Putting Belief Back Where It Belongs. Review of Jean-Claude Guillebaud, La Force de conviction (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005)

Belief (religious or otherwise) is a subject of debate at the start of the 21st century, what with Islamist terrorism (Al Qaeda), a religious revival that is sometimes close to fundamentalism in the United States and Latin America, but also the decline in religious observance in Europe and excessive faith in some aspects of scientific progress (transhumanism, for example). Jean-Claude Guillebaud, observing the return or the potentially threatening appearance of certain dogmatisms and clericalisms (religious, but also in economics, science and politics), has devoted his most recent book to the question of belief. “What can we believe in?”, he asks, or in other words how do we distinguish blindly held beliefs from reasonable convictions? Benjamin Delannoy has read this essay for Futuribles and summarizes its main points.