Racine says in the prologue to Berenice that "the principal rule is to please and to move: all others are merely meant to achieve this first one." To please, to move: that is to say, to seduce. In this book, Gilles Lipovetsky addresses the issue from two angles. First, erotic seduction, from the courtship rituals of primitive societies to online dating sites. But there is a second, broader field; in our current society, the techniques of seduction are also applied in other domains: economics, politics, education, the media… We enter what the author calls consumerist Don Juanism.

The imperative no longer seems to be to compel, command, discipline, and repress, but rather to please and move through seduction. The seduction that surrounds us provokes the emergence of a hypertrophied individualism in relation to the other, generating a way of intervening in the behavior of individuals and governing them in liberal democratic societies. This essay addresses these mechanisms with precision and depth, and how they affect our lives.