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Par Nasser Suleiman Michaëlen-Gabryel
Docteur en science politique
Directeur de Recherche Scientifique/Université Méditerranéenne de la Francophonie
Chercheur associé au Laboratoire Islam et altérité Institut catholique de Paris
Chercheur au CEIR Centre d’étude internationale sur la Romanité
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Abstract : The intellectualization of the ascending classes in the countries of the South has allowed generations previously excluded from the university system to have access to higher education. Knowledge, which was a colonial tool of the human sciences: was transformed into a tool of emancipation aimed at the development of sovereign and autonomous cultures (Homi K. Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy). The Foucault heritage: Foucault is formally solicited in its two commonly accepted periods: the first period, from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, is that of the Foucault of « Bio-power » and of « the Archaeology of Knowledge » or « the order of discourse », imposing a deconstruction of the relationships of knowledge understood as orders of power; the second period, from the end of the 1970s, is presented as the Foucault of « self-care » where the thinker focuses on the actor’s autonomy and his capacity to produce resistance to power.
Résumé : L’intellectualisation des classes montantes dans les pays du Sud a permis à des générations auparavant exclues du système universitaire d’accéder à l’enseignement supérieur. Le savoir, qui était un outil colonial des sciences humaines : s’est transformé en outil d’émancipation visant le développement de cultures souveraines et autonomes (Homi K. Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy). L’héritage Foucault : Foucault est formellement sollicité dans ses deux périodes communément admises : la première période, des années 1960 à la fin des années 1970, est celle du Foucault du « Bio-pouvoir » et de « l’Archéologie du Savoir » ou » l’ordre du discours », imposant une déconstruction des rapports de savoir entendus comme ordres de pouvoir ; la seconde période, à partir de la fin des années 1970, se présente comme le Foucault du « self-care » où le penseur s’intéresse à l’autonomie de l’acteur et à sa capacité à produire des résistances au pouvoir.
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In an interview with Noam Chomsky in 1971, Michel Foucault rejected with the last energy the idea of a holistic conception of politics, which would be the translation of an asymmetrical vision between the holder of politicized knowledge and the cause embodied by the various minority human groups. In this debate Foucault identifies in Chomsky a policy of values linked to a traditional conception of politics of the Marxist-type linked to great historical narratives and an eminent mission of the avant-garde. For the Foucauldian perspective, which can be found in Camus’ literature, the practical modes of politics (in terms of mobilization, militancy) are the results of the in-situ action of the will of individuals and local resistance. It is no longer appropriate to have an a priori ideology or a framework in the sense of the Gramscian praxis, but to rely transversely on contextual responses to situations of precise domination (be it political, economic, or social). The other approach would not be the sum of the will of various individuals, but the collective response linked to political and social institutionality (revolutionary party, organic intellectuals). The social world cannot be autonomous from the subject/social actor who is first and foremost a historical actor. From this social world, the latter determines its political-ideological practice in theoretical and practical terms. From this confrontation, it is obvious that the first approach prevailed from the 1970s towards on the occasion of minority protest movements.
In the Foucaultian definition: Power is the affirmation and increase of power. It is not deduced from its failures or punishments but rather from its expansion. A power that is not limited to a legal and constitutional order. This, as totalitarianism has shown, is intrinsically marked by its limits and weaknesses, such as Hergé’s Ottokar sceptre, a scepter that Tintin must rediscover if he is to see King Muskar lose his throne. The sceptre goes from hand to hand, legal power is fragile and monopolizing its interpretation is not enough to grasp the profound logic of power: « We remain attached to a certain image of power-law, power-sovereignty that legal theorists and the monarchical institution have drawn. And it is from this image that we must free ourselves, that is, from the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we want to make an analysis of power in the concrete and historical interplay of its processes. It is necessary to build an analytic of power that will no longer take law as a model and as a code »[1].
If we can hear the necessary distance of analysis of legal formalism, it is necessary for Foucault to think about the circulation of discourses of power as a norm and as a discipline, in order to better understand the aspects of appropriation, subjection, the role of legitimization that the writing imposes by the force of its moral auctoritas.
