Frédérick Guillaume Dufour

Immigration, neoconservatism and neoliberalism: The new Canadian citizenship regime in the light of European trajectories

Abstract A vast range of recent academic scholarships seek to theorize the recent convergence of neoliberal, anti-immigration, xenophobic and populist measures and practices since the Crisis of 2008. This paper analyses recent changes to the Canadian citizenship regime and it compares this changes to neoliberal and neoconservative trends in Europe. The authors argue that although it did not explicitly renounce its pluralistic orientation, the Canadian Conservative Party had already started its neoliberal and neoconservative reorientation of the Citizenship in Canada prior to the Crisis of 2008. Despite several similarities with European trajectories, the Conservative Party needs to deal with structural factors that are specific to the Canadian context: the electoral system; demographic trends; and a public opinion which, unlike in Europe, remains optimistic with regards to the economic contribution of immigration.

Assessing the historical turn in IR: an anatomy of second wave historical sociology

This article reassesses what is at stake in the historical turn in international relations (IR) and the attendant debate between the Second Wave of neo-Weberian historical sociology (WHS) and Political Marxism (PM). Firstly, it endeavours to recast what is at stake in the ‘historical turn’ in IR: the critique of reification and chronocentrism. Secondly, it examines WHSs argument against reductionism in the light of Webers own work. We show how the Weberian dualism between the politics and the economics inhibits its capacity to complete its project of historicizing IR. Finally, it explains why recent Weberians defence of multicausalism creates even more obstacles on the road towards an ontologically consistent historical turn.

The Social Structures of the Economy

This paper is divided into two sections. The first section presents a concise survey of the intellectual itinerary of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the French intellectual field. Then, after a short presentation of Bourdieu’s The Social Structures of the Economy , I proceed to a broader discussion of his economic sociology. After a presentation of Bourdieu’s key conceptual contributions, I question some aspects of Bourdieusian sociology with regard to its ambition of historicising the ‘economic field’. I identify the limitations of this historicising project in the extension of the metaphor of the market to virtually all fields of human activities and in a concept of capital which fails to grasp a social relation specific to the historical development of capitalism.