Science and Literature: Reconciling “Two Cultures”

The Revue d'économie financière (REF) has decided to initiate a “Finance and Literature” column beginning with this issue. The column will feature an excerpt from a literary text intended to broaden the perspectives of the central theme chosen for each issue. The text will be accompanied by a brief commentary. The ambition is modest, but it is ambitious in the sense that it comes at the right time. Indeed, we believed long gone the traditional opposition between the “two cultures”, humanities on the one hand and modern sciences on the other. There was certainly something of this myth left in the symmetrical, often legitimate, accusations against technocrats and experts, through the criticism of the sterile “governance by number” approach, of which the great jurist Alain Supiot has described the excesses in his lectures at the Collège de…