L’esprit politique des savoirs

Our certainties are shaken by the crises that our societies are experiencing and the conjunctural uncertainties tend to become structural, pushing us to question the interrelations between knowledge and power.

The comparison between the evolution of knowledge on law, on society and on nature shows an exceptional parallelism of the transformations in time of these three regimes. What can be observed is the passage from overhanging approaches, from imposed truths, to a growing interest in the ways in which society positions itself, questions, and confronts itself more and more with what this knowledge states. The "social" becomes part of these three knowledge regimes.

Such an observation suggests a homology between knowledge and power insofar as the rejection of a top-down imposition of "Science" is found in the questioning of the monopoly of a top-down control that increasingly characterizes the regime of political regulation and the forms of exercise of power in so-called "democratic" societies.