Researchers in political sciences, communication or sociology who are interested in the public sphere are not as concerned with a civil and solidarity-based economy perspective. Conversely, economists and sociologists working on the civil and solidarity-based economy often do not use the concept of the public sphere in their conceptual equipment. This type of compartmentalization is partly due to an opposition between work, defined as an alienating activity, and political activity defined as an action typical of the free man that many (...) authors claim to borrow from Hannah Arendt and introduces a radical dichotomy between the economic and public spheres. However, as a historical investigation clearly indicates, the analytical distinction between the political order and the economic order cannot be transformed into an empirical dissociation. The civil and solidarity-based economy thus invites the researcher to think about economic activity and political activity together in order to look further into the concept of public sphere. (shrink)

Un foisonnement d'expériences associatives et coopératives s'est manifesté dans les différents pays européens depuis les années 1970, particulièrement dans le champ des initiatives locales et des nouveaux services relationnels. Selon la grille d'analyse adoptée qui privilégie le potentiel de démocratisation, ces pratiques peuvent être mieux comprises à travers une perspective d'économie solidaire que par les références habituelles au tiers secteur, à l'économie sociale et aux organisations non gouvernementales. Néanmoins, comme l'interdépendance entre actions collectives et publiques s'avère déterminante dans l'histoire européenne (...) pour organiser une résistance à l'utopie d'une « société de marché », le devenir de l'économie solidaire est étroitement lié à la reconnaissance par les pouvoirs publics. Tant au niveau national qu'international celle-ci reste partielle et la pertinence d'un soutien ne fait pas consensus comme le montre la position de l'Union européenne.A large amount of associative and cooperative experiments has arisen everywhere in Europe since the 1970s particularly in the fields of local initiatives and new “relational” services. Our framework of analysis shows these practices are better understood by a civil and solidarity-based economy perspective, emphasizing their potential of economic democratization, rather than by the usual references to third sector, social economy or non-governmental organizations. Nevertheless, since collective and public action has interacted decisively in European history to organize resistance against the utopic vision of the “market society”, the future of this solidarity-based economy appears to be closely linked to its recognition by public policies. But at the European and national levels, this still remains partial and the relevance of such an economy is a highly controversial subject as the European Union’s position demonstrates. (shrink)