Menu

Discover this new book, published last November (Editions La Découverte) by Claudia Senik, professor at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) and at the Sorbonne University..

« Crises de confiance ? »

Dedicated page on the publisher’s site: https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/crises_de_confiance_-9782348065866

Extract from the back cover

Summary

It is commonly accepted that trust is the elementary virtue of any social life: without trust, the behaviors of our fellow human beings would be unpredictable and dangerous, whereas it allows us to anticipate their actions and reactions. But the establishment of trust relies on cultural, institutional, social and, often, imaginary and religious devices. However, we have to recognize that our contemporary societies are disrupted by crises of confidence with very diverse manifestations: questioning of political elites, scientific knowledge and expertise, success of conspiracy theories, etc. At the same time, these crises do not prevent the construction of other modalities of trust. While it is important to analyze the way in which trust is weakened or even destroyed, it is also necessary to grasp the continuous production of trust in new forms.
This is the purpose of this collective work, which brings together original contributions by researchers from a number of disciplines in the human and social sciences: history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, political science, communication science, etc. These multiple approaches help to shed light on a theme that embraces the entirety of social life and can be broken down into multiple questions and objects.

The author

Claudia Senik is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and at the Sorbonne University. She is also the co-director of the Center for Economic Research and Its Applications (CEPREMAP).