Human Sciences All books
Patrick Artus, Marie-Paule Virard
Capitalism’s Last Chance For a new balance between consumers, workers, and shareholders
A stimulating text, powerful ideas, a limited number of figures, diagrams reserved for more technical elements: here one finds all the ingredients for a formula that has already marked the success of the Artus-Virard duo!
Christian Saint-Étienne
France 3.0 React, Renew, Reinvent
If French recovery is to succeed economic reforms must go hand-in-hand with political reforms
Patrick Artus
40 Years of Wage Austerity How Can We Escape It?
With great clarity, this book dismantles the mechanisms that ensure that wage, monetary, and budgetary policies are completely interwoven. Patrick Artus excels in this demonstration!
René Frydman
God, Medicine and the Embryo
With ethical questions raised about medically assisted pregnancies and medical experimentation, the eugenics debate has become a mute point. Yet bioethical legislation has remained ambiguous. René Frydman has made himself the ardent defender of progenics, a predictive and humanistic medicine. Here, Frydman reflects on the problem of the human embryo through the different points of view of science, religion, law, and morality, and answers ethical and religious questions that he has been asked by his patients. René Frydman is a gynecologist-obstetrician and a member of the FrenchEthics Committee.
Alain Cotta
Global Hypercapitalism
Erudite and original, this book presents a true portrait of the “Dynamics of hypercapitalism,” tracing its lines of strength. It is also a denunciation of the elites and of their oligarchical power, exercised on the middle classes.
Michel Godet, Marc Mousli
The Joy of Work Working brings us alive
A message for our political and economic leaders: work plays a central role in our societies, and seniors constitute a formidable pool of skills that they must learn how to use
Mario Bettati
International Environmental Law
An indispensable book for students, diplomats and activists faced with attacks on the environment
Françoise Benhamou
The Star-System Economy
We live in an age that spends fortunes on its stars. But why do we get the impression that the fees that stars receive and their popularity correspond less and less to their talent? Why does stardom seem to have so little to do with creativity and quality? Françoise Benhamou is an economist.
Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld
The 3 Cultures of Human Development Resistance, Regulation, Utopia
Today, economic growth has taken off again, creating jobs and making full employment a feasible goal. And yet, at a time when we seem to be at the brink of a new recession, nothing seems to have really changed. Modernisation may exclude fewer members of our society than had been previously feared, but, if we are not careful, their exclusion will be all the greater. It is no longer possible to retain a soft procedural approach to democracy. Democracy needs to return to its origins; it must be given a goal, based on a strong vision of humanity and of humanity as part of society. It is necessary to construct human development along the lines of three political and spiritual cultures which represent our common heritage : resistance, regulation and utopia. Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld is a senior official in the French Treasury. Until 1995 he was a commissioner of Frances economic plan. He is active in numerous think-tanks and associations that struggle against social exclusion and unemployment.
Hubert Montagner
The Child : The Real Question of Education
This ambitious work aims to provide a comprehensive view of the mechanisms, processes, influences, factors, and past and present events that may keep children from constructing, structuring or mobilising their abilities in an academic environment, and from acquiring new abilities and successfully constructing the required learning skills. In the struggle against academic failure, the main tool is understanding the child better. In order to do this, it is essential to base educational practice on the most recent knowledge.
Geneviève Bédoucha
Lunar Eclipse in Yemen An Anthropologist's Emotions and Feelings of Bewilderment
This is a fascinating approach by a woman of a tribal society in a mountain valley in northern Yemen, near the Saudi Arabian border. Partly a travel book and partly a journal of the author's fieldwork, it restores an anthropologist's unique first-hand experience, questionings, hesitations and discoveries, from the first moments spent in an unfamiliar village. There are few anthropological works on Yemen, and even fewer about private life in rural societies in the hinterland of the former Arab Republic of Yemen (the author's fieldwork dates from the 1980s, before reunification). At the time, the presence of a female anthropologist led both men and women to talk openly, often jokingly and provocatively, of male-female relations, and it seemed to encourage women to voice strong criticisms of male behaviour and privileges. The women's comments reveal them to be lucid independent thinkers, and not at all submissive. This book is an invitation to discover a little-known rural community at close quarters, and to penetrate the secret universe of Yemen's many-storied mud houses. It reveals relations between men and women in a closed, but curious and hospitable, Muslim Arab society. An anthropologist and research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Geneviève Bédoucha is a specialist in the relations between socio-political structures and irrigation systems in Arabic and Islamic societies.
Stella Baruk
Si 7 = 0. Quelles mathématiques pour l'école ?
Stella Baruk is known for her uncompromising criticism of the way mathematics is taught at school. She sees children's frequent aversion to the subject as a clear demonstration of the failure of current methods. Following her earlier book, L'Age du Capitaine, in which she denounced the meaningless mathematical problems that children were burdened with and enjoined to solve, she now addresses the difficulties encountered by the new generation of the captain's children. She has reproduced pages from the exercise books of primary school pupils, with a commentary underlining the confusion created by modern maths in the minds of children who are not yet familiar with mathematics. Her message is clear: the fault lies not in modern maths, but in the fact that the cart has been put before the horse. Modern maths was created to generalise operations and structures that recur in every aspect of mathematics, and modern maths cannot be correctly understood without the full mastery of those operations and structures. Yet, the teaching of mathematics has been turned on its head, with the abstract being taught before the concrete and the general before the specific - with the result that empty formalism is all that is being passed on. Baruk's very precise analyses, illustrated with specific examples, will help parents understand their children's mistakes and difficulties, so that they can help them overcome them. Stella Baruk is a mathematics teacher and pedagogical researcher.
Jacques Lesourne, Denis Randet
Research and Innovation in France FutuRIS 2011
With a view to the 2011 French presidential elections, here are a series of proposals that offer the middle classes the future perspectives they deserve
Jean-Paul Betbèze
The Ten Commandments of Finance
Contemporary finance is driven by a quest for a high rate of profitability. According to Jean-Paul Betbèze, this quest is ruled by ten commandments, ranging from "Thou shalt always seek a 15% return on Equity" to "Thou shalt not allow the whole system to explode". He examines how this has upset the old form of capitalism, and in his lively, clear style, the author recounts the unprecedented changes that are now taking place and that will determine our future. Jean-Paul Betbèze teaches at the University of Paris Panthéon-Assas.
