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.
Philosophy has something to say about wine: about its definition, how to savor it, what it inspires, but also about the virtues of inebriation.
Michel Crozier’s work was shaped by the conviction that organizational phenomena create society. He helped pioneer the tools for analyzing groups established to carry out a common project according to a specific system of action and rules of the game.
Katharina Pistor has renewed the critique of economic inequality by showing how the institutions of private law form the lock of an unequal economic and social system.
Contemporary uses of the word “Muslim” in France illustrate the variety of ways in which minorities identify themselves. In a book that straddles semantics and ethnography, Marie-Claire Willems sheds light on the diversity of forms of belonging available to populations exposed to exclusion.
The encounter between British miners and gay and lesbian activists during the strikes of 1984-85 was explored in the celebrated film Pride. A historian looks back at this memorable period and reveals the continuities between the two movements.
About: Isabelle Poutrin, Les convertis du pape. Une famille de banquiers juifs à Rome au XVIe siècle, Seuil
About: Guillaume Alonge & Olivier Christin, Adam et Eve, le paradis, la viande et les légumes, Anacharsis
About: Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Yale University Press
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.
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 this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, six contributors from France, Russia and the US address the issue of contemporary Russia and its often tense relations with the West.
In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, four participants from France, Germany and the US re-visit the inequalities debate sparked by Thomas Piketty’s Capital, comparing perceptions of income, economic equality and political economy.
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 questions the social construction of racial identities, and the history of domination.
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?
How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.
According to Nancy Fraser, the renewal of socialism requires a conflation of activism and political theory; indeed, emancipation can only exist on the basis of equal participation in all spheres of life, and can only be understood in terms of social struggles, which today appear in multiple forms.
Entre ordre et transgression, critique sociale et fascination pour l’étrange, l’image de la folie dans l’art modifie le regard porté sur la marginalité. Du Moyen Âge au romantisme, de la fête des fous à l’enfermement, les représentations reflètent autant de regards sur l’insensé.
Dans un essai à la forme composite, Jean-Claude Schmitt poursuit son étude des images médiévales, une étude aussi sémantique et historique que plastique sur la manière dont l’Occident médiéval pense l’image et parfois pense par l’image.
Le pilori a longtemps été considéré comme une peine typiquement médiévale avec toutes les connotations négatives traditionnelles. À l’aune d’une lecture anthropologique, la condamnation au pilori apparaît comme un outil et surtout un rituel, permettant à la société urbaine de se reconstituer.
À propos de : Omer Bartov, Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israël Palestine. First Person History in Times of Crisis, Bloomsbury Academic
À propos de : Olivier Mahéo, De Rosa Parks au Black Power : Une histoire Populaire des mouvements noirs, 1945-1970, Presses Universitaires de Rennes
À propos de : Evanghelia Stead, Goethe’s Faust I Outlined. Moritz Retzsch’s Prints in Circulation, Brill
