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.
Maritime spaces are the focus of the major economic, ecological, and geopolitical challenges of our time. Lest they become the site of routine legal violations (ranging from pollution to overfishing), a government of the seas is necessary.
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.
Philosophy has something to say about wine: about its definition, how to savor it, what it inspires, but also about the virtues of inebriation.
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.
About: Marie Cabadi, Lesbiennes et Gays au charbon : Solidarités avec les mineurs britanniques en grève, 1984-1985, EHESS
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
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.
As protests against racism break out all over the world following the murder of George Floyd, Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts examining the history of these multifaceted discriminations and of the struggles for racial justice.
Summer is here; Books&Ideas is off on holiday. We will be back with new publications starting August 30. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.
This dossier examines the recently reopened debate on regional integration in Asia. What are the obstacles to the construction of an Asian Union? How is the issue tackled in Japan, China or Australia?
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.
Miguel Abensour profoundly renewed thinking about democracy. His political philosophy paid close attention to the desire for emancipation and was based on an original conception of utopia breaking with the mythology of the ‘ideal city’ or of a ‘good society’.
Le retour de milliers de Palestiniens sur leur terre après les Accords d’Oslo a suscité une abondante littérature, en partie autobiographique. Loin de célébrer les retrouvailles, elle porte la marque d’un déchirement. Comment dire la patrie, lorsque l’on ne la reconnaît plus, et se dire quand on est pour toujours un exilé ?
En juin 1942, la « nuit fantastique » de Bir Hakeim, fait d’armes modeste en soi, devient un événement d’envergure mondiale, redonnant espoir à ceux qui refusaient d’être d’éternels vaincus. La guerre du désert, vue au plus près.
Peut-on comprendre le nazisme de l’intérieur, du point de vue de ses partisans ? C’est la tâche que se sont fixée trois spécialistes de la période.
À propos de : Olivier Tinland, Le grand principe de l’expérience, Hegel et la philosophie anglaise, Vrin
À propos de : Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les Images médiévales. La figure et le corps, Gallimard
À propos de : Isabelle d’Artagnan, Le Pilori au Moyen Âge dans l’espace français, XIIe-XVe siècle, Presses universitaires de Rennes