At this stage of development, we can take into account Habermas’ criticism of the lack of moral economy in Foucault’s logics[2]. Thus, « moral » are « all those of the institutions that inform us on the question of how we should behave in the best way possible in order to thwart the extreme vulnerability of people, by protecting and sparing them. From an anthropological point of view, morality can be understood « as a protective provision that compensates for a vulnerability that is structurally embedded in socio-cultural forms of life ». Foucault having in his eyes, particularly in his early works, too much inclined to self-centre power in a self-referential system; a system that Foucault targets as a philosophy of power that « presents itself and prescribes itself as one thinks », to deconstruct the very parameters of its power.
Starting from the questioning of the political order, it is to confront oneself with the reading of a writing; an archaeological writing whose organizational matrix is based on a wide distribution of syntactic and normative topologies.
To think of this political definition of Foucault necessarily leads to think of a situated fragment of the question. From Bodin to Foucault, passing through Hegel, « the State », « politics », « men »[3] are first causal subjects, by which thought as a reason subject erects forms of universality and universalization: necessary for the construction of what Hobbes defined as a public power[4]. Taking the opposite approach, Karl Marx[5] refers the universal to a precise sociology of the dominant and the State to its historical and economic instrumentation[6]. Hostile to any single theorization of the superstructure, which would not combine its analysis with the analysis of the economic structure, Marx opposes any « idolatry » of the State and calls for its future liquidation. By the same token, any doctrinaire thought on the State is thus rejected in the name of a fascination specific to any guilty alliance with the bourgeois forces of capitalism. This delegitimization marks the sustained efforts of 20th century economist schools on the structure of capitalism and their equally sustained disinterest in the notion of the State relegated to legal and political studies. By this yardstick, Leninism and neoliberalism being at two historical moments, gave the most material elements of a vassalization of the notion of State to the benefit of the party and the market. From this division, the structuralists and a fortiori the poststructuralists completed the work, so to speak, by radically separating the notion of the State from the political subject, a delimitation that became both epistemological and political in the 1960s and 1970s. This process, besides being yet another symbiotic translation of the individuation and individualization of society, suggests a slow reformulation of the problem of public power, which after the extraction of politics, will slowly be detached from the State from the 1990s onwards. Theories of public management, globalization and the effects of decentralization have been successful in this divestiture. Foucault’s thinking[7] on politics can be embedded in this notional framework as a participant and actively contributing to this long process of divestment.
In Foucauldian conceptions[8], through norm and law, flow from narrative political forms whose territory is enclosed by a polycentric and affirmative political order. The reader and writing come together in a fusional political identity called « power »; a power that historiographers attach to the first Foucault, in order to relativize criticism and deny its most controversial elements. To grasp the multiplicity of power relationships and power games, particularly those that involve life, it is necessary to refer to a strategic model of power rather than the law model. The strategy is like a war of movement but whose mapping is configured on predetermined and unlimited boundaries. From this extension-dilution placed on the border, this question can be asked « How is power exercised? ». It is « The question » of a theory that is intended to be practical; criticism of the modes of domination, modes conceptualized in the generic « power ». In this progressive configuration of public power, marked using violence, particularly symbolic violence, the political order takes on the aspects of the social order, it becomes its instrument, representation, sometimes a substitute, it establishes from the State:
This reading is in line with the archaeological and genealogical identification of the power of what Foucault calls « biopower[9]« . For the classical policy which is concerned with the governance of souls and bodies, biopolitics substitutes « the multiplicity of men as a global mass affected by global processes that are specific to life ». This consists of specific techniques of power exercised over subjects of rights, i.e. collective bodies and individual bodies. On the one hand, for the collective bodies, biopower is, as a technique for managing life, and on the other hand, for the individual bodies, disciplinary power aims at establishing objective frameworks for normality and abnormality. Power is a space, it is a geography of power marked by the use of law as an object, a scepter of power both visible through its writings and invisible through its discursive practices that must be grasped.
