Professor of economics, adviser to the President of the Republic François Mitterrand, founder of five international institutions, author of 80 books, Jacques Attali has been deciphering the past, present and future of our societies for fifty years. And yet, this new opus is undoubtedly the most ambitious of all. Is it because of the new ideas that this French intellectual is developing today? No: the strength of this book is that these ideas are better presented, synthesized and brought into line as ever.
The humanization of the economy first. The more time passes, the less Jacques Attali is tender with economists. “Economic theories are wrong all the time, he writes today. We cannot understand the functioning of the economy without a detour through history and anthropology, which forces us to detect the anti-economy – which no longer comes from utility and interests, but from human passions within the economy”, he noted already in 1974 in The Anti-economic (PUF), with Marc Guillaume.
Tracing the contours of our futures
The dynamics of history, then, already highlighted in Tomorrow, who will govern the world ? (Fayard), in 2011, punctuated by innovations that each time move the heart of the world economy towards new poles: Bruges, then Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, Boston, New York, Los Angeles…
The crucial role of information in the upheavals of the world, too. And continue to plead, as in The Word and the Tool (PUF), published in 1975, “for a society which is neither enslaved to the sacrifices of production, nor to the simulacra of information”.
And then this obsession with tracing the contours of our future. Without complex, Jacques Attali has always refuted the idea that the future is unpredictable. Often with good reason, as when he announced in 1990, in horizon lines (Fayard), the advent of nomadic objects.
The governance of the planet, of course, is the focus of all attention. Already in Tomorrow, who will govern the world ?, the author multiplied the hypotheses: the United States? China ? India? Europe? The G20? The UN? The multinationals ? The mafias? Faced with the emergencies of the time, Attali’s responses are now clear-cut. No institution will be able to organize global cooperation, there will be neither G7 nor G20 but a G0 to deal with the three existential threats that weigh on humanity: climate change, hyperconflict and artificialization of our lives – health, education, power, intelligence… To escape these three threats, only two paths are possible: dictatorship or individual awareness. Tipping the scales in favor of the second is not the less ambitious goal of this book.
The World, user manuals
by Jacques Attali.
Flammarion, 290 pages, €20.
The rating of L’Express: 4/5