Faced with a number of contradictory injunctions, researchers have engaged in controversies and debates. Given the many questions and concerns that the current "data moment" provokes, this special issue proposes to take a step back and reflect on our trade and practices.

This special issue aims at shedding light on different notions of the social link from Plato, Montaigne and Locke, to the Age of Enlightenment, where three articles fuel the debate played out in particular by Hume and Rousseau.

This collection of texts is intended to correct a historical oversight. Johann Nikolaus Tetens (1736-1807) is an ignored thinker, yet he played a central philosophical role in eighteenth-century Germany. He developed the problem of the objectivity of knowledge before Kant and gave previously unknown opportunities to philosophical thought.

The notion of public interest, which has been widespreadly used in France in the eighteenth century, contains a foundamental polysemy: the debates about its definition are linked with the modern characterization of the State and its right.

This issue of Tracés approaches land as a conceptual object, as a power issue, and as the site of many agencies and political possibilities. Ten contributions (translation, note, dialogue and original papers) from several disciplines shed light on a different side of the comeback of land, reinstating land as a major contemporary concern.