Contenu du sommaire : Les libéralismes

Isaiah Berlin, English Liberalism and a Third Concept of Liberty.
Isaiah Berlin is celebrated for having defended the claim that there are two distinct concepts of liberty. According to the more familiar view, liberty is a « negative » concept. The presence of liberty is said to be marked, that is, by the absence of something, and specifically by the absence of inteference with an agent's capacity to pursue some chosen end. According to Berlin, however, this concept stands in contrast with a « positive » view, according to which liberty is the name of that state in which we shall have realised ourselves most completely. Liberty on this account is the name not of an opportunity but of a moral achievement. Berlin considered the second view dangerously confused, but one aim of the present essay is to defend its coherence. Its principal aim, however, is to show that Berlin's understanding of negative liberty is a misleadingly narrow one. As is evident from classical and early-modern debates, we have in fact inherited two rival conceptions of negative liberty. One of these focuses, as Berlin rightly observed, on the idea of absence of interference. But the other, which he overlooked, sees lack of liberty as arising from relations of domination and dependence. The principal aim of the present essay is to distinguish these two traditions and to give new prominence to the idea of negative liberty as absence not of interference but of dependence.

The Slave Plantation and the Origins of the Physiocratic Theory of Capitalism : The experiences of Le Mercier De la Rivière as Royal Intendant in La Martinique. A study of some little-known writings of Le Mercier de la Rivière should enable us to define the nature of his experiences, first as a planter, and subsequently as intendant of La Martinique, from 1759 to 1764. A reappraisal of his book, L'ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (1767), in the light of his experience of the slave and segregationist colonies of America sheds new light on his physiocratic theory of capitalism and on the genesis of concepts as central as those of legal despotism, physical liberty and chattel property, the latter being considered in relation to an unexpected source, the 1685 Code Noir.

Democracy purged of all its Disadvantages.
« Encoded at the level of its lexicology and logical constructedness, the republican discourse of the enlightenment and revolution is marked by two conceptualizations which contradict and mutually exclude each other. Contemporary observers of the revolution or those close to its events speak about an opposition between an order of egotism and an order of equality, between a principle of utility and a principle of ascetism, between an ethics based on personal interest and an ethics based on the national interest, between a kind of individualism and a kind of socialism, etc. Because it has excluded physiocratic thinking from its domain, the traditional historio-graphy of political ideas has obstructed an unbiased view to the context which engenders conceptualizations of an alternative Republicanism vis-a-vis that of Rousseau, while at the same time utilizing Rousseaus formulas ».

Republicanism, Liberalism and the French Revolution. This article studies, on the basis of the evidence provided by the discursive action of journalists and patriot pamphleteers, the transformations brought about in the context of the process leading to the fall of the king.

Isaiah Berlin, English Liberalism and a Third Concept of Liberty.
The concept of Jacobinism, while lacking any strong anchorage in the historiography of the French Revolution, nonetheless represents the central category in the Marxist analysis of the revolutionary phenomenon in general. The aim of the present article is to examine the concept of Jacobinism in its relation to a series of other categories : the individual, the universal, and sovereignty, categories prominent in recent historical debates. Our aim is therefore to propose a typology of the concept, by way of a provisional three-way division of political liberalism : the constituent liberalism of moderate Jacobinism, the egalitariam liberalism of centrist Jacobinism, the civic liberalism of radical Jacobinism. Going beyond the historical existence of the Jacobins as a group, the aim of our analysis is to give the largest possible extensive definition to the concept of Jacobinism, in order to evaluate its organic dimension within the political tradition which has its source in the French revolution.

Marxism's Unintentional Contributions to the Renewal of Human Rights in Post-1968 France.
The years following May 1968 witnessed the end of a certain chapter of French Marxism and a return to the languages of human rights and liberalism. French Marxism itself unintentionally contributed to this development. This article examines three overlapping cases from the 1970s : Maoism and mobilization around prisons, the women's movement and the law, and the New Philosophers' undermining of a dialectical view of history.

After History, the Event ? Our aim in this article is to reflect on the reasons lying behind the current fascination with the concept of the event.
A belief in the Event has taken the place of the belief in History. The concept of the Event in no sense constitutes a step beyond the metaphysical. It is, on the contrary, the new guise of the latter. Our initial aim is therefore to outline our hypothesis, placing it alongside other possible diagnoses. We then seek to attempt the pragmatic validation of our argument concerning the concept of the Event, arguing that the advantage of our hypothesis is that it offers a more adequate account of our present historical moment, which may perhaps be qualified as merely the precarious conjunction between the Event, Globalisation, and Memory. And so it is that, after History, our moment is that of the Event, understood as the categorical hypo-stasis of the event. As such, the concept is, we argue, one which is not to be celebrated too hastily, in case one were to end up howling with the wolves.

Periods of the Epoch: Shifts between Nominalist and Realist Versions of a Concept.
The nominalist critique of the concept of epoch has the effect of relegating and discarding the various philosophies of history. Such a critique, necessary as it is, is nonetheless doomed to fail, if it does not promote the critical apprehension of reality in terms of a renewed epochal thinking, capable of addressing capitalism in its current phase, that of an actualised world-system. The idea of a general history is one which does not consent to its post-modern effacement or dissolution. It is, on the contrary, an idea which can re-emerge in a renewed, trans-modern version

Fluxus and Political Propaganda: Social Goals, not Aesthetic ones. For the members of the Fluxus group, modern art opened up a whole gamut of possible modes of liberty, including the social and the political realms. It follows that the artistic project must therefore involve the incorporation of such liberty (of mind) within the order of the everyday. Only thus can life and art become an art of living. To this end, art must become a form of organised leisure, or what we could qualify as a kind of play, since, to quote Guy Debord, « the liberation which results from play has to do with the creative autonomy of the latter ». For the achievement of such a condition to be possible, art must be more than a mere form of leisure, becoming a poetic form of leisure.

The Contemporary Artist and the Consciousness of His/Her Era.
We examine the changed conditions under which artists accomplish their work, and the consciousness they now have of their work, and of the forms which it takes. If the ideal of a revolutionary consciousness is no longer part of the artistic agenda, this does not necessarily imply that artists have abandoned the aim of opening up the reality of the current moment to a space where the intimation of something other is preserved.