She there was a real, complete and living intellectual in France, let’s not hesitate to say it, he was an economist, it was Daniel Cohen. The reason is simple. He pushed to new limits, to face the challenges of the present, these qualities which have always defined an “intellectual” and not only in France. We have indeed forgotten it, but the intellectual is the one who unites recognition by peers in a determined knowledge, but also concern and commitment in the public sphere against proven injustices, and finally the ability to speak to everyone, by his style and if we dare say by his person.
Daniel Cohen possessed and above all united all of this to an unprecedented degree: an economist of the highest and most international science, an admirable pedagogue and a passionate and concerned speaker, in debates but also in public bodies. He sometimes worried after a debate: “My sentence was cut off, I was not understood, we are going to caricature everything. » But no, dear Daniel: each of your words exudes science, commitment and clarity and each and everyone feels it and will always feel it, despite all the caricatures that surround you. We reassure him, therefore.
But his concern had its reasons, deeper than this or that debate and even than this or that context (fox or social networks for example) because this concern perhaps leads to the heart of all his action, all his thought and of all his work.
Daniel Cohen was an economist. But he had long since renounced the too simple optimism of the Enlightenment and in them of economic reason, which consists in trusting the immediate rationality of interests, even when it is implicit or unconscious in the actors. There is indeed an economic rationality; it is not a question of contesting it. We can demonstrate, for example, the harmful and dangerous effects of extreme inequalities. But this rationality will not necessarily have an immediate or automatic effect, through a sort of implicit or unconscious action, as so many scholars and rulers still believe. All the disasters over the past two centuries demonstrate this. This is no reason to renounce reason! Quite the contrary, but it will be necessary to state it, explain it and make it public, without naivety about its immediate effect, and without ever renouncing its possible effect.
Genius of public debate
Basically, this was perhaps the heart of Daniel Cohen’s public action: constructing a public reason in the awareness of possible unreason: without naivety (let us insist) with regard to an economic reason which would govern the social actors without their knowledge, but without giving up on it. Because for Daniel Cohen, it seems to us, one could not be rational or just without knowing it, and therefore knowledge is not enough: because still it is necessary, for each and in the whole of a society, defend and build the public dimension of this knowledge.
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