Public Books

One is mistaken to think that corporations dominate the electoral process in the United States is misplaced. The problem is actually deeper: money structures the field of ideas and sets the terms of the debate.

Great Britain only belatedly passed certain laws regulating the funding of political parties. With a small share of public money and varied sources of private funding, this system is accused of favouring large donors and extremism. These criticisms invite us to think of a fairer system.

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.

Once seen as omens, birds continue to point to the future: a few years ago, their change of behavior heralded the beginning of avian flu. Two anthropological studies focus on these avian sentinels. A closer observation of the relationships between species, they argue, would help us better prepare for the pandemics to come.

During the Black Plague, Boccaccio’s Decameron provided readers ways to laugh through the pandemic. A few centuries later, a new kind of pandemic strikes: with Covid-19, the world as we knew it seems forever changed. Can fiction help us imagine new ways of existing together in times of uncertainty?

With the population aging in the US as in many Western countries, COVID-19 has only revealed an increasingly urgent need for care. But the lack of support for caregiving is an ongoing and increasingly shared struggle. How can we care for the caregivers, and build a society that values care?

Hollywood cinema tends to represent climate change in catastrophist and sensationalistic movies. By contrast, a new type of ecological cinema emerges in which the issue of sustainability is taken into account not only as a theme, but also within the film production process.

Predictive models in ecology generally assume that capitalism will be maintained. However, as Claire Sagan argues, adapting to the climate crisis requires that we go beyond the capitalist hegemony and renounce the notion of “Anthropocene”.

The climate crisis demands that corporations be envisioned as “commons”, and that they serve the protection of the material and intangible common goods which, alone, can allow the emancipation of all.

By setting the prices of raw materials, financial markets influence our relation to the environment. Nicolas Bouleau examines the environmental governance of these markets and invites us to shift our priorities away from economic logics toward a concern for nature and for the long term.

Philanthropic foundations are now publicly aknowledged and celebrated as essential actors in the climate struggle. But for what results? As Edouard Morena shows, these foundations actually perpetuate the dominant economic order—an order that many hold accountable for the deepening climate crisis.

A virulent nationalism is currently being injected along Russia’s newly blurred southwestern border with Eastern Ukraine. As tempting as it my be to slip back into Cold War rhetorics, Monica Eppinger warns us that the old framework and distant gaze of geopolitics are prone to missing much.

Since the year 2000, Russia has seen rapidly increasing inequality and the emergence of a “middle class”. At the same time, the demographic crisis has ultimately led to pro-birth policies. Cécile Lefèvre interrogates the evolution of Russia’s social and demographic predicaments in the context of recent economic and geopolitical crises.

In Russia, the government’s propaganda machine is not limited to
the political sphere. In rewriting the country’s history, it is promoting “the decay of rationality and the de-installation of a scientific worldview”. Historian Ekaterina Pravilova addresses the effects of this crisis of knowledge for Russia’s intelligentsia and academic community.

What lies beneath Putinism? Taking a look at Russia’s history and culture, Michel Eltchaninoff shows that the success of Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric, though drawn partly from pre-Revolutionary thought, is as much the result of the post-war Soviet Union’s strong nationalist streak that continues to shape Russian society.

How can we explain Vladimir Putin’s extraordinary levels of popularity in Russia? Beyond accusations of poll manipulation and propaganda, Carine Clément traces the history and characteristics of “Putinism”, a system of ideas and practices feeding on patriotism and a general sense of political apathy throughout Russia.

As pundits in the West comment on the rise of “anti-Americanism” in Russia, Americans wonder about the origins of this anti- US sentiment. In this essay, Eliot Borenstein explains that, against all odds, the hostility towards America comes from a place of love.

While confessing her admiration for Thomas Piketty, American economist Nancy Folbre has three objections to his theories. What is the impact of labor inequalities on class conflicts? What part do gender-based differences play? And lastly, aren’t economic inequalities between nations even more problematic than those between individuals?