Republic transformed
Politics and media in France
The successful campaign of the Republican Front against the mainstreaming of the far-right proved that France’s ultra-conservative media, though on the ascendant, are still not hegemonic.
Jean-Claude Monod
Senior researcher at the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) and associated professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). His most recent publication is L’Art de ne pas être trop gouverné. Sur les crises de gouvernementalité (Seuil, 2019).
Articles
From dialectical materialism to neoliberalism, any politics that lays claims to the truth is both illusory and dangerous. But does this mean that democracy is simply rule by opinion, without recourse to facts? And does the rejection of absolute relativism mean abandoning the postmodernist critique of truth and power?
The assumption of ownership as an absolute right is largely a creation of the nineteenth century, writes Jean-Claude Monod. Roman law separated abusus, the right to sell, give or destroy property, from usus, the right to make use of it, while medieval custom saw different groups holding complementary claims to the same resource. Today, there are signs of a gradual return to a less deregulated way of looking at our relationship with things.
