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.
Over the past few months, Books and Ideas has been running a series of interviews with leading contemporary scholars, who took the time to discuss their particular topics of research with us. For the Christmas season, we have put together a selection of seven discussions with intellectuals across the humanities and sciences: sociology, history, comparative literature, neuro-biology, anthropology and political science.
This dossier examines the recently reopened debate on regional integration in Asia. What are the obstacles to the construction of an Asian Union? How is the issue tackled in Japan, China or Australia?
After four years of monetary crisis in Europe, with serious political and social consequences for some countries, as well as a general mistrust of Europe’s political and economic models, new analyses bring light on what happened in 2009 and on how to improve the current situation. Books&Ideas presents them in a selection of essays and reviews on Europe, its money, its construction, and its politics.
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.
By asserting that structuralism is a fruitful approach to kinship relations or the difference between the sexes, Françoise Héritier radically renewed anthropological methodology. Her life’s work has also shown us that scientific commitment goes hand-in-hand with societal involvement.
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