The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France

A researcher or a journalist trying to compare the situation of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States and in France immediately confronts a crippling obstacle. The concept of ‘ethnic and racial minority’ as such is not used in France. This is not simply a matter of vocabulary –something the French typically like to argue about; the problem rather lies in the very incomparability of populations that one is talking about. Many of the categories that do exist in political discourse and public debate can of course be found in statistics. But there are no data describing the situation of minorities in France that could be compared with those produced in the United States. This state of affairs in French statistics – gathering has been the subject of major criticism for some 20 years now; it has gotten to the point that it has triggered a controversy of rare violence between those that would like to see statistics take into account the diversity of the population and those who denounce the danger that such statistics might pose of ethnicizing or racializing society. The media focus on the contentiousness of this debate has been such as to sometimes lose sight of the very existence of discrimination and the flaws of the Republican model that are at the root of the controversy in the first place

"Dominez la terre !" Le créationnisme, du fondamentalisme à la désécularisation

Historiquement, l'antiévolutionnisme constitue la première cause qui rassembla les protestants conservateurs étasuniens en un puissant mouvement social luttant pour conserver le caractère religieux de la société. Dans ses diverses évolutions, le créationnisme n'a cessé de procéder à ce geste, poussant les croyants vers le fondamentalisme, mais aussi une radicalisation politique, dans un combat cherchant à inverser la sécula- risation de l'espace public. Cet article suit la diffusion du créationnisme dans divers contextes nationaux (États-Unis, Suisse) et sphères sociales (religieuse, académique, politique), afin de restituer son caractère globalisé. On verra comment cette idéologie a disposé les évangéliques à des conceptions théocratiques, au nom de la « domination » que Dieu aurait conférée aux humains sur le monde lors de la Création

Evaluation as Practical Judgment

What does evaluation mean? This paper studies the evaluative process as a practical judgment that links a situation to a set of values in order to decide upon a course of action. In the first part, the article follows Sen’s account of an evaluative process. His critique of the monist, deductive and idealist theory of Rawls leads to a “relational” and “comparative” approach of the evaluation. Incompletedness, comparison, reality and deliberation are the key principles of this methodology. This is close to insights of John Dewey. Nevertheless, Dewey grasps the pragmatic dimension of the process more precisely then Sen. He firstly makes the distinction between prizing and appraisal, valuation and evaluation. And secondly, the singular situation is underlined as a component of any evaluation. Therefore, evaluation requires empirical inquiry and public deliberation. In a third step, the article focuses on the relationship between evaluation and norms in practical judgments. As explained in the paper, norms are close to, but different from, values. As horizons or constrains, norms contribute to the framing of evaluations. In short, evaluation is a complex process linking prizing and appraisal, situated deliberation, values and norms. Any reduction to a single dimension should mislead the practical judgment, as shown on the example of the evaluation of work