French Tradition Research Articles

The Contribution of Maurice Allais to Contemporary Macroeconomics: From French Planning to National Accounting

__kindeditor_temp_url__If the history of macroeconomics is still largely associated with John Maynard Keynes’ masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes, 1936), macronomics also includes a branch of economics which has gained recognition through the use of mathematical models, the notion of general equilibrium, the development of an empirical basis (applied economics), and the evaluation of the effects of economic policy. These elements of macroeconomic theory are found in Maurice Allais’ work, mainly his Théorie du rendement social (Allais, 1946) and his Fondements comptables de la macroéconomie (Allais, 1954). In the aftermath of the Second World War, Allais was able to use a corpus composed of a theory—the Walrasian General Equilibrium, a doctrine—competitive planning, an empirical basis—his work on national accounting and economic policy prescriptions, “la planification à la francaise” and monetary dynamics. This work, combined with the development of national statistics and national accounting, highlights the French tradition of economic thinking and reminds us, that in the history of economic thought, the Keynesian precepts took some time to “colonize” the minds of French economists.

Конкретная психология и подход «клиники деятельности»: значимость для интервенционных исследований в 21 веке

This paper discusses the project of concrete psychology, anchored in vital human drama, both for Vygotsky and Politzer, and its methodological implications, especially from within an interventionist, developmental, transformative perspective. How are the concepts of concrete psychology and drama related for Politzer and Vygotsky? How can we push the agenda of concrete psychology foward? What are the methodological implications of a Vygotskian concrete psychology for us today? After discussing both Vygotsky’s and Politzer’s views on concrete human psychology, we will introduce the French tradition of Activity Clinic, and argue that this approach, and its “organized frameworks,” offers the potential to move one step forward in the direction of a concrete human psychology. We will analyze a short sequence of Cross Self Confrontation as a dramatic interaction potentially contributing to development. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of concrete psychology for XXIth century researchers. The paper thus aims at contributing to an urgent need to rethink an epistemology of psychology, which strongly anchors research in practice.

Submission beyond Islam: Yielding as Organizing Principle in Michel Houellebecq's novels

Submission beyond IslamYielding as Organizing Principle in Michel Houellebecq's novels Karl Ågerup introduction On 7 January 2015, the same day as the attack on the Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission was published in French. This novel, depicting a future France in which a Muslim president is elected, immediately became part of the ongoing debate on Islam and French identity. In an address to the country, then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls claimed that the attack on Charlie Hebdo should inspire the French to rise up against hatred, intolerance, and Michel Houellebecq: "La France ce n'est pas la soumission, ce n'est pas Michel Houellebecq" [France is not submission, it is not Michel Houellebecq] (all translations are mine unless otherwise stated) (Tronche). Thus, the Prime Minister associated Houellebecq and Soumission with intolerance and hatred. In this he was not alone. Former editor of Le Monde and founder of Mediapart Edwy Plenel called Houellebecq Islamophobic on national TV ("Houellebecq et islamophobie" 5:00–5:15), and socialist politician Alexis Corbière stated on national radio that Soumission adhered to xenophobic discourse ("Le grand directe" 01:30–01:40). Faithful to his habits, and to the operating manual for poets he had integrated in his 1991 essay Rester vivant (26), Houellebecq had found one of society's most sensitive wounds and rubbed salt in it. Only this time the debate was more extensive than before, and the audience too: by February 2015, the novel had simultaneously topped the sales charts in France, Italy, and Germany ("Houellebecq, superstar des ventes"). The German magazine Der Spiegel ranked Submission among the fifty best books of our times (Scappaticci), and The New York Times named it one of the top hundred books of 2015 (Pagesy). There are comprehensible arguments for reading Houellebecq's picture of a submissive France as neo-conservative discourse. Whether in the form of Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" theory, of Renaud Camus' vision of a coming "great replacement," or of more realistic prognostics of cultural transformations in Europe, the question of a rising Muslim community threatening French traditions was frequently raised during the decade preceding Houellebecq's novel. Professor Jérôme Meizoz solemnly declared that he felt Soumission fed on these ideas ("Lettre" 80). The fact that [End Page 196] Houellebecq had called Islam "la religion la plus con" [the stupidest religion] in the literary magazine Lire made it easy to classify Soumission as Islamophobic (Sénécal). Notably, "Islam" can be translated as "submission," but what did Houellebecq mean by giving his novel this title? The critics were intrigued. As Agathe Novak-Lechevalier has noted, the word "soumission" is highly polysemic and takes on meanings in various areas such as sex and politics (154). From the viewpoint of Soumission's narrator, Islam is not dangerous, but valuable: Houellebecq's hero benefits from the new patriarchal order and finds it ideologically reasonable. As Philippe Lançon has emphasized, the novel can be read as both Islamophobic and Islamophilic. The novel's reception has accordingly been mixed and confused (see Ågerup, "The Political Reception"). The debate is nowhere near consensus on what Houellebecq wants to say. Is he out to make the public afraid of Islam in general, or just of patriarchal politics? Or is he attracted by the conservative morals practiced by some Muslim societies? Given the novel's evident anchoring in contemporary French political debate, such questions impose themselves even on a reader who is conscious of the literary text's principal autonomy. A certain ideological tension appears during the realization of the text, and this disturbing ambiguity, as several critics have maintained, is also one of the novel's key assets (Dorais 29; Knausgaard; Novak-Lechevalier 154). In his classic work "Implied Truths in Literature," John Hospers remarked that the literary text's resistance to a single interpretation is "frustrating and at the same time fascinating" (45). It is precisely because fictional discourse lacks a stable, responsible, and identifiable speaker that it can be so intriguing. The present study is driven by the frustration-fascination that Hospers notes, and it approaches Soumission as fictional discourse with political implications. It takes into account...

