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.
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.
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.
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.
What economic impacts and consequences did conversion carry in early modern Rome? The history of an elite Jewish family offers revelations about Jewish conversions to Catholicism and the shifts in social status that followed baptism.
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
About: Antoine Grandjean, Métaphysiques de l’expérience. Empirisme et philosophie transcendantale selon Kant, Vrin
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.
The June protests which shook Brazil in 2013 stunned the world. This dossier, published by Books&Ideas, discusses the main issues at the core of these protests, analyzing them in the light of previous mobilizations and explaining why they are essential to the understanding of contemporary Brazil.
How do images shape our worldview ? What do their study bring to our understanding of society ? Through interviews, essays and reviews this dossier shows how the close study of still or moving images has become central to the social sciences. From anthropology to history or literature, taking into account the overwhelming presence of visual representation yields unexpected and original information about human, social and political relationships.
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 focuses on ways to shift our intellectual categories.
What distinguishes a blank canvas from an empty frame? A simple object from a readymade? What is this mysterious gap that art digs as it separates from life? Such are the questions posed by Arthur Danto, a major figure of contemporary art theory.
In an innovative study that returns Albert Camus’ early works to their rightful place in the canon, Laurent Bove suggests we should view Camus as a philosopher of immanence and of acquiescence to the joy of the world. This reading is enlightening as far as Camus’ thoughts on history are concerned, but tends to gloss over the ruptures that run though his work, which is driven with multiple tensions.
By asserting that structuralism is a fruitful approach to kinship relations or the difference between the sexes, Françoise Héritier radically renewed anthropological methodology. Her life’s work has also shown us that scientific commitment goes hand-in-hand with societal involvement.
Entre les 15 et 31 janvier 2025, les agriculteurs sont appelés à voter pour leurs représentants syndicaux au sein des Chambres d’agriculture. S’ouvrant dans un climat de revendications et de défiance tous azimuts, ces élections professionnelles sont l’occasion de se pencher sur un malaise agricole aux multiples dimensions.
Les sociétés qui effacent leur passé en pensant par là éliminer leur culpabilité ne font que menacer leur avenir. Telle est la conviction d’O. Bartov, lui qui a cherché à reconstituer une histoire en première personne de l’Holocauste.
Le mouvement pour les droits civiques aux États-Unis est plus complexe que ce que le grand public en connaît. O. Mahéo en reconstitue la multiplicité discordante et marginalisée.
À propos de : Evanghelia Stead, Goethe’s Faust I Outlined. Moritz Retzsch’s Prints in Circulation, Brill
À propos de : Jean-Pascal Anfray, Descartes- More. Correspondance 1648-1655, Éliott
À propos de : Vincent Tiberj, La droitisation française. Mythe et réalités, Puf
