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.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, reviews and interviews published over the past year, exploring the relationship between music and politics.
In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, six contributors from France, Russia and the US address the issue of contemporary Russia and its often tense relations with the West.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection questions our global consumerism, looks back in its history and analyses its legal framework.
Thanks to his work on Greco-Roman antiquity, his intellectual curiosity, his pronounced taste for interdisciplinarity, his sense of humor, and the freedom that informs all his research, Paul Veyne is a twentieth-century historian whose work cannot be avoided. A loose cannon at the heart of the academic establishment, a deep thinker and a dilettante, Veyne invites us, through his work, to a festival of thought.
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.
One of Albert O. Hirschman’s contributions to economic theory is a richer understanding of the concept of the “rational actor,” which, he demonstrated, possesses the deliberative capacities that democratic market societies require. This following is a profile of an economist who was also a dissident and an activist.
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