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.
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 articles published over the last year.
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change is three years old this week but is already under attack. In support of further necessary action to address the changing climate, Public Books & La Vie des Idées offer a collaborative series of articles examining the intersection of climate change and capitalism.
As populism is rising on a global level, Books & Ideas offers a series on media politics in East Asian countries, to be published over the next two weeks. Though situations are extremely diverse, they can teach us a lot on the relationship between the state and journalists in authoritarian contexts. What role is left for the media to play in non-democracies?
Though poorly known in France, the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas is nonetheless essential for understanding the elementary forms of social organization and daily life. By shedding light on her academic career and personal life, this portrait rehabilitates the thought of a major intellectual.
Leading 19th century statesman, political economist, architect of the 1860 commercial treaty between France and the United Kingdom, and campaigner for peace between European nations, Michel Chevalier had also been a dominant voice in the Romantic socialism of Saint-Simonianism: the eclectic nature of his thought would lend itself to a particular vision of Europe, forerunner of today’s European Union.
“Do we have the right to make bets on the future of mankind?” Forty-one years after being the first ecologist candidate in a presidential campaign and publishing his manifesto book, René Dumont’s intuitions and warnings have lost little of their relevance.
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