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.
Arrests, torture, massacres: the Assad clan has been tormenting the Syrian people for the past 50 years. This major collective work provides conclusive evidence of the violence to which Europe turns a blind eye.
The EU aims for net climate neutrality by 2050, utilizing the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) as its main tool. But the climate crisis demands more than market mechanisms. It requires comprehensive planning and legal frameworks that prioritize public over private interests.
Rachel St. John explores the diverse range of nation-building projects that vied for legitimacy and land across the continent during the XIXe century, illuminating the diversity of North American political history and the contingency of national growth and definition.
Have France’s Jews been excluded from the great national narrative? The fact is, their archives are as rich as they are significant, bearing witness to a very long history. Moreover, they provide a basis for writing the “external” as well as the “internal” history of Jewish communities.
Opening the doors to the backstage of political campaigns, Daniel Laurison invites us to take a closer look at the work of politicos who have played critical roles in presidential elections in the United States.
About: Serge Paugam, L’attachement social, Seuil
About: Camille Dejardin, John Stuart Mill, libéral utopique. Actualité d’une pensée visionnaire, Gallimard
About: Grégory Salle, Qu’est-ce que le crime environnemental ?, 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.
Is it really the case, as is often alleged, that money decides everything about elections? As the US presidential election is looming, La Vie des idées/Books & Ideas and Public Books team up to examine the influence of money in today’s electoral democracies.
Disasters and the tragedies that they entail accumulate, along with human and social science research trying to grasp the significance of their repetition. The aim of the dossier launched today by Books & Ideas is to comprehend the nature of these studies.
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?
“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.
Ronald Dworkin’s innovative and politically ambitious work has become essential reading in political and legal theory. Taking issue with classical political liberalism, he argues that liberty and equality are not mutually exclusive, and are indeed inseparable. And against traditional interpretations of law, he argues that law must be understood by comparing it to a collective novel, a mixture of creativity and interpretation.
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.
Un an après la grève massive du secteur automobile étatsunien en 2023, quels sont les acquis du puissant syndicat United Auto Workers et pourquoi cette grève est-elle l’événement écologique le plus important du mandat de Joe Biden ?
Il faut reconstruire l’universel : non comme un modèle surplombant qui devrait s’appliquer à toutes les régions du monde, mais à partir de leur singularité – latéralement et non d’en haut.
Muse du cinéma moderne puis « insoumuse » révoltée, l’actrice et réalisatrice féministe Delphine Seyrig semble plus que jamais notre contemporaine, par la persistance de son aura comme par l’écho rencontré par ses combats.
À propos de : Victor Pereira, C’est le peuple qui commande, la révolution des Œillets 1974-1976, Éditions du Détour,
À propos de : Daniel Laurison, Producing Politics : Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Priviledged Few Shape Politics for All of Us, Beacon Press
À propos de : Constance Rimlinger, Féministes des champs. Du retour à la terre à l’écologie queer, Presses universitaires de France