Tourism and equine heritage in France: the case study of the Cadre noir de Saumur and the Vendée Stud

ABSTRACT The intention of this research project was to question the ability of tourism to promote the conservation of equine heritage in its diversity. I undertook two case studies examining emblematic examples in France: the ‘Cadre noir de Saumur’, the main depositary of Equitation in the French Tradition inscribed on the UNESCO list, and the Vendée Stud, in the Pays de la Loire. This was a qualitative project including a total of 32 h of in-depth semi-structured individual interviews with 15 stakeholders at the ‘Cadre noir de Saumur’, at the Vendée Stud and at the Ministry of culture in Paris between September 2017 and April 2019. The interviews were combined with a total of around 40 h of participant and non-participant observations, conducted during several on-site visits. The results are nuanced. Both sites demonstrate that tourism can contribute to the revaluation of this equine heritage, but it necessitates the incorporation of a profound socio-cultural change, including a redefinition of the way the horse is used. This evolution is based on the ability of the stakeholders to incorporate a tourism culture, one which requires the inclusion of multiple skills but also an ability to devise joint cultural mediation projects with local communities.

Przed dziełem sztuki. Wspomnienia ze studiów

The present essay includes the author’s memories of his university studies and the intellectual formation that he received as a student of art history at the University of Poznań in 1949-1954. His first professor who opened to him the door to art history and exerted on him a strong intellectual influence, was Szczęsny Dettloff, a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich and Max Dvořák in Vienna. Dettloff taught his students that the foundation of studying art in history is the study of the form of an individual artwork He believed that without a proper analysis of form it is impossible to construct appropriate series of the works of art and specify their position in the culture of the times of their origin. Similar sensitivity to form and the understanding of its significance for the art historian’s work were represented by two other professors important for the author, both educated by Dettloff already before World War II: Gwido Chmarzyński and Zdzisław Kępiński. When in 1957–1968 the author was a postgraduate student in the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at the University of Poitiers (CÉSCM), it turned out that the local methodological tradition was similar to what he had learned in Poznań before. The CÉSCM was founded as a multidisciplinary institute for the study of the Middle Ages, combining history, art history, literary history, and the history of ideas. It was important that one of them could shed light on an object studied by another, but each of them, including art history, kept its material and methodological identity. In the French tradition, art history had an “autonomous” status, focusing on artistic creation as a special sphere of human activity. That idea influenced also quite strongly the study of medieval architecture, originated in the early 19th century by Arcisse de Caumont, and continued until today by many generations of French scholars. What is characteristic of their research is meticulous analysis of form, articulated with a precise, detailed, and comprehensive specialist vocabulary. The lectures of French scholars on medieval architecture, which the author attended in Paris and Poitiers, taught him precision in the analysis of the artwork’s structure and its components, as well as responsibility for every single statement made on art. For a young art historian who did not specialize in architecture but in representational arts, that French experience was a lesson of methodological rigor necessary in the intellectual pursuits of the humanities scholar.

