New book by Jacques Lévy

Our former fellow Jacques Lévy has just published a new book: Humanity: A Beginning. The Ethical Turn of the World-Society. He is speaking about his research and the book on france culture. Click on the video below to find out more.

The author described the book, commenting that

The book shows that the emergence of a World-society composed of actors-individuals indissociably comes with an ethical turn. By little touches, the universe and the universal are, in a messy style, meeting and merging.

The ethical turn is a major fork within ethos worlds. After centuries of transcendent, supposed-to-be-eternal moral commandments tolerating a lot of exceptions, societies have become factories of self-defined, modifiable, and universalizable values.

This bifurcation is the consequence of a threefold process: the present stage of globalization, with the invention of politics is at stake; the extension and the deepening of societies of individuals, where societality and individuality simultaneously thrive; the dramatic irruption of a pervasive new couple actor/environment, which overarches ecological awareness and ask the citizens which kind of nature, that is which kind of society, they see both viable and desirable.

As a result, values aiming at a universal scope are growingly escaping the abstraction that undermined their legitimacy. They cannot be found anymore in sacred texts or in philosophy handbooks but are manufactured in trial-and-error experiments and conflicts in major events as well as in daily life.

The resolution of these novel complexities is to be found in the dual signification of the word humanity: mankind as the people of the global society and a set of contemporary ethical issues. Bringing together these two meanings turns out to be the simplest way to answer the question: How will and can we inhabit the possible futures to make at least one of them inhabitable?

L’humanité : un commencement. Le tournant éthique de la société-Monde, Paris : Odile Jacob, 2021


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