ? Some, just from ourselves, or at least we believe so, but the majority come from others which we then pass on in our turn. The age-old philosophical question on the origins of ideas is analysed here in relation to their mode of dissemination. In his search for the natural element of culture, Dan Sperber presents in this book an epidemiology of ideas which describes how they spread by passing from one person to another, undergoing transformations which are in the same category as mutations. He also investigates how these ideas establish themselves in the long-term by occupying our mental world without our conscious knowledge, which allows us to participate in our culture. Dan Sperber, an anthropologist, is the research director of CNRS.
David Spector
History of the Market Concept in France
An original point of view which runs counter to received ideas: the concept of the market is in a blind spot of leftist thinking, or even that of the French intellectual tradition. This book should be part of the debate as it provides historical insight on a crucial point of current disunity within the left and on its future.
Sébastien Soriano
The Future of Public Service
A decisive contribution to thinking about the sovereignty of society in the face of the era of networks and the digital world.
Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont
Intellectual Impostures
In spring 1996, a American journal published an article in which the author Alan Sokal, supported his ideas with quotations from famous intellectuals, both French and American...