Facing the Work of Art. Memories of My Student Years

The present essay includes the author’s memories of his university studies and the intellectual formation that he received as a student of art history at the University of Poznań in 1949-1954. His first professor who opened to him the door to art history and exerted on him a strong intellectual influence, was Szczęsny Dettloff, a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich and Max Dvořák in Vienna. Dettloff taught his students that the foundation of studying art in history is the study of the form of an individual artwork He believed that without a proper analysis of form it is impossible to construct appropriate series of the works of art and specify their position in the culture of the times of their origin. Similar sensitivity to form and the understanding of its significance for the art historian’s work were represented by two other professors important for the author, both educated by Dettloff already before World War II: Gwido Chmarzyński and Zdzisław Kępiński. When in 1957-1968 the author was a postgraduate student in the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at the University of Poitiers (CÉSCM), it turned out that the local methodological tradition was similar to what he had learned in Poznań before. The CÉSCM was founded as a multidisciplinary institute for the study of the Middle Ages, combining history, art history, literary history, and the history of ideas. It was important that one of them could shed light on an object studied by another, but each of them, including art history, kept its material and methodological identity. In the French tradition, art history had an “autonomous” status, focusing on artistic creation as a special sphere of human activity. That idea influenced also quite strongly the study of medieval architecture, originated in the early 19th century by Arcisse de Caumont, and continued until today by many generations of French scholars. What is characteristic of their research is meticulous analysis of form, articulated with a precise, detailed, and comprehensive specialist vocabulary. The lectures of French scholars on medieval architecture, which the author attended in Paris and Poitiers, taught him precision in the analysis of the artwork’s structure and its components, as well as responsibility for every single statement made on art. For a young art historian who did not specialize in architecture but in representational arts, that French experience was a lesson of methodological rigor necessary in the intellectual pursuits of the humanities scholar.

Governare i poveri

Vincent Dubois’ well-known book La vie au guichet. Relation administrative et traitement de la misere, published in its Italian edition in 2018, focuses on the relations between bureaucrats and service users in two local services where income support measures are provided. In his analysis, the author applies the perspective of the street level bureaucracy, though enriched with a greater attention to the relations of domination, regulation and construction of identity that results from a fruitful encounter with the rich French tradition on the topic.In the observed interactions, “negotiated” identities are shaped through the personal relationships that are established at the counter. Such interactions appear to be the crucial moment in which previous identities are not only “impersonated”, but also to some extent “put back into play”. However, the analysis goes far beyond the micro level of personal relations. Rather, the counter represents the place where a social actor, the poor, meets the entire community, or rather “society in its most exacerbated form”. In this context of structural asymmetry, the relationship of the community with its poor is built, and the social status of the poor takes shape.Though twenty years have passed since its first edition, and many things have changed in the social dynamics and policy structure, Dubois’ book is still extremely useful in analysing the contemporary scenario.

Zapadno- i južnoslavenski romantizmi kao epoha demokratizacije kulture

If we regard democracy as tied with four functions: availability, representation, freedom, and education, then we can state that the Romanticism conceived as the intellectual formation and literary current has managed to realize the deepest and thorough process of democratization of culture, of which results remain valid and actual in our contemporary reality. In the Romanticism, two traditions converge in order to construct its progressive character: the educational tradition derived from the German idealism and the liberation one. The educational tradition has been inspiring the development of knowledge, education and university values by shaping the holistic conception of education and personal progress. In this article, the educational orientation of the Romanticism is expressed by the function of availability concerning culture as well as education. The liberation current of the Romanticism is related with the French tradition, peoples as a subject that debates on the ideas of justice and injustice, and also with the folklore along with the independence narrative. The titular category namely, democratization of culture should be understood as a multifaceted phenomenon of the gradual and irreversible processes of innovations which have spread through the spheres of culture, language, system of forms of utterance in order to shape various social and cultural institutions, which – throughout the process of generating new literary canons and redefining modern national identities – eventually contributed to the constitution of the contemporary states.

