Contenu du sommaire : Aliénations nationales

René Gallissot, Beyond Nationalism or Overtaken by Nationalism ? What appears to have failed in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia was the attempt to overcome nationalist sentiments by a higher conception of citizenship. But is it rather a distorted conception of patriotism ? The spread of the nation state has promoted nationalist alienation in the nationalist state. If the nation state has lost its centrality, a "national" function continues to operate in the spheres of civil order, social management and the representation of private and categorical interests. The nation state is situated between the national social state and the corporative state. The process is one of transnationalization ; the reaction to it is the development of an exacerbated xenophobia. Is this the ultimate form of national alienation ?

Claudie Weill, The Succession of Empires in Europe The collapse of the Soviet empire completes the emergence of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe begun by the First World War. Then as now, the criterion for judging the correspondance between national affirmation and democracy is the degree of respect for important minorities. But ethnic and national conflicts continue to occur in response to the economic and ecological crises responsible for the breakdown of social systems. The seemingly obligatory passage from national affirmation to nationalism and then to xenophobia constitutes a new but counterproductive way of dealing with social problems.

Micheline de Felice, Yugoslavia : from Workers' Self -Management to National Corporatism The founders of the second Yugoslavia saw themselves as guaranteeing the legacy of the state created in 1918. They intended to achieve civil peace and solidarity between the diverse national groups through the establishment of socialism and by providing for a large degree of cultural and administrative autonomy in the different national enclaves. The nationalization of the means of production was succeeded by a self-management, market-oriented regime said to represent the socialization of production. On this foundation, a social stratum emerged in each federated unit which based its power on its local authority. The central state was thusly weakened and the conditions were created for the emergence of inter-state antagonisms.

Jürgen Link, Political Symbolism in Germany and the Future of the Neo-racist Trend The emergence of a new racist current in Germany, as seen particularly in the "Republican" Party of Schönhuber and others, can be analyzed as constituting a corpus of collective symbolism. There are two opposite types within the fundamental imagery of "Left/Center/Right/Extremism". The first is the "symbolic civil war", and the other is the "symbolic balance of equilibrium". The latter, firmly established in postwar Germany, can also be seen as a sort of political vehicle of normalization. This type of analysis is useful for evaluating the possible risks created by a new German Extreme Right.

Jocelyn Létourneau, Ethnic Diversity and Nationalist Movement : The Present Situation in Quebec At the present time, Quebec is at a turning point from three points of view : its place in the Canadian federation, its integration into the international economy, and its cultural coherence. The case of Quebec reveals fundamental problems of the creation of a nationalist movement in a context marked by a diverse population, cultural interpenetration and new challenges raised by world economic integration. creation of a nationalist movement in a context marked by a diverse population, cultural interpenetration and new challenges raised by world economic integration.

Said Tamba, Civil Society in the Arab World The notion of civil society can be used to legitimize a particular society, and it is for this reason that its application to the Arab world elicits polemics. The cases of Egypt and the countries of the Maghreb are revealing of this phenomenon

Frédéric Vandenberghe, Social Reification and Methodological Choice Analysis of the way Marx, Simmel, Weber, Lukacs and Habermas use the notion of rzification is instructive in developing a critique of the pseudo-natural and alienating autonomization of social systems that escape human control. In the philosophy of the social sciences, the notion of reification is used either to criticize the conceptual hypostasis of the realist or holistic social theorists, to criticize the elimination of the comprehensive or hermeneutic moment by the positivists, or to denounce the reified consciousness of those who fetishize method.

Didier Paquette, Alienation, Difference and Contradiction The epistemological confrontation of sociology and psychoanalysis focuses upon contradictory socio-historical differences taking full account of gender differences. Notions of post-modernity and neo-modernity, in addition to other modes of analysis, can be tested by reference to the ontological problems presented in all attempts to grasp the nature of difference and how it relates to forms of social alienation.

Bernard Lahire, Social Forms and Objective Structures, : A Way of Transcending the Objectivism / Subjectivism Opposition When the question of the forms of social relations is posed as the object of sociology, socio-historical variables take form and oppositions such as individual/society, actor/structure and the dialectic of the interiorization of exteriority and of the exteriorization of interiority lose their pertinence. In order to avoid reifiying the notion of "social structure", we can explore the methodological means which allow the construction of something like "objective structures". Such practices are indissociable from the socio-historical process of objectification.

Pierre Tripier, A Sociology without Universals ? Towards a Taxinomic Approach in Sociology One of the endemic weaknesses of sociological analysis is to imitate indigenous sociologies, especially in the context of micro-sociological verification and macro-sociological explanation, while rejecting the value of these sociologies. In order to avoid this endemic weakness, taxinomies should be constructed on the basis of intermediary objects the common point of which would be the production, in a real group situated in very different space-times in which the relations, meeting points or existential similarities can be determined, of an implicit accord allowing organization, limiting the range of possibilities and guiding action.

Teresa Sousa Fernandes, Feminin Power and Social Order : the Paradoxes of Inequality in the Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau has played a decisive role in the construction of sociological knowledge. But questions remain with respect to how the different aspects of his philosophy were integrated into scientific discourse in the nineteenth century. In particular, the value of male-female relations in Rousseau's thought is revealing of how the representation of feminin power is linked to the genesis of modern conceptions of individuality and sociability.