If Durkheim was right to claim that the sacred remains a powerful social force in the modern world, where can we find it? One obvious answer is the collective symbols that people gather around as they ...

In the same way that Sigmund Freud created a way of making sense of the dynamics and passions of the human psyche, the pioneering French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, created a language for ...

150 years ago, a French-Jewish teenager told his father, a rabbi in the town of Épinal, that he had decided against entering rabbinical school, thus breaking with a family tradition that stretched ...

Globally, we are currently experiencing tremendous social and political turbulence. At the institutional level, liberal democracy faces the threat of rising authoritarianism and far-right extremism.

A few years ago I was planning a book on market capitalism—one that would demonstrate its inestimable virtues. But in a moment of candour it occurred to me that I had not exposed myself sufficiently ...