Où ce-qu’il vient de?

The sociologist Joseph Yvon Thériault is a remarkable figure in Canada’s French-language intellectual life. Extraordinarily prolific, he has written on community identity, cosmopolitanism, international perceptions of Quebec, modernity, small societies and large. Or, as the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation puts it, on “citizenship, democracy, the ­welfare state, memory, the French-speaking world and collective identity.” He has led research groups and headed university departments. And, above all, he has reflected on what it means to be Acadian.

Thériault recently retired, after a career spent first at the University of Ottawa and then at the Université du Québec à Montréal. (A Festschrift, Sur les traces de la démocratie: Autour de l’œuvre de Joseph Yvon Thériault, to which I have contributed, is due out next year.) Nevertheless, he continues to publish at a remarkable rate, including L’autre moitié de la modernité, a collection of conversations with...