Alain Martin

The intellectual profile of Jean Bingen, one of the most prominent archaeologists and papyrologists of the twentieth century, is here presented by Professor Alain Martin, Bingen's former student and successor.

Jean Bingen

This paper describes a Roman archaeological site – the Mons Claudianus, in the Eastern desert of Egypt – as a gauge of a wider social and political context: the Mediterranean Sea as a network of power and exchanges within the Empire. The rise and fall of the site reveal the evolution of imperial power across the centuries. The archaeologist is thus enabled to measure the intensity of the exchanges that took place in a space only apparently distant from the site, but such that it formed the background of all human interactions in western Antiquity: the Mediterranean.

Bensalem Himmich

This paper explores the diverse aspects of cultural and economic globalization. It argues in favor of a more equitable repartition of material and intellectual resources throughout the various regions and countries of the world.

W. John Morgan and Alex Guilherme

Education has two distinct but interconnected layers. There is an outer layer concerned with knowledge transfer and skills and an inner layer concerned with the development of character and relationships with others, both individually and socially. This inner layer provides the individual with the capacity to influence and to change society. In that sense, such an inner layer is ‘political.’ In this article we argue that the ‘political’ in education can take two distinct forms: either that of dialogue or of defiance. We claim that the former is epitomized by the philosophy of Martin Buber and the latter by the philosophy of Frantz Fanon. Our analysis contrasting these two philosophies clarifies the implications for education, and thereby for the individual and for society.

William L. Remley

In this essay, it is argued that Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew not only provides a unique portrayal of the psychological character of both the anti-Semite as well as the Jew, but of more interest is Sartre's use of psychoanalysis to elucidate the psychic structure of his characters. It is generally well known that psychoanalysis was not a method that Sartre wholly embraced, yet he felt it to be the only device available to him to unlock the mysteries of the bad faith of the anti-Semite and the inauthentic Jew who desire only to justify their existence, if even just a little. Of equal importance was the use of psychoanalysis by Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks. Following Sartre's lead, Fanon also describes the psycho-somatic structure of colonialism and the bad faith of both the colonized and the colonizer in order to liberate the mind of the colonized before liberating a culture.

Michel Lallement

The sociology of work in France today presents all the appearances of a paradox: while it brings together a whole body of researchers of different generations whose output is both visible and prolific, it suffers from considerable intellectual diffuseness and theoretical deficit. Taking this observation as its starting point, the goal of this paper is twofold. It aims firstly to put forward a reasoned overview of the current intellectual state of French sociology of work; secondly, it will suggest that, at a time when both work and the sociological community are undergoing change, an epistemological reasoning founded on the notion of ‘style’ is capable of elucidating the contemporary situation.

In counterpoint to an epistemology of paradigms, an epistemological diagram directly inspired by the studies of Paul Feyerabend will be proposed. By means of the categories of perspective, semantics, strategy, and rationalization, the schema will be applied to four ‘styles’ which may be considered as having been the dominant ones over the last two decades in the field of contemporary French sociology of work.

Stéphane Laurens

Influence, or manipulation, separates decision and implementation: the decision is made by the one who influences, while the influenced implements. In order to find the source of an action, it is therefore necessary to unfold the path of influence; yet, by doing so, the distance between decision and action becomes wider. This gap multiplies the possible interpretations of an act. This paper attempts to show that interpretations based on theories of manipulation or hidden influence open the way to any sort of explanation or interpretation of events. Hidden sources are often so distant that they become invisible: it is easy then to attribute to them all sorts of intentions, influences, and manipulations for virtually any event.

Barbara Carnevali and Emanuele Coccia

With her work, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, Eva Illouz penetrates the heart of the subject to reveal the extent to which love today is the experience of an unprecedented social shaping. In response to those economists who project rational choice as the paradigm of all anthropology, the heart of the subject's freedom and the basis of free exchange, she objects that the centrality of choice in the love experience is anything but liberating and represents the place where domination in love relationships manifests itself most thoroughly in the modern world.

Maria Letizia Cravetto

At the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, a mystic practice has come to substitute for the traditional mystic discourse: the utterance, like a voice that is muffled, resonates mutely with another language – the language of the Other – which is for the subject both a language of exile and of proximity. This approach seems to be echoed by the memory of what the Tuareg language was for Charles de Foucauld. This paper describes the diverse stages in the slow elaboration of the Dictionary, and brings to light the hidden fabric of this work. For years Charles de Foucauld, a ‘mystic in the primitive state’ according to Louis Massignon, lived according to his faith in God; progressively, his quest of the union of the human and the divine will force him to expatriate, to join a nomadic universe, and to ceaselessly go towards the Other – the unknown, his brother.