DOSSIER «LE SEXE SANS COMPLEXE» | The French historian René Rémond, who died in 2007, summed up the answer to this question in a shocking formula: sex, he wrote in 1987, entered politics in 1968! Does this aphorism imply that sex and politics, prior to that date, lived in separate spheres, intersecting only in the private lives of political actors and actresses?

Each month, Le Regard Libre presents a philosopher whose thinking is different from, or even the opposite of, that of...

ANALYSIS, Olivier Meuwly | «It could be argued that the capacity of capitalist regimes to reform is partly due to Marx himself», asks Raymond Aron in his famous lecture on Marxism by Marx, delivered at the Sorbonne in the early 1960s, then at the Collège de France a decade later, and published in 2002 by Jean-Claude Casanova (Editions de Fallois). Is Aron indulging in his customary irony? Or are we to wonder whether, behind the provocative aphorism, lies not only the profound admiration that the great French liberal has always shown for the founding father of «scientific socialism», but also a warning to those who profess to analyze... or practice this same capitalism?

Each month, Le Regard Libre presents a philosopher whose thinking differs from, or even runs counter to, the clichés that circulate about him. Historian Olivier Meuwly opens the ball by arguing that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel did not advocate an authoritarian state. On the contrary, our guest editor locates certain theoretical foundations of liberalism at the heart of the Hegelian system. Direct democracy itself is no stranger to the German's vision, according to the historian.