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.
What if human lives actually do have a price tag? Ariel Colonomos analyses the social and political conditions of pricing practices for human lives, offering an innovative interpretation of the role of the state in modern European history.
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.
A history of masculinity and a history of men, this collective volume shows that while “ideal” Nazi masculinity was opposed to that of Jews and homosexuals, it was also contested and fragmented, both in the private sphere and on the battlefield.
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.
About: François-Xavier Fauvelle et Anne Lafont, L’Afrique et le monde : histoires renouées. De la préhistoire au XXIe siècle, La Découverte
About: Céline Spector, No Demos ? Souveraineté et démocratie à l’épreuve de l’Europe, Seuil
About: Solenne Carof, Grossophobie. Sociologie d’une discrimination invisible, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
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 and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on ways to shift our intellectual categories.
How to renew the currently dwindling support for democratic governance? To the minds of theorists and historians, whether advocating going back to classical political traditions like Republicanism or drawing lots, or experimenting new approaches, increased political participation may be the best path to follow.
Books&Ideas presents a second summer selection, in which contemporary historians tell us about the future of history as a discipline, about how they research and write history, and the way history affects their bodies and minds.
How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.
Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), a poor child who went onto become a university professor, was the epitome of a successful scholarship student. The trajectory of this “exemplary counter-example” sheds light on the mechanisms of social reproduction when they prove inoperative and the distance that can be traveled from one’s native milieu.
La résilience de l’économie russe, en dépit de la guerre et des sanctions, conduit à s’interroger : quels en sont les facteurs et les limites ?
La valeur d’une vie humaine est-elle mesurable ? Ariel Colonomos analyse les conditions politiques et sociales des pratiques de valorisation des vies humaines et ouvre une perspective novatrice sur le rôle de l’Etat dans l’histoire européenne moderne.
Les sociétés amazoniennes ont longtemps été considérées comme des sociétés égalitaires aux relations symétriques. Carlos Fausto montre que les relations asymétriques du type maître-animal apprivoisé sont pourtant au cœur de la théorie politique locale.
À propos de : Philippe Sénac, L’autre bataille de Poitiers. Quand la Narbonnaise était arabe (VIIIe siècle), Armand Colin
À propos de : Hélène Frappat, Le Gaslighting ou l’art de faire taire les femmes, L’Observatoire
À propos de : Nelly Wolf, Le Juif imaginé, d’Elsa Triolet à Romain Gary, CNRS Éditions