Human rights are a complex concept with distinct parts, whose histories are often independent from one another. Histories of human rights are almost always partial histories, and we cannot reduce their history to that of one part. This article challenges one of the central tenets of the early-modern history of human rights, namely that it was the “discovery” of subjective rights in the late medieval period that was the critical move in the development of human rights. It examines in particular the work of Richard Tuck, and exposes his debt to the French legal historian Michel Villey and to Leo Strauss. In so doing, it disputes the existence of a “modern school” of natural law theory, and sketches an alternative history of natural rights, which passes from the Huguenot monarchomachs and the English Levellers to the American and French revolutionaries.

"Liberty," "secularism," "security," "people," "identity" . . . Politicians like words that slam or clash. But what precise meaning do they give them? At the dawn of a high-risk election year, and in the context of the rise of the National Front and increased terrorist threat, it is imperative to clarify the meaning of the words of the political debate.

For the first time, a scientific analysis decodes the logic of the discourse of the politicians who are competing for the 2017 presidential election - Marine Le Pen, François Fillon, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Supplanted - François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Juppé. At the crossroads of an ancient world and a new world, the ability of politicians to read the contemporary world and to verbalize it is scrutinized.

The author sifts over 1,300 texts - 2.5 million words - written or spoken from 2014 to 2016 to decrypt keywords, fetish words, and taboo words, and to map the positions of each and the reconfiguration of the political landscape.

This semantic, stylistic, and rhetorical inquiry reveals that behind the surface of small sentences is the profound structure of a political worldview. What do they say ? Who is "left" and "right" at this time of elastic political concepts? Are the "populisms" on both sides really the same? And what are the dead angles of these seasoned orators, who handle both silences and unspoken words, as well as slogans and soundbites?

More than ever, the battle of ideas will pass through the battle of words. And the one who imposes his own sense of "secularism" or "Republic" will have won an ideological victory, even beyond the electoral results.

Professor of literature at Stanford University and associate researcher at the Cevipof at Sciences Po, Cécile Alduy is the author of Le Seuil de Marine Le Pen: Decryption of the new frontistic discourse (2015).

The politics of economic crises brings distributive economic conflict to the fore of national political debates. How policy should be used to transfer resources between citizens becomes a central political question, and the answers chosen often influence the trajectory of policy for a generation. This context provides an ideal setting for evaluating the importance of self-interest and other-regarding preferences in shaping public opinion about economic policy. This article investigates whether self-centered inequity aversion along with self-interest influences individual tax policy opinions. We conduct original survey experiments in France and the United States, and provide evidence that individuals care about both how policy alternatives affect their own interests and how they influence the welfare of others relative to themselves.

Relying on diversity measures computed at the apartment block level under conditions of exogenous allocation of public housing in France, this paper identifies the effects of ethnic diversity on social relationships and housing quality. Housing Survey data reveal that diversity induces social anomie. Through the channel of anomie, diversity accounts for the inability of residents to sanction others for vandalism and to act collectively to demand proper building maintenance. However, anomie also lowers opportunities for violent confrontations, which are not related to diversity.

“What was the Enlightenment” is a question scholars have been asking since the eighteenth century, but far less often has it been asked who the Enlightenment was. Who were the members of the social, professional, and academic classes that made up the Enlightenment? Who was in and, by extension, who was out? Much is known about the primary producers of Enlightenment works, from the famed philosophes to some of the lesser-known authors (e.g., in France, the Encyclopédistes, the Grub Street writers, or the libellistes).¹ Studies have also revealed some of the readers of Enlightenment texts and explored some of its social institutions. And a certain degree of attention has been paid to the major patrons and political supporters of the philosophes: Mme de Pompadour, Frederick the Great, and other influential governmental officials such as Malesherbes. But rarely, if ever, have the different participants of the Enlightenment been considered together as a single entity, or, as we would say today, a network.

That is the goal of this article: to study the social composition of the French Enlightenment network. What sectors of eighteenth-century society were most present? How involved was the government? What role did the aristocracy play? Which intellectual disciplines and fields were most represented? Which ones were not? What was the role of women? And, perhaps most critically, how did it function as a network? These are the kinds of questions we raise, and we seek to answer them by means of a hybrid quantitative and qualitative methodology. We use basic statistical calculations to provide rough estimates of the size and importance of different social groups; given the nature of our data, however, we do not analyze them with standard social network analysis (SNA) methods. Rather, we corroborate, refine, and defend our findings through comparisons with arguments from the secondary literature. While our reasons for this approach are largely driven by the shape of our data (which make most SNA metrics unfeasible), we also advocate a method of network analysis that does not rely on mapping relationships between nodes and calculating such metrics as betweenness centrality or clustering coefficients; rather, it focuses on the relative size of, and overlap between, different subgroups in order to understand the overall structure and social composition of a historical network.

While some of our findings, detailed in full below, will not come as a surprise to specialists (the network is, for instance, overwhelmingly male), the overall picture of the French Enlightenment network that emerges from this study is nonetheless striking. Two features in particular stand out. First, men and women of science are significantly underrepresented. The scholars and writers we find in this network were largely gens de lettres, much more engaged with history, philosophy, political economy, and literature than with mathematics, medicine, or astronomy. Second, the elite segments of society, be they aristocratic, social, or governmental, are remarkably overrepresented. The French Enlightenment network incorporates the crème de la crème of the French state and high society. The presence of so many notables in this network suggests that French Enlightenment authors were more likely to be engaged in collaborative, reformist efforts than in subversive plots; conversely, it also hints at the existence of a fairly extensive and well-represented (at different levels of social hierarchy) parti philosophique within the French state itself.

France and the UK have had different approaches to the possibility of nuclear disarmament; these derive from the different post- Second World War national narratives in which the development of nuclear weapons has been embedded. This started from two different attitudes toward the NATO Alliance and its nuclear component, two different sets of lessons learned from the 1956 Suez crisis, and it culminated in two different reactions to the increase in nuclear disarmament advocacy worldwide, which is the focus of this chapter.

After the attacks in Paris, TEC faculty affiliate Russell A. Berman argues that "ISIS is hardly the only challenge to American power and the international order" and that "strategic thinking has to consider long term issues and not merely react to immediate events or even the most terrible headlines." Instead, he encourages the U.S. to strengthen alliances with the Europeans and the Sunnis in the December 1, 2015 edition of The Caravan.