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.
Under the Ancien Régime, salaries were not enough to live on. Many people had to combine activities to make ends meet. Laurence Fontaine paints a vivid picture of this reality.
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.
The “California dream” does not date back to the Gold Rush of the 19