This Thursday, December 14 from 18:30 to 20:30, Demosthenes Davvetas, head of the Europe Department at the IESA arts&culture Contemporary Cultures Research Center, will host economist and researcher Pierre Bentata for a lecture on the occasion of the release of his latest book "The Disillusions of Liberty."
Pierre Bentata will focus on the economics of art and culture in the 21st century and will take the time to answer your questions.
The lecture is free and open to all; it will take place in the auditorium of IESA arts&culture (1 Cité Griset 75011).
About Pierre Bentata:
Founder of Rinzen, Pierre Bentata is a professor at ESC Troyes. Holding a doctorate in economics, he was an associate researcher at Paris II and has published several scientific articles in international peer-reviewed journals on the econometric analysis of regulation and the functioning of courts of justice. He regularly advises law firms on economic issues and publishes reports on public finance for many French think tanks. In parallel, he teaches microeconomics and finance at several business schools and regularly contributes to the French business dailies. He is co-founder of the Cercle de Belém. He is the author of the essay "Young People Without a History" (2016), on the political and social situation in Western countries.
About "The Disillusions of Liberty":
Resurgence of nationalisms, return of religious obscurantism, rise of transhumanist or posthumanist ideology. How can we explain the simultaneity of these events?
What if all three were extreme reactions to the globalization of the world, a legacy of the Enlightenment? The extraordinary material prosperity our world has known over the last two centuries was built on the universalist ideal of a free man endowed with absolute Reason. But this undeniable progress has a counterpart: the dilution of cultures, the weakening of nations, economic and political interdependence; all constraints that suggest no one controls their own destiny. The promise of individual sovereignty has given birth to a world where each person would be merely a cog, identical and interchangeable, in a global machine that serves only itself.
Inevitably, questions of identity, freedom and meaning arise once again, replaying here and now, with redoubled vigor, the debate that pitted the Enlightenment against the Romantics. Faced with the disillusionments of freedom, a new wisdom must be built that reconciles roots and reason, pluralism and universalism, before the world comes apart. That is the immense ambition of this book.