The wicked city

How can we explain the growing number of political and financial leaders who are veritable pornographers? (Berlusconi and his underage call girls, Sarkozy and his verbal obscenity, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his sexual assaults, etc.) How can we understand that the West, in the century of the first Industrial Revolution (17th-18th century), went from the puritanical philosophy of Pascal to the obscene philosophy of the Marquis de Sade? Why did liberalism become a pornographic regime? Dany-Robert Dufour revisits central aspects of Western thought to construct, from a philosophical perspective, a history of libido. Written in clear and irreverent language, this book has won over a wide audience, from the humanities to political science, including psychoanalysis and economics.