Sublime

En l’absence de normes partagées, en l’absence de tout type d’attachement commun, les acteurs du marché et de l’État s’entre-déchireront pour le pouvoir et l’argent. La société et la culture précèdent la politique ou le marché, elles sont plus importantes. La santé d’une société dépend d’une abnégation volontaire.

Discontinuité et précarité du travail cessent ainsi d’être synonymes. Plus le travail est intermittent, mieux la sécurité de l’emploi peut être assurée et plus grande aussi est la liberté des actifs dans le choix de leurs temps et périodes de travail. Inversement, plus la quantité de travail socialement nécessaire se contracte, plus sa répartition

People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in

All of these thinkers opposed bigness and prescribed a greater humility about one’s unavoidable ignorance. No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organical

This connection, that duration is as important as the number of events, explains in great part why there is so little activity in many new housing projects, such as multistory apartment areas, where great numbers of people in fact live. Residents come and go in great numbers, but there are often only meager opportunities to spend extended periods o

Various tasks – manufacturing tools, processing food and so on – which become mutually beneficial are therefore split between a population in a way that segments society according to function. This causes interdependence and therefore social cohesion. It is this necessary segmentation of society – a kind of functionalism – that created a tendency t

If activity between buildings is missing, the lower end of the contact scale also disappears. The varied transitional forms between being alone and being together have disappeared. The boundaries between isolation and contact become sharper – people are either alone or else with others on a relatively demanding and exacting level. Life between buil