Between Borders: French-Language Poetry and the Poetics of Statelessness

This special collection explores poetic engagements with statelessness in a selection of poetry in the French language in the period since 1900. Evoking a position abstracted from established categories of being, place and political selfhood, statelessness speaks to the dramas of exile and migration as well as to the anxious positioning of poetry itself on the margins of prevailing discursive systems. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, events such as the Armenian genocide, the Russian Revolution, or the rise of fascism and political anti-Semitism in European countries precipitated stateless persons onto the international stage. France was the primary host country for stateless refugees in those years (OFPRA), one factor which accounts for the high concentration in this special collection of French-language writing; of translingual writing in French, and of translingual writing produced in France. Indeed, a number of the poets featured here (Guillaume Apollinaire, Chahan Chahnour/Armen Lubin, and Gherasim Luca) were themselves stateless, or claimed to be so, and as some of the contributions go to show, this suggests an underexploited frame of reference for understanding the evolution of avant-gardist poetry of the early twentieth-century. While some articles draw on this context, others are marked by more contemporary configurations of questions of belonging, migration and translinguality. Though the present selection makes no claim to be fully comprehensive, the featured contributions range widely across national boundaries, notably moving between Armenian, French, German and Romanian literary traditions. Together they offer a compelling picture of the development of poetic practice in the modern and contemporary period.

The Semantics of Virtuosity in Genre-Stylistic System of C. Saint-Saëns’s Album for Piano op. 72

The Semantics of Virtuosity in Genre-Stylistic System of C. Saint-Saëns’s Album for Piano op. 72

Introduction: Debates on Experience and Empiricism in Nineteenth Century France

Introduction: Debates on Experience and Empiricism in Nineteenth Century France

O Discurso da Análise: Ensaio Epistemológico sobre as Doutrinas do Discurso

O presente texto isola uma técnica de interpretação utilizada na tradição da cultura francesa, anglo-saxã e brasileira de teoria do discurso. O problema é motivado por uma pesquisa de tese que investiga a história mais geral da relação entre o saber da linguagem e a prática de interpretar em nossa cultura. O discurso da análise ou fala analítica é uma técnica que consiste na articulação dos enunciados do saber da linguagem com os enunciados do saber da história e com os enunciados do saber do sujeito para efetivar sua interpretação. Portanto, as diferenças do discurso da análise serão pontuadas para cada um dos seus enunciados em três culturas distintas, deixando em aberto a tarefa de pesquisar sua formação entre nós. Porque o discurso da análise difere sua interpretação de acordo com a cultura considerada, sendo inadequado avaliar sua presença em l'analyse du discours, discourse analysis e nas doutrinas do discurso como uma influência que aparece em cada cultura. As doutrinas do discurso no Brasil não são uma influência estrangeira, mas possuem uma formação que pode ser buscada através do discurso da análise que funda a relação mais geral do saber da linguagem com a intepretação.

Chamberness in genre-stylistic field of Piano concertos by Johannes Brahms

Chamberness in genre-stylistic field of Piano concertos by Johannes Brahms

Translation and Translatio in the New Rhetoric Project’s Rediscovery of Rhetoric

ABSTRACT This article, an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, traces the surprising role of translation and of translatio (the medieval trope referring to the transfer of knowledge across time and space) in the story of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s turn to rhetoric. Neither Perelman nor Olbrechts-Tyteca were well versed in the French tradition of rhetoric as poetics. However, in two lectures Perelman gave late in his life, he offered a surprising description of the influence of Jean Paulhan, the French literary critic and long-time director of the Nouvelle Revue française, and of thirteenth-century Italian author and notary Brunetto Latini, on the turn to rhetoric. In addition, this essay situates these lectures as a critical response to the claim made by three important French thinkers, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, that they had recovered rhetoric for the study of expression and thus as poetics.

Translation and Translatio in the New Rhetoric Project’s Rediscovery of Rhetoric

ABSTRACTThis article, an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, traces the surprising role of translation and of translatio (the medieval trope referring to the transfer of knowledge across time and space) in the story of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s turn to rhetoric. Neither Perelman nor Olbrechts-Tyteca were well versed in the French tradition of rhetoric as poetics. However, in two lectures Perelman gave late in his life, he offered a surprising description of the influence of Jean Paulhan, the French literary critic and long-time director of the Nouvelle Revue française, and of thirteenth-century Italian author and notary Brunetto Latini, on the turn to rhetoric. In addition, this essay situates these lectures as a critical response to the claim made by three important French thinkers, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, that they had recovered rhetoric for the study of expression and thus as poetics.