Foucault’s twofold question is: what type of organization? what type of justification narrative has been made of it?, and how do we grasp it, apprehend it? One of the most massive transformations of political law in the 19th century consisted, I am not saying exactly to substitute but to complete, this old right of sovereignty – to make die or let live – with another new right, which will not erase the first, but which will penetrate, cross, modify it, and which will be a right, or rather an exactly opposite power: the power to « make » live and « let » die; hence the need to detect the forms of concretizations. Foucault escapes Foucault, it is not the direct translation, but it is one of his filiations, one of his betrayals / translations, it is all at the same time: without, for, with and after. It is not a « but »; the imperfect generic term for a presence in the text; a presence that is intended to be a reading of diffuse and exemplary grammars; reading a reading[10]. In a plural order of reception (which is not in our intention to define here), the consecration of the work Foucault is done in the name of a final desacralization of modernity (and thus of the classical conception of politics) by institutionalizing a crossed filiation between Foucault and the Frankfurt school[11].
In the light of this reduction in politics, a new field of reception anthropology was established in the 1980s, which in some texts found a configuration close to the 1950s. A questioning that, under the guise of postmodernity[12], aims to radicalize the refutation of the Promethean ordering of the world. The concepts are thus dematerialized historically, the initiating works are collected in as many stylistic figures defining the referential auctorial: « Adorno », « Heidegger » and « Foucault » coexist in as many spectacular references linked to the prior selection of the object, to a re-prographic serialization of a polymorphic universe of discourse. The mental processes of intuition meet the scholastic challenge of forcing things defined as a system of things that must be completely dismantled if not subverted. The author-bricolor anthropologizes foucaldism, he signs it as a trace of a particular rise in generality whose power of assignment is commensurate with an ontological quest; ontology of an object that is itself the narrator-author-bricolor. In an improbable projected debate, there is a ritual dance where the concepts and experiences of the world are constantly linked as founding causalities and regulatory mediations. This option had its posterity, notably by Agamben with the question of sovereignty, in what can be understood as the main premium. The narrative work broadens the concepts as social characters; their effectivities being erected as their own life independently of their respective histories. The ontology outcrops writing, a phenomenological ontology whose circularity is equally proportional to the ease of abstraction from space and time. The subject’s literature underlies this essentialization of narrative problems that somehow characterizes the subject matter. The noun is emptied of its primary definitions, but this is only to better substantiate the critical readings of this same noun. The design work allows this yardstick to give an artistic effect of simplifying narrative problems. Creative thinking takes the face of the careful reader of its own reading, a linguistic face centered on the language of the demiurge author. The corpus studied is an aesthetic reference in the context of a plural order of reception. The work of thought at work, if challenged, is rejected as metadiscoursal; the work of thought is carried out on thought itself in a sinuous register of theatricality and narrative dramatization. The text is a ready to use, it is an inaugural act of saying and making say. The established narrative grammar makes it possible to give meaning and duration to the reader’s work, assigning other thoughts in a solipsistic way, his thinking through collective mediation. To say what legitimacy can confer, that is, an authorized sedition.
The score of an artist’s thought is thus played with the approvals of a theoretical musicality that does not intend to leave the state of the question to the sole indigenous schemas of the respective disciplines or singular questions. The abstract / The abstraction of generic terms is for extensive use. The positioning of the critical philosopher of power, recalling what the Karl Marx defines as idealism[13], the canvas of the painting being at the service of an ontological point of view, the creator merging with the work of art.
In the light of this apparatus, i.e. heritage, is the critical sociology of the third generation significant for a particular positioning? In what way, if so, can this mode of being conceived as linguistic, cultural, social grammar[14]? The spirit world is a mode made up of acts of enunciation by which man describes, acts, produces and determines his own thinking situation. To do this, abstract logics are used. In this respect, subjective abstraction should be considered as a formal mode of interaction between theory and practice, a determined register of a scientific discourse, an institutional postulate or an ordinary predicate. In terms of defining the notion of radical criticism, abstraction is, to quote the « Gentlemen » of Port Royal, a « fact of conscience » which constituted as a « fact of thought », in other words, in terms of universal denomination, aims to establish pure categories in a cyclical manner as grammatical sciences of facts. Thus, the notion of « radical criticism » in its most rudimentary use may contain both a historical interpretation and a theoretical exposure within it (i.e. subjectively). It is based on a work of language on language, a semiotic work (produces meaning), assertorical (affirms a value judgment), performative (acts through enunciation). Idealistic abstraction is first and foremost a linguistic work exercised on « values » through a process of de-historicization of social and political cultures. We are therefore seeking in a meta-historical past, the understanding of the present time. This transcendent past is supposed to give the norm and the way of being .
