The 2006 François Guizot Prize

The Calvados County Council's seventh Guizot Prize was awarded to Alain Finkielkraut for his book We moderns. Four lessons.

A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud and holder of an agrégation in modern literature, he teaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the École Polytechnique. He is the author of a large number of books and articles, the common thread of which is a critical observation of modernity. He is also a frequent speaker at contemporary events, offering an original interpretation of the issues. He is a founding member of the Institut d'études Lévinassiennes in Paris and Jerusalem and also presents a radio programme on France-Culture. He was elected to the Académie Française on 10 April 2014.

We moderns. Four lessons.

«Unread Descartes determines us whether we like it or not», writes Hans Jonas. This determination is the primary object of my teaching. It's not philosophy, it's their philosophy that I'm trying to teach my students at the Ecole Polytechnique.
What does Descartes have in mind for us? Just yesterday, the answer might have been: to make ourselves methodically, polytechnically masters of all things in order to alleviate the lot of mankind and make their lives more pleasant.
It has become difficult to set the calculations of reason against the darkness of superstition without further ado, because there is nothing reasonable about the processes that reason unleashes.
It is this paradox, this philosophical surprise reserved for philosophy, this shaking of modernity by itself that I have tirelessly sought to explore and question in the lessons we are about to read. Instead of the questions that the intellect poses on its own initiative, according to its own project or plans, and to which it puts the world on notice to respond, I have preferred the questions that the world poses and imposes on an intellect that cannot but, and I have chosen as my pedagogical maxim this confidence of the immense teacher that Michelet also was: «I have always been careful never to teach anything that I did not know. I had found these things as they were then in my passion, new, animated, burning, under the first attraction of love». Source: Alain Finkielkraut.

Speech by Jean-Claude Casanova, Chairman of the Jury.

Speech by Alain Finkielkraut, winner of the Prix Guizot-Calvados.