“I have reached the age where offering an utopian vision becomes a duty; an age where epochs all seem equally distant; whether they belong to long passed centuries, or to decades to come, they all relate to a time frame that I will not experience.”
The tone is set from the start: personal, involved, serene. Albert Jacquard’s book is also a manifesto, where, for the first time, he talks about his childhood and youth, as well as his beliefs and utopian ideas. Convinced that in the future the alienation generated by work can disappear, he develops the concept of a “City of learning”, where there would be no talk of social security shortfall because health costs would be integrated to the state budget like that of Education or Defense, where the accumulation of riches would give precedence to communication and exchange, where technology would not be put in the service of exploitation…
A utopian vision? Indeed, yet a reasoned one: can there be anything more rational than to admit that we have to find new ways if we want to avoid the worst that is to come?
Albert Jacquard looks back at the course taken by his life, and describes some of the encounters that shaped it: his meeting with Yehudi Menuhin for instance.
Impervious to political correctness, Jacquard shows how we have become the prisoners of certain ways of thinking and proposes a radical change of perspective.
At a time when candidates to the presidential election are putting the final touches to programmes that all sound alike, Jacquard ‘s is a truly alternative proposal.
Albert Jacquard is known for his atypical background: a former student at the famous Polytechnique college and a specialist in population and genetics, he is involved in the fight for the rights of the poor and excluded. His is a popular and highly topical, humanistic secular wisdom.