1/ Modernity, born out of industrial capitalism, established itself as a movement that overturned the society of orders, rent, and status. Today we are watching an overturning of this overturning. 2/ The tertiarization of societies and the financialization of capital (and private estates [patrimoines]) mean that wealth no longer comes fundamentally from materially productive work: The economy has become “immaterial” and wealth is henceforward obtained by stock purchases,

1/ The principal criticism communitarians address to liberal individualism is precisely that it makes communities disappear, communities which are a fundamental and irreplaceable element of human existence. Liberalism devalues political life by considering political association 2/ as a mere instrumental good, without seeing that the participation of citizens in the political community is an intrinsic good constitutive of the good life. Because of this it is unable to give a satisfactory account of a certain number of obligations and commitments, viz.,

The international law issued by the Peace of Westphalia 1648 is today equally turned upside down by the ideology of human rights, which justifies the right (or the duty) of ‘humanitarian interference’, i.e. preventive war, formerly seen as nearly identical to a war of aggression. 2/ This right of humanitarian interference, which patently violates the Charter of the United Nations, has no precedent in international law. It suggests that every state, whatever it be, can intervene at will in the internal affairs of another state, whatever it be,

1/ Capitalism is not primarily an economic system, but a “total social fact” (Marcel Mauss), from which flows the fetishised form that social relations take in liberal societies. It is therefore futile to seek to assess its value with regard to its real or supposed effectiveness. 2/ The capitalist system is undoubtedly highly efficient at producing commodities, but efficiency is not an end in itself. It never qualifies that the means implemented to achieve an end, without telling us anything of the value of this end. Goods bring in money,

1/ Being disconnected from gold, the dollar could be multiplied without an immediate automatic effect on its value or on inflation, which would permit Americans to have their growing commercial deficits financed indefinitely by the rest of the world, 2/ especially thanks to the issue of Treasury Bonds. In fact, the massive demand for dollars has permitted Americans to accumulate extravagant commercial and budget deficits without suffering any negative economic effects from the debts for a long time,

1/ On the psychological level, individuals now feel dispossessed by overwhelming mechanisms, an increasingly fast pace and even heavier constraints—variables so numerous that they are no longer able to grasp where they stand. 2/ That this happens at a time when individuals are lonelier than ever, abandoned to themselves, when all great world-views have caved in, only intensifies this feeling of a nothingness. “Globalization,” says Laïdi, “strangely reproduces the Freudian mechanism of the crowd

1/ Stripped of its traditional mediation, society is becoming more fluid and more fragmented, which only makes it easier to objectify it. You live in it suddenly and quickly. With the real disappearance of the main collective ideas that were once carriers of various worldviews, 2/ the religion of the Ego—based on unrestrained freedom and narcissistic desires, created out of nothing—has caused a deterritorialization that goes hand in hand today with the decomposition of all boundaries and all references, making the individual more and more vulnerable,

1/ Decadence in modern mass multicultural societies begins at a moment when there is not longer any discernible meaning within society. Meaning is destroyed by raising individualism above all other values because rampant individualism encourages the anarchical proliferation 2/ of egotism at the expense of the values that were once part of the national heritage, values that give form to the concept of nationhood and the nation state, to a state which is more than just a political entity, and which corresponds to a particular people who are conscious

1/ As opposed to the centralising tradition, which confiscates all powers to establish a single level of control, as opposed to a bureaucratic and technocratic Europe, which relinquishes sovereignty without transferring it to a higher level; 2/ as opposed to a Eur. which will only be a big market unified by free trade; as opposed to a ‘Eur. of Nations’, a mere assemblage of national egos which can't prevent future wars; as opposed to a ‘European Nation’ which's nothing more than a larger version of the Jacobin state;

1/ Freedom is not only a personal power. It needs a social field to exercise itself. That is why one could not be satisfied with the definition figuring in Article 4 of the Declaration of Rights of 1789: ‘Freedom consists in being able to do anything which does not harm others’. 2/ On the one hand, individual autonomy & the free expression of capacities & merits are not subjective rights but correspond, on the contrary, to an imperious political & social necessity. (Public education, for example, is not at all the result of some ‘right to education’

1/ The first theoreticians of human rights were not wrong to refer to human nature. But it is the notion that they formed of it that was inconsistent. One knows today—one has known it for a long time—that man is a social being, 2/ that the existence of men did not precede their coexistence; in short, that society is the perspective in which, from its origins, the human presence in the world has been recorded. Just as there is no spirit that is not incarnated,

1/ We know that it is difficult to prioritize information when we are bombarded with news, comments & images that follow one another at breakneck speed. This is the problem of "infobesity". This is nothing new, but the phenomenon has obviously accelerated in the postmodern era. 2/ The transformation of political life into a spectacle, that is to say into a contest of appearances, the flood of images, fraudulent commercial practices, false advertising, the advent of the blogosphere and social networks, the reign of reality TV and "infotainment" (mixing

1/ From the Right, apart from individual developments, there is obviously nothing to expect. If today it has not moved entirely to the side of money, at least it does not stop maintaining a scarcely artistic blurriness around the omnipresent reality of capital. 2/ In this way, the customary reluctance it feels with regard to society is added to a complete incomprehension of the historical period in which we live. Except in some small circles, the Right has abandoned what in the past could have constituted its legitimacy:

1. Modernity is characterised primarily by five converging processes: individualisation, through the destruction of old forms of communal life; massification, through the adoption of standardised behaviour and lifestyles; desacralisation, through the displacement of the great 2. religious narratives by a scientific interpretation of the world; rationalisation, through the domination of instrumental reason, the free market, & technical efficiency; & universalisation, through a planetary extension of a model of society postulated implicitly as the only

1/ The tendency to overexpansion & concentration produces isolated individs. who are thus more vulnerable & defenceless. Widespread exclusion & social uncertainty are the logical consequences of this system which has wiped out almost all possibilities of reciprocity & solidarity. 2/ Faced with traditional, vertical pyramids of domination that inspire no confidence, faced with bureaucracies that are reaching more and more rapidly their level of incompetence, we enter a world of all sorts of cooperative networks.

1/ In contrast to racism, there is a universalist and a differentialist anti-racism. The former leads to the same conclusions as does the racism it denounces. As opposed to differences as is racism, universalist anti-racism only acknowledges in peoples their common belonging to 2/ a particular species and it tends to consider their specific identities as transitory or of secondary importance. By reducing the ‘Other’ to the ‘Same’ through a strictly assimilationist perspective, universalist anti-racism is, by definition, incapable of recognising