The notion of radical criticism has a varied use, it can be the repository of a sociological dogmatism that has too much desire to extend the theory to the world of practice, condemns it to idealize and abstract the social world from any historical effect. Third generation critical sociology poses the necessary use of internal criticism in order to remain a process where rationality requires its own delimitations in order to be able to think of the discursive means of a systemic rupture with capitalism to do so, the language of critical sociology (« postcolonial studies, subordinate studies ») leads to the demarcation between the scholarly world, that of thought and the word of God and that of the profane world linked to the subjection of power over thought and the grasp of ecclesial power of the established church. This interpretation is oriented in its causality aims and sequential claims. Critical sociology of text builds the gaze and drowns the mirror in an infinite extension of it referring to a reference which referring to a referential system as explained Henry James in « Daisy Miller »[15] . This model for example replaces Pronoun by Noun, the character is painted, and his narrative power is absolute, his narrative is declamatory, his prose heroic: a political will in the name of a demiurgic writing. History from tales or novels taking advantage of enunciative topos (commonplace), too calls for scans, ruptures, exemplary figures, epistemes, in short, looks. It may be a question of the philosophy of history, of the conception of the world, of the scripted opus where the plot of the caliphal fiction maps the stories of the protagonists – the aesthetic gaze of the participant/constituent author in its most perfect form, the commitment of the actor’s politics
The critical sociology takes the aspects of eidetic, Platonic revolutionary progressivism, which only moves to contemplate the Idea, seeking systematically to grasp its substance: the essence of the beings and things that would be « the migrant », « the social movement », « the worker », « the employee », as so many socio-political categories that are malleable in the symbolic overthrow of the established order. This positioning characterizes a discourse whose criticism is part of the self-identification between the sociologist, author, historiographer and the political actor. This textual method meets in the aesthetic gaze that paints both a landscape and a way of painting. It aims to aesthetically affirm its social view in the idealistic construction of an imaginary, as a deployment of a certain mental mapping where the author actor-scribe is ideally located in the world and positions check whether it is a Noun or Past participle? himself in the order of things and words.
In this construction, we can identify this ideality both conceptual (it is a speaking thought), and not conceptual (it is a thought that speaks with confidence without asking the question of the speaker’s role in his speech). This implies posing the subject of error not as a prerequisite but as a form of locutory grammar that has as its notion ideality, i.e. a general rise, an allusive definition and an ontological predicate of a metaphysical type (for example, the formulation of the « Critique of neoliberalism » or of « critique of post-colonialism[16]« ). The definition of Others is inscribed in a relationship of dependence between the periphery and the center, and it is this relationship that is challenged by postcolonial studies. Studies that assume the power of the spokesperson and the power of criticism as a monopoly. This determination raises the subject of the privilege of the universal, the power of generalization and monopolization of words in the name of these same words. This critical sociology aims at the use of ordinary language, i.e. the manifestation of what is conceived as ordinary, common, which must be reduced to the voice of the « oppressed ».
