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This text analyzes the features and the figures of the legitimate citizen in the sphere of school, through both official guidelines and school staff's conceptions and practices. Data from two qualitative fieldwork surveys in French schools are used. The analysis focuses on the political dimension of citizenship: the relationship between individuals and power and their agency in collective and political life. Overall, citizens' participation is a secondary dimension in school citizenship education, which rather emphasizes the intellectual autonomy of the critical citizen. The school hardly offers tools enabling students to understand political life, its issues, its actors and its concrete processes. The avoidance of political issues that is observed in classrooms is related to a particular conception of school political neutrality, but still more to the objective of cohesion officially attributed to school and recognized by teachers as legitimate. In other respects, citizenship is increasingly intended to be translated into the school life itself, whose modes of organization must move closer to those of adult political democracy. The article shows the limitations of such an analogy between the school and political society and identifies several obstacles that hinder the implementation of this “democratic school”. Lastly, it highlights the gap between the emphasis on the figure of individual citizen in the school space and the relationship to groups entailed by the actual practice of citizenship.

Keywords: citoyenneté, éducation, école, socialisation politique, pouvoir, participation politique, citizenship, education, school, political socialization, power, political participation

What does the renewal of republicanism mean? Are we, as a lot of people think, to understand republicanism as a real alternative to political liberalism? Is republicanism perfectly distinct from political liberal? Is it able to avoid its pitfall? This paper addresses these questions, focusing on the case of freedom of conscience. Through a dialogue between Rawls's political liberalism and Cécile Laborde's critical republicanism, I explain why republicanism claims it overcomes political liberalism. Nevertheless, I emphasise on the fact that a perfectionist interpretation of republicanism presents some difficulties and I propose an alternative neutralist interpretation. However, such an interpretation calls into question the idea that republicanism is an alternative to political liberalism.

The institutionalisation of minority communities in Canada: from political communities to community policies? As an enigmatic object, communities are the topic of original analyses in Canada, which are nevertheless embedded in the dichotomy between “society-centred” and “state-centred” approaches of the politics identity. In this paper, we propose a neo-institutionalist perspective of minority communities that helps to apprehend communities as the result of the interaction between the group's (internal) social dynamics and the (external) nation-building public policies implemented by the federal government. The first part of the paper is devoted to scientific literature on minority identities which, in terms of regional nationalism or institutional completeness, considers that communities are mini-polities where the use of identity allows a collective management of community issues. In a second part, we examine recent literature suggesting that formally “weak” North American states should be considered as having a strong effective capacity for action, an “infrastructural power” to construct a meta-polity. The federal state has thus implemented community public policies that construct communities consistent with its strategies for nation-building. The conclusion focuses on the “nature” of the minority communities in Canada to question the relevance of the concept of “institutional completeness” as a bottom-up response to the top-down governmentality of the federal state.

Keywords: communauté, nationalisme minoritaire, instruments de politique publique, néo-institutionnalisme, community, minority nationalism, public policy instruments, new institutionalism

Without blindly condemning the world system within which we live, nor systematically finding fault with every action or policy favouring cultural integration, the author seeks, in the first part of this article, to become aware (1) of the nature of the system (humanism, world norms, megamachine), (2) of the homogenizing tendencies which threaten existing cultures, and (3) of the characteristics of the modern Nation-State.In the second part of this article, he examines: (1) what can be done in the present context to change the « integrationist » political system even though we are necessarily a part of that system, (2) some concrete measures which are part of the political strategy proposed by the Monchanin Intercultural Center of Montreal.

Anchored in a critical appraisal of the coupled concepts “gender” and “political science” in the Quebec context, this article argues that the main difficulty in integrating not only gender as a category of analysis, but a feminist perspective into political science, is epistemological and resides in the discipline's andro- and eurocentrism. Drawing on contributions from standpoint, critical, and postcolonial theories related to the notion of voice, and the body, this article proposes a “border feminism” that relies on interrelationship, translocalization, and transdisciplinarity as central epistemological axes.

Keywords: épistémologie, féminisme, décolonialité, science politique, pensée de frontière, epistemology, feminism, decoloniality, political science, border thinking

A surprise initiated this article. The surprising detail that began the research: the use, by Gabriel Naudé, in the XVIIth c., in his Considérations politiques sur les coups d'États, of a text attributed to saint Thomas Aquinas to legitimize his use of Machiavelli and his own propositions. This article interprets this unique use of Aquinas.