Invitations à l’Imaginaire — Michel Maffesoli, Jean-Didier Vincent & Patrick Tacussel — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Lecture — Slash Paris

Past: Tuesday, January 28, 2014 at 7 PM

Michel Maffesoli invites sociology professor Patrick Tacussel and Jean-Didier Vincent, a member of the French Académie des sciences and Académie de médecine to debate with Hélène Strohl their lastest work, Les nouveaux bien-pensants.

The ever-growing rift between the elites and the people is a recurring theme in Michel Maffesoli’s work. Far from reading it as the sign of a lack of education or cultural and social capital among the people, he analyzes it as the inability to think outside the box on the part of those with the power to speak and the power to do.

And indeed the book — in a longstanding French tradition of intellectual polemics — shows how journalists, politicians, academics and high-ranking civil servants practice exclusive associations that make any renewal impossible in public thought.

A few telling examples illustrate the argument of the book, whose last chapter was written in collaboration with Hélène Strohl.