In his latest book, The Crisis of Culture, Olivier Roy argues that the lack of shared cultural understanding in the modern world has resulted in everything becoming explicit codes of behavior, often manifested online. Identities are now defined by personal traits, leading to fragmented sub-cultures seeking safe spaces. The author suggests that the increased focus on identity in political discourse fails to address the underlying crisis of culture and community and proposes that the solution lies in rebuilding social bonds at the grassroots level.
This conversation will be moderated by American Library in Paris 2024-25 Visiting Fellow, David A. Bell.
About the speakers:
Olivier Roy is Professor at the European University Institute (Florence) where he headed the ReligioWest research project (funded by the European Research Council). Mr. Roy received an “Agrégation de Philosophie” and a Ph.D. in Political Sciences. He is the author of The failure of political Islam (Harvard UP 1994), Globalized Islam (Columbia University Press, 2004), Holy Ignorance (Hurst/ Oxford UP, 2010), Jihad and Death (Hurst 2017), In Search of the Lost Orient (Columbia UP 2017), The Crisis of Culture (Hurst/ Oxford UP 2024).
David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton where he recently served as director of Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Born in New York in 1961, he was educated at Harvard and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris before completing his doctorate at Princeton in 1991. Before returning to Princeton in 2010 he taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins, where he also served as Dean of Faculty. A specialist in the history of France, he is the author of seven books, including The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, and most recently Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution.
