Pierre Rosanvallon

Arthur Goldhammer

Democracy is established as a generally uncontested ideal, while regimes inspired by this form of government fall under constant criticism. Hence, the steady erosion of confidence in representatives that has become one of the major political issues of our time. Amidst these challenges, the paradox remains that while citizens are less likely to make the trip to the ballot box, the world is far from entering a phase of general political apathy. Demonstrations and activism abound in the streets, in cities across the globe and on the internet. Pierre Rosanvallon analyses the mechanisms used to register a citizen's expression of confidence or distrust, and then focuses on the role that distrust plays in democracy from both a historical and theoretical perspective. This radical shift in perspective uncovers a series of practices - surveillance, prevention, and judgement - through which society corrects and exerts pressure.

Politics in an Age of Distrust

Counter-Democracy

Daniel Roche

Daniel Roche, the foremost historian of eighteenth-century France, brings the Old Regime to life by showing how its institutions operated and how they were understood by the people who worked within them. Roche depicts the eighteenth-century French "culture of appearances"--the food and clothing, living quarters, and reading material of the peasant, the merchant, the noble, the King, from Paris to the provinces.

France in the Enlightenment

Thomas Piketty

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Alice Kaplan

Albert Camus

More than 50 years after its original publication in French, Albert Camus' controversial look at the Algerian War for independence—and his opinions on terrorism—is published in English for the first time.

Algerian Chronicles

Olivier Zunz

Alexis de Tocqueville

Gustave de Beaumont

A selection of Tocqueville's writings on America together with letters and sketches from his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont.

Their Friendship and Their Travels

Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America

Emmanuelle Saada

Europe’s imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers.When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining the status of persons of mixed parentage born in French Indochina—the métis—she found not only a remarkable artifact of colonial rule, but a legal bombshell that introduced race into French law for the first time. The decree was the culmination of a decades-long effort to resolve the “métis question”: the educational, social, and civil issues surrounding the mixed population. Operating at the intersection of history, anthropology, and law, Empire’s Children reveals the unacknowledged but central role of race in the definition of French nationality. Through extensive archival work in both France and Vietnam, and a close reading of primary and secondary material from the Pacific islands and sub-Saharan and North Africa, Saada has created in Empire’s Children an original and compelling perspective on colonialism, law, race, and culture from the end of the nineteenth century until decolonization.

Arthur Goldhammer

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