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.
We seem to struggle to take the measure of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its onset was sudden, its effects are uncertain and its long term consequences are still unpredictable. Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts exploring the various facets of epidemics.
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.
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 China today, its uses of digital technologies to govern, and the political theories developed by its intellectuals.
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?
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.
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.
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