This book questions the difficulty of conceiving collective emancipation in a world dominated by capitalist technocracy and individualism. Alain Deneault pursues the ideas found in his previous essays La médiocratie and Politique de l’extrême center. He invites us to break with the dynamics of identity-based quarrels where everyone uses their own conscience as a stick to hit others, and in which everyone seems to let the world run to its ruin, as long as his or her cause and interest advance here and now. He deplores the degradation of important categories into slogans and clichés, and reminds us that underneath these debates lie precious issues and desires that must be urgently brought out of the rubble.

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To identify a common crisis among progressives and conservatives is not to turn them back on each other. No inverted symmetry here, but a reflection engaged in complex fields aiming to put forward not so much an evolution of mores as a dilution of these. Today, the possibility of morals, of a common world, of shared customs, is undermined. This is what is shown by the proliferation of identity and moral quarrels which, too often, instrumentalize ideas instead of expressing them and thinking them. Mores can only be thought of in relation to a society in the light of its general evolution. It is a matter of collective intelligence. To inquire about mores, is to situate oneself in a society in so far as it participates in a complex economy and involves us in it. It is to be interested in the way in which it constitutes us while trying to contribute reciprocally to its evolution.