I say that those who condemn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs appear to me to be blaming the very things that were the first reason for Rome’s remaining free and to be paying more attention to the shouts and cries that these tumults aroused than to the good effects they generated.
Machiavelli
The biannual journal Tumultes was founded in 1992 by a group of academics at Université Paris 7 who wanted to create a space for reflecting on contemporary political issues that would also act as a crucible for collective intelligence. The journal’s editorial approach has remained unchanged to this day. Its themed issues are like collectively published books, remaining interesting reads well after they are published, since they examine topical questions from multiple angles, diving deeply into the issue, combining different approaches and disciplines, and adopting an international, even global point of view. Previous issues of Tumultes have focused on topics such as fundamentalism, the fall of communism, war, national identity, the state, biopolitics, citizenship, domination and resistance, violence, postcolonialism, the decolonization of arts and knowledge, and more. Tumultes also makes an effort to translate important authors from other language backgrounds and to share them with a francophone audience. This approach helps to highlight how theories and ideas circulate, diverge, and sometimes come together on a given continent, or between one continent and another. The Tumultes editorial board believes that literary works, visual art, and sometimes even music can enlighten political analysis, and vice versa. Tumultes has also repeatedly sought to cast new light on certain schools of thought (the Frankfurt School, postmodernism) and certain authors (Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
While the journal is largely aimed at an academic audience, it is not limited to this milieu. Tumultes is also intended for a wider public of readers who are interested in an in-depth analysis of the issues at hand. The editorial board’s goal is to participate in the circulation of knowledge, but also in intellectual debate, which is always closely intertwined with what is happening in the political sphere. The issues published over the last thirty years are proof of this commitment, and future issues will not diverge from this path.
