Useful insights.

This test of Virginia Martin is brave, even foolhardy. Courageous because it takes bravely against the foot of the currently fashionable theories. Bold because the author draws hazardous conclusions fair conclusions. She is also aware of the risky nature of the project and warns us that the first lines as soon as that work was completed before the killings in January 2015, the words became more difficult to hear.
The subtitle sums up the ambition: "For a universalism of differences." It is a fact, our world, especially in its western part, is becoming more cosmopolitan. Migration, zero barriers that can not effectively stop the spread of low-cost travel, and especially the internet and social networks, put us in permanent contact with the other, the different. This cosmopolitanism is a hybridization factor that is found in other areas such as robotics, genetics, the links between technology and medicine (artificial organs, various locations) but also in the recent claims gender , generating concerns but difficult to control (just across the border to provide surrogacy). Faced with these processes also have their economic component (uncontrollable financial flows, transnational corporations freed states, tax havens) nation-state governments are perceived as helpless by the voters. They have the feeling of a world that escapes them, on which they have taken over. There is certainly the first explanation fallback votes observable everywhere in the West, particularly in France old nation state.
After finding this hard to deny the author encourages us to accept an inevitable historical development. And it is here that his courageous test becomes reckless because it must be said that some of its proposals perplexing: for example the idea of ​​replacing election by a draw, certainly the policy should not be a trade cut off from the daily life of other citizens, but the desire and experience in complex societies, are not negligible success factors. We also can not agree with his rejection of the law on the veil in the name of respect for diversity. But more fundamentally Virginia Martin leaves us a bit in midstream because it is useful and healthy to draw attention to a reality that does not exorcise shouting "Republic! Republic!" but thinking hard "Homogeneity! Homogeneity" it is unclear how today again become credible policies that wish could not hear what goes up the people and expresses the anguish of the future. We live in public companies and which, because of technology, will be more and more, but the consideration is the rising fears and folds. Every politician must take account of whatever partisan response. The diversity and hybridization are more factors of cultural insecurity (to borrow the title of the recent book by Laurent Bouvet). It must be taken into account except to generate disasters (not just voters, nihilism is just as serious).
The lighting brings this book is interesting and we exchange some tunes (eg secularism as miracle cure), but it leaves us somewhat helpless against the requirements of accountability. One last observation, personal one, although some authors like Alain Finkielkraut often make the same observation is that political action is decidedly difficult today, it is shared among multiple conflicting requirements, and the stigmatization of the political in their generality is outrageous.