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.
The economic crisis that has plagued a great part of the world since 2008 remains baffling as ever, all questions and no answers. Why not start by listing the former, and then imagine what the latter could look like?
How to combat growing inequalities and injustice in a given country? Recent research suggests that solutions lie in better understanding and controlling access to education and working conditions but also in regulating tax havens and the salaries of executives.
Books & Ideas is going on holiday for the summer, and will resume its publication schedule in September. In the meantime, we present you with a weekly roundup of our most recent essays and reviews. Our second summer selection features portraits of prominent intellectual figures: Albert Camus, René Dumont, Ronald Dworkin, Joan W. Scott and Max Weber.
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.
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.
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.
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