Christian Papilloud, Sociology through Relation: Theoretical Assessments from the French Tradition

Christian Papilloud, <i>Sociology through Relation: Theoretical Assessments from the French Tradition</i>

Muhammad ibn al‐Zain's basin (baptistère de Saint Louis)

AbstractThe traditional baptismal font of the kings of France for centuries, the so‐called baptistère de Saint Louis is part of 1750s–1900s French national legend. Against all evidence, the name suggests that it is the spoils of Louis IX's crusade of 1250–1254. In fact, that large, copper vessel of exceptional quality, with gold and silver figural decoration, was probably produced in Damascus or Cairo in 1320–1340, almost a century after French downfall at the hands of the Mamluks in Northern Egypt in 1250. As part of the crown treasure of France and because of its outstanding artistry, it is one of the most thoroughly researched Islamicate objects in the Louvre. The association with Louis IX is pure fiction that illustrates the nonsensical and yet persuasive economies of French national legends. Paradoxically, the ransom that the French army paid to leave Egypt in 1250 was one of the stepping stones for the rise of the Mamluk dynasty, renowned for gold and silver incrusted metalwork objects, such as the basin. In another paradoxical turn, the Mamluks who ruled the Central Islamic area from 1250 to 1517 are the military elite recruited from enslaved non‐Muslims, including Turkic and Christian populations. The basin invites us to connect the points on the archipelago that includes France, the Eastern Mediterranean (fall of Acre, 1291), Cyprus and Armenia under the Lusignans, Sicily, Naples, and the South of Italy under the Angevins. Further still, this splendid and still enigmatic work of art brings together Ming China, Mongol Persia, Mamluk Islam, and Gothic France. This paper includes the earliest French description of the basin, from 1606, published in 1642 and reproduced later, including in 1742 (Piganiol de la Force, 1742). The paper also discusses the French tradition of medievalists opposing white supremacist fantasy of white, Christian medieval origins of the French nation. Finally, the paper notes some differences between French and U.S. mentalités in relation to race, in the context of recent events (2019), based on the French ideal of republican universalism, citing such symptomatic events as the replacing of the word “race” by “sex” in the French constitution, the reluctance to base activism on collective identitaire claims, the reluctance to think in terms of race and use race‐related or communautariste terms with which to think about complex social, historical, or artistic rights and responsibilities, and the prohibition to collect race‐based statistics, but also, often in advance of similar laws enacted in other countries, such acts as the Taubira law of 2001 that recognizes France's responsibility for slavery and slave trade beginning in the fifteenth century as a crime against humanity and provides for teaching, research, and commemoration.

La farce rétrospective – revoir la farce au xvie siècle

The consideration for farce during the Renaissance appears deeply ambiguous. Although the humanists tend to disapprove the farce as a medieval leftover, some of them do write farces; most of the preserved farces date from the 16th century and several farces are still published at the beginning of the 17th century; also, at the time, the representation of a tragedy is usually followed by a farce. The theoretical rejection of this genre for its lack of Greco-Roman models is counterbalanced by the fascination for its indigenous origins, as farce is considered an eminently French tradition. Nevertheless, some authors (such as Amyot) seem to implicitly legitimate farce inscribing it within the universalia of theatrical history.

Memória discursiva em manuais de leitura de meados do século XX

O artigo mostra a partir da análise de manuais de leitura da primeira metade do século XX e de livros didáticos utilizados no século XXI, o modo pelo qual se construiu uma rede de sentidos sobre leitura. O corpus foi organizado a partir de material coletado no museu Pedagógico da Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia e analisado a partir das noções de discurso, sentido e memória discursiva da Análise de Discurso francesa. Mostramos um efeito de retorno do sentido individualista e utilitário de leitura que contraria o sentido polissêmico de uma “arte da leitura”. Percebemos, portanto, a consolidação deste lugar dominante nesta rede de memória discursiva.

Recovering a French Tradition: Ignace Meyerson in focus

The paper is written on the occasion of a new French monograph by Noemi Pizarosso on Ignace Meyerson. This French mid 20th century intellectual has been one of the representatives of the early French non-individualistic social psychologies. Meyerson claimed that the mind undergoes radical changes during historical times. Relative to the other early historical psychologies, Meyerson was more radical and more relativistic in the historical sense. One great merit of the book of Pizarosso is to show that Meyerson and his followers attempted to prove this historical relativity thesis in analyzing changes in the concept of person, and changes in styles of art.