The critical sociologist as critical theorist is an actor of textual revolution: an exclusive translator who has an interpretative monopoly on categories presented in both textual and virtual form in literary and critical theory. The construction of a critical narrative grammar makes it possible to separate camps judged to have opposing interests, and to emancipate oneself from any judgement of academic values, without ever allowing epistemological questions to be really debated or asked. models are intertwined in the different models of the interlocking that the critical sociologist imposes on his study. The monopoly of the definition it articulates makes it possible, on the one hand, to build the circle of a suitable cultural consensus and, on the other hand, to mean that all persons who violate the rules of the game are put on/in the index. In the light of this methodology, the subject (from the individual to society) becomes the Other as a global, differentiated and even unrealized cultural character. To use the vocabulary of anthropology, the observer tends to be a cultural sculptor who authoritatively provides a meaningful social or political form to a being reduced to a category that will, strictly speaking, be a creation. The experience lived in its phenomenological idealistic form poses the problem, among other things, of the function of « radical criticism » in the determination of the object. The aim is to question the use of the idealistic forms of enunciation of a certain current of so-called critical sociology not only in its internal form but within the external framework of the contextual topos of the production of the statement in its most concrete and determined form, i.e. real. In a beautiful text, Italo Calvino[17] asked the question of the gap between the representations that the social individual manages to build and the surrounding world. The individual is always a moving actor with wide margins in particular contexts, in permanent confrontation with his own powerlessness to grasp reality: « something essential for every person to be the image of what words can no longer say, something that has not been said and I still don’t know what is ».
The aim will be to situate the dynamics not only from their original concept but also in their material circulation, in concrete linguistic, cultural, political and social frameworks. This induces a « repatriation », from the Gramscian praxis, of a material, non-dogmatic and non-idealistic determination.
Cultural capitalism cannot be understood only under its idealized or phenomenological magistracy, but in its causalities and intrinsic dynamics. The Gramscian problem of hegemony can at this stage be the structuring element of this critical materialism. It is as much an external concept allowing us to think about the trench war of ideology as it is an internal one, to question the idealistic ideality that is part of any expressive thought where political writing is the formalization of a material form of the world. Based on these dual political and methodological registers, it is necessary not to restrict their scope (that of hegemony) by an identity reading of the subordinate groups and to rediscover the own Gramscian denomination[18] of a collective paradigm: the revolutionary form being only one of the forms of critical materialism. The other meaning that can be established by the definition of critical sociology is that of a certain regime in the world where ideality takes its first form in the critique of the dominant ideology and the predicate of neoliberal refutation. This speculative conception of the world erects a real phenomenology of social facts from the limited angle of a disciplinary critique (sociology in particular) that organizes the field of the world into as many social research objects but avoids thinking of its material determinations in the very choices of these objects. Epistemic closure leads so-called critical sociology to renew a denial of the social, giving it an ontological and predicative form. Gramscian anthropology is necessarily an « anxious thought », the one that constantly poses the problem of its own enunciation. This amounts to thinking about the framework of rational materialism as it relates to a material approach to socio-historical processes. This narrative, born of the dynamics of independence between 1945 and 1975, allowed a writing centered on the forgotten of history. It revisited the history of colonization (postcolonial studies) and sought to define the modalities of endogenous development in non-Western societies (subaltern studies). This has led to a critical re-reading of Marxism: how to have a real point of view on society in Africa, the Arab world or Latin America while using in a relevant way/ a thought marked by its European imprint?
The notion of criticism crosses the fields of human sciences and literary studies. Legal practices and regimes of powers are described only from the angle of political structures, it is no longer a question of thinking the figures of commitment and disengagement, the modes of politicization of beliefs: only under the sole term of radicality and criticism. Critical discourse is described as collective property and functions as an economic signal through which the writer constantly imposes his conversion without ever retracing its history[19]. The social space seems to be reduced to the semiotics of power as the giver of meaning. As the notion of politics loses its precision, it derives in a profusion of the term attached to uncertain fields of research between public policies, political action, political parties, institutions, etc. This uncertainty arises from the gaps between the constructed object and the narratives that articulate it, the individuals who animate it and the narrators who theorize it. This process, which is generally described as the democratization of knowledge initiated at the end of the Second World War, has given rise to many historical discussions: in the debate on postcolonial theories, four types of regimes have been established:
The first concerns the historicity of their regime and the interpretative paradigms of their speeches From Franz Fanon to Edward Saïd the postcolonial question[20] aims to think about the effects of colonialism, the mental, psychological, political and socio-anthropological effects. We are in the register of a relationship between center and periphery, a periphery that appropriates a dominated culture and transforms it into power of action. To do this, it is a question of using the culture of the dominant center to find ways of affirming the culture of the periphery. It is a question of insisting on the notions of hybridity, interbreeding and challenging traditional forms of cosmopolitanism conceived as modes of collaboration and complicity with the dominant orders
The second aims to define the interaction between postcolonial studies and other forms of critical theories by identifying points of convergence and modes of differentiation. The questioning of the centrality of Europe as a dominant narrative order (postcolonial studies) has led to the emergence of an approach to non-Western societies conceived no longer in their heteronomous otherness towards the West but as an autonomous society. Edward Saïd’s work of Orientalism in 1978[21] is in line with Michel Foucault’s thinking. The aim is to provincialize Europe, whose heritage would be contextualized and relativized in order to dissociate it from the project of political modernity. Project whose conceptual and epistemological framework must be adapted to the realities and contexts of Asian, African and other societies.
