Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Two fallacies about corporations This paper seeks to identify and criticize two fallacies or mistakes that might dull our sense of dismay at the scenario of a fully corporatized world, weakening our commitment to guard against it. These two fallacies apply to commercial bodies but more generally to our sense of what is and what do corporate bodies. The first fallacy is that corporations are networks of individual – to – individual, relatively enduring arrangements, and they exist because of serving the contracting parties better than more regular, episodic contracts. The mistake or fallacy here is the assumption, quite common in economics circles, that there is no literal sense in which corporations constitute agents like you and me. The second fallacy is common within legal rather than economic traditions of thought and involves an error of the opposite kind. It holds that corporations are indeed agents like you and me, not just impersonal contractual arrangements. But it maintains that they are personal agents and that they have a just claim to the rights that our constitutions give to natural persons like you and me. The authors argues against the first fallacy that corporate bodies are agents – agents indeed that have capacities characteristic of natural persons – and that they do raise a challenge for us as citizens who have to make our lives in their company. Against the second he argues that, on pain of betraying the ideal of individual equality, we should only give corporate bodies the rights that it is in the interest of the community of natural persons to bestow; they do not have any independent claims in their own name.

Political representation and “subjectivation effects”: Posing the question of democratic legitimacy after the constructivist turn. This article poses the following question: how to construct a normative criteria following the “constructivist turn” in theories of political representation. To respond to this question, I take direction from empirical research conducted in the United States on “policy feedback” which broadens the scope of inquiry into democratic legitimacy. Rather than focus on the quality of the relationship between representative and represented (e.g. empirically adequate, deliberative, responsive), this work directs attention to the “subjectivation effects that acts of representation create – to their formation and empowerment or disempowerment of political groups.

Passion for language and recognition This article explores three approaches to language policies. Utility, domination, passion. Each paradigm matches policy preferences and political contexts in France, the US and the EU. (Linguistic) non-domination is assumed to be the ideal linguistic situation ; my claim is that it can be achieved through a mindful balance between utility and passion, in particular through a multilingual management in intermediary institutions (schools, workplace, civic associations). Linguistic democracy requires that parity of participation trumps unifying language policies.

Claude Lefort. Practice and thought of disincorporation
How to present Claude Lefort's work and offer an overview, even if brief, of more than a half century of topics and authors quite different in appearance? What is the thread uniting the diverse moments of his work? How it was constructed ? How to read it currently? Beyond the singularities and discrepancies among the topics approached, Lefort adheres throughout his work to a constant way of thinking. His concern to judge and to choose between the true and false, the just and the unfair, goes hand in hand with the will to describe straightforwardly the complexity and ambiguity of phenomena and the works he interrogates.

From “Ethic of Care” to “Welfare Society”: politicization of the ethic of care in French Socialist PartyIn an interview for on line newspaper Mediapart in spring 2010, First Secretary of the French Socialist Party Martine Aubry promotes a “society of care”, rooted in the ethic of care theorized by American scholar Carol Gilligan. Facing violent reactions in newspapers following this interview, actors of the introduction of the ethic of care in France adopted two distinct positions: the actors of the academic reception denounced the “misogyny” of the French political and intellectual elites as well as the “amateurism” of the PS on the matter, whereas actors of the political receptions tried to fix misunderstandings in the first public reactions. The paper focuses on the political sequence of the introduction, particulaly on the political investment of the ethic of care in the think tank Laboratory of socialist ideas. By looking into forms and processes through which scholars accept to submit themselves to a political command (1), one can highlights how the meanings of the ethic of care are radically transformed, depending on the social fields it is invested in (2) : first opposed to deconstructivist tradition of French feminism and John Rawl's theory of justice, the ethic of care becomes the theoretical instrument of a new conception of the welfare State in the Socialist Party.