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.
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.
During the Christmas season, Books and Ideas offers a selection of reviews and essays that tackle the subject of cities and the issues they raise as complex centers of urban life: how could we live better in them? How to reduce the inequalities they create? Can they become more sustainable? The following texts cast a new light on all of these questions.
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.
Miguel Abensour profoundly renewed thinking about democracy. His political philosophy paid close attention to the desire for emancipation and was based on an original conception of utopia breaking with the mythology of the ‘ideal city’ or of a ‘good society’.
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?
A great historian of the English working class, a major intellectual figure in debates surrounding Marxism in the years 1960-1970, and an anti-nuclear activist who initiated an environmentalist critique of capitalism—such were the many faces of Edward Palmer Thompson, whose work deeply permeates the different social sciences to this day.
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