Books & Ideas is the English-language mirror website of La Vie des Idées, a free online journal which has gained a large readership and established itself in France as a major place for intellectual debate since 2007.
Do the institutions and procedures of democracy deliver more social justice than authoritarian regimes or a hypothetical government of experts? They can, suggests one philosopher, by virtue of the impartiality they foster between citizens.
Quotas in India contribute to the emancipation of lower castes while producing perverse effects that are difficult to control. Rohini Somanathan questions the right balance between targeted positive discrimination policies and public policies with a universal vocation.
Religious dialogue, trade, slave mobility, knowledge circulation, pilgrimage and intellectual exchange, colonization, resistance, creolization: Africans have been connected to the rest of the world in every possible way.
The political construction of the European Union has broken down. Restarting it would require profoundly changing our ways of thinking about sovereignty, the people and democracy – we must find a new way of thinking about our citizenship.
About: Solenne Carof, Grossophobie. Sociologie d’une discrimination invisible, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
About : John Tolan, Nouvelle histoire de l’islam. VIIe-XXIe siècle, Taillandier
About: Dominique Charpin, En quête de Ninive. Des savants français à la découverte de la Mésopotamie (1842-1975), Collège de France/Les Belles Lettres
Jane Mansbridge has made a major contribution to political theory. She has spent her life combining empirical research with a theoretical approach, and has played a vital role in developing the critique of rational choice and the study of democracy as a permanent process continually in flux.
Rorty made conversation a philosophical genre in its own right, which led him to reject any distinctions he considered futile: between analytic and continental philosophy, between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, between philosophy and literature.
In 1947, Princess Elizabeth promised to serve ‘the great imperial family’, as part of the attempt to remake post-war Britain as a global power. The British Empire collapsed; but this language of service and Commonwealth allowed the Queen to take up the postcolonial concerns of the 21st century.
Recent publications on the Holocaust, as well as the opening of a new archival site for researchers, have enriched the history and historiography of what remains as the most traumatic event of the 20th century. From Saul Friedländer’s cohesive rendition of the genesis and enactment of the final solution (2007), to the opening of the Bad Arolsen archives in Germany in 2008, and the new study of the Warsaw Ghetto archives by Samuel D. Kassow (2007), this dossier presents a selection of five reviews and essays recently published on Books&Ideas, showing that the study of the Holocaust continues to stir up considerable interest in the international research community.
Summer is here. Books&Ideas is off on holiday. We will be back with new publications starting August 29th. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.
Food is now a conspicuous topic, from culinary blogs to magazines, diet books, TV shows and contests. Yet unbeknownst to many, it often holds an underground, clandestine place in some of social science’s major works. This dossier assesses the current importance of such scholarly endeavors, known as “food studies” in the United States.
A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history.
Although now considered a pseudo-science, phrenology was tremendously successful in its Victorian heyday. Tracing the intellectual and scientific journey of George Combe, the ’science’s most prominent promoter in Great Britain, this paper addresses the phrenologists’ little-known contribution to the ’social question’ debate of the day, and the ambiguities of their social gospel.
Fred Block & Margaret Somers, two key members of an international network of scholars appealing to Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece of 1944, forcefully argue that it constitutes a critical resource for understanding not only the nature and origins of the market economy but also its recurrent crises, including the current one.
En septembre 2022, une coalition de droite a gagné les élections suédoises avec le soutien d’un parti d’extrême droite. Comment, en dix ans à peine, la Suède accueillante envers les étrangers est-elle devenue un pays pratiquant une politique migratoire parmi les plus restrictives d’Europe ?
Le patriarcalisme s’est constitué en grande partie en effaçant les voix des femmes, plus encore en les poussant à s’effacer elles-mêmes. Le cinéma permet de démasquer cette stratégie misogyne.
La littérature française porte la trace d’un « fait juif », comme en attestent trois prix Goncourt entre 1955 et 1962. Souvenir de la Shoah et du yiddish perdu, la judéité s’écrit en termes moins identitaires que mémoriels et politiques.
À propos de : Éric Fournier, Nous reviendrons ! Une histoire des spectres révolutionnaires, France, XIXe siècle, Champ Vallon
À propos de : Laure-Hélène Gouffran, Être marchand au Moyen Âge. Une double biographie, XIVe-XVe siècle, CNRS Éditions
À propos de : Meron Mendel, Über Israel reden. Eine deutsche Debatte, Kiepenheuer und Witsch ; Michael Wolffsohn, Ewige Schuld ? 75 Jahre deutsch-jüdisch-israelische Beziehungen, Langen Müller