euro|topics - Eric Aeschimann

07/09/2008

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Aeschimann, Eric

3 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.

Libération - France | 29/11/2007

Patrick Savidan highlights contradictions in equal opportunities

Interviewed by Eric Aeschimann, the French philosopher Patrick Savidan, director of the Observatoire des Inégalités, explores the notion of equal opportunity, which "functions according to merit. Under the Ancien Régime, honours and riches were attributed according to birth right. All of modernity's struggle has imposed merit as a criterion for distribution. Equal opportunity means allowing each individual access to a position in society that corresponds with his or her talent and effort. ... However, in order to be credible, equal opportunity requires a tax-funded system of redistribution that corrects inequality at birth. This is a saw point. As soon as individuals believe that they owe their merit to nobody but themselves, and believe themselves to be the exclusive owners of their riches, they will prove reticent facing a tax which they will consider takes riches away from deserving individuals -themselves- in order to give them to the undeserving."

Libération - France | 12/09/2007

'The Human question' by Nicolas Klotz

The controversial film, 'The Human Question', by French Nicolas Klotz, that compares the world of business firms with Nazism, has failed to convince Eric Aeschimann: "The plot conveys a thesis that is in vogue among certain radical thinkers (Bauman, Agamben), for whom ultraliberal companies repeat the same dehumanising structure as extermination camps and are actually a contemporary version of them. However, here anyway, the theory burdens the fiction with an ideological weight that ends up problematic. Firstly because liberalism, even in its negative effects on man, has nothing in common with Nazi horrors."

Libération - France | 14/04/2007

Eric Hobsbawm explains the 'reinvention' of history

In an interview conducted by Eric Aeschimann, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm considers that "decolonisation brought on the creation of new states that are either deprived of a history or have a history that they don't want to accept. More recently, the end of the cold war provoked a sort of thawing of the history that had been put on ice at the end of the Second World War. Revisions of history are being imposed or trying to be imposed all over the place. All this has opened an extraordinary space for the reinvention of History, which is largely mythical because these stories are not written by historians, but by governments, movements, organisations, pressure groups. ... A nation only exists in relation to its past. ... This being so, it is not surprising that an ethnical group or allegedly ethnic group trying to establish its identity should start to reinvent its history. "

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