The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
We are at the end of a cycle that started in the second XIXth century. During this cycle, including in the XXth century, the left was governed by the ideology of progress and economic determinism. After the collapse of the so-called ‘communist’ countries, the question of the relevance of a new left for the XXIst century was raised. Different elements are necessary to answer it, the growing number of citizen initiatives all over the world (that is the subject of the launch text by Laville), the ambivalent experiences of left governments in South America (second subject raised by Coraggio). The analysis of these complex background issues opens up new perspectives for collective action and emancipation (to follow, third and fourth texts by Wainwright and Hart) and the structural crisis of European social democracy (fifth and sixth, closing texts by Hulgard and Lévesque). Very different from those of the traditional left; this week’s opinions and debates are also to be found in detail in Spanish (Reinventar la izquierda en el siglo XXI – Hasta un dialogo Norte-Sur) and French (Les gauches du XXIe siècle – Un dialogue Nord-Sud ). Jean-Louis Laville, economist and sociologist, supervised 'Les gauches du XXIe siècle – Un dialogue Nord-Sud' (Bord de l’eau, 2016).
Original poster for Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times. Wikicommons/ Some rights reserved.Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize in economics for inventing the idea of transaction costs in "The nature of the firm" (1937). Shortly before his death at 102, he and Ning Wang announced a new journal called "Man and the economy". Their manifesto "Saving economics from the economists”, was published in the Harvard Business Review (2012):
