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.
Can one save the planet and still be a capitalist? For Hélène Tordjman, the answer is “no.” To save nature, capitalism must be abandoned. Not an easy task!
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.
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.
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.
About: Pierre-Étienne Vandamme, Démocratie et Justice sociale, Vrin
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
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.
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?
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will resume its publication schedule on August 26. In the meantime, we present to you a weekly selection of essays and reviews published over the past year.
Summer is here; Books&Ideas is off on holiday. We will be back with new publications starting August 30. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.
Now a well-known Chinese lawyer of the democratic dissidence in China, Zhang Sizhi was once a young nationalist, a high-ranking official in the court of Beijing and a victim of anti-rightist repression. In his memoirs, he provides a detailed and fascinating description of the profession and China in the second half of the 20th century.
Rediscovering an activist thinker who was at the origins of eco-feminism, but remains unknown. Her work inspired an extremely heterogeneous movement, but has her ambition to concretely transform the social, economic and political organisation of society been pursued?
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.
Actrices de la sécularisation et de la résistance, les Iraniennes sont la cible du régime depuis 1979. C’est sur cette toile de fond qu’éclate en 2022 le mouvement « Femme, Vie, Liberté ».
Andrea Wulf fait revivre le premier romantisme en retraçant l’histoire toute romanesque du cercle d’hommes et de femmes qui en Allemagne inventèrent le moi moderne.
Colin Jones replace dans sa contingence le récit du 9 thermidor an II (27 juillet 1794), jour du coup de force à la Convention nationale contre Robespierre et ses partisans, en écartant toute idée de conjuration ou de révolte populaire.
À propos de : Camilla Townsend, Le cinquième soleil : une autre histoire des Aztèques, Albin Michel
À propos de : Ariel Colonomos, Pricing Lives : The Political Art of Measurement (OUP, 2023)
À propos de : Carlos Fausto, Le jaguar apprivoisé. Essais d’ethnologie amazonienne, Presses universitaires du Midi