Universalism, claims the author of The Rights of Others, can only be dialogical – that is, it can only proceed from the gradual mutual recognition of moral positions that were initially opposed.

[...] If postcolonial theories have taught us one thing, it is to mistrust discourses which exalt ‘origins’ – that is, to reject the idea that it is possible to rediscover a ‘virgin’ postcolonial identity beneath the colonial experience. Nothing of the sort exists, and origins are always hybrid. [...]

French has undergone a process of vernacularization – ‘creolization’, as the Afro-Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant would say – on contact with the continent. It has become immanent in the everyday life of millions of Africans, who recognize it as their language.

In On Populist Reason, hegemony is conceived in the form of synecdoche. Synecdoche is a rhetorical figure that consists in taking the part for the whole or conversely (it involves a form of metonymy).

According to Mandel, market capitalism (1700–1850) and monopoly capitalism (up to 1960) have been succeeded by a ‘third age’ of capitalism – precisely ‘late’ capitalism. It is characterized, inter alia, by the rise of multinational firms, a new international division of labour, an explosion of financial markets, the emergence of novel means of communication, and the weakening of the traditional labour movement