The third places the epistemological and political limits of a common definition of critical theories that would combine the deconstructivism approach (postcolonial theories), the axiological approach (subordinate studies) and the historiographical tradition (Marxist theory)
The fourth engages in a frontal struggle between subordinate studies, postcolonial theories on the one hand and cultural Marxism on the other hand (from Gramsci to Ed Thompson and Ranajit Guha[22]). On this last point we can quote (Vivek Chibber).
<</>>Notes
[1] Behrent, M. (2021). A Foucauldian Defense of the State : Blandine Kriegel and the État de Droit. Modern Intellectual History, 1-25. doi:10.1017/S1479244321000615
[2] – King, Matthew (2009), Clarifying the Foucault—Habermas debate: Morality, ethics, and `normative foundations’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453708100232
[3] –Althusser,Louis (1965). L’immense révolution théorique de Marx dans Lire le Capital, Paris, ed. Maspéro.https://idoc.pub/documents/althusser-y-balibar-lire-le-capital-1pdf-vnd5eq0935lx
[4]-Hobbes, T. (2016). Leviathan. Edited by C. Brooke. London: Penguin Books
[5]-Lapeyronnie D (2004)., « L’académisme radical ou le monologue sociologique. Avec qui parlent les sociologues ? », Revue française de sociologie, n° 45, pp. 621-651.
[6] – Fusari, Angelo (2014), On the Dynamics of Societies: Is There a Universal Theory?, In book: Methodological Misconceptions in the Social Sciences, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-8675-1_5
[7] Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972 – 1977. New York: Pantheon Books
[8]-Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology Of Knowledge. Translated from the French by A. M. S. Smith. New York: Pantheon Books
[9]-Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978-79. Translated from the French by G Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[10]-Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978-79. Translated from the French by G Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[11]-Bernstein, J. M. (1994) The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments, Volume 3, Taylor & Francis, pp. 199–202, 208
[12]-Jameson, Fredric. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
[13]-Marx, K. (1977). Misère de la philosophie. Paris : Editions Sociales. (Œuvre originale publiée en 1847)
[14]-Jean Lesaulnier, Antony McKenna, (2004).dir. Dictionnaire de Port-Royal. Paris, Honoré Champion,
[15] -Henry James, (1981) Daisy Miller. Traduction française. Edition Robert Laffont, S.A. Paris, 1981.PP11-29
[16] -Edward Saïd (2007) Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography Harvard. Republished by Columbia University Press in 2007, ISBN 0-231-14004-5
[17]-Italo, Calvino, (1992), Le città invisibili, in Romanzi e racconti, vol. 2, Milano, Mondadori, p. 477
[18]-Kreps, David, (2015), Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment. Farnham, Surrey, UK ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub Co.
[19]-Thomas, Peter, (2015).“Gramsci’s Machiavellian Metaphor. Restaging The Prince”, The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy and Language, edited by Fabio Frosini, Filippo Del Lucchese and Vittorio Morfino, Leiden: Brill,
[20]-Worth, Owen. (2015).Rethinking Hegemony. London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.PP76
[21]– Saïd Edward, (1978) Orientalism. Pantheon p98-109
[22]-Guha Ranajit 1998, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Harvard University Press Thompson Ed La formation de la classe ouvrière anglaise [« The Making of the English Working Class »] (trad. de l’anglais), Paris, Le Seuil, 1988; éd. points, 2012, 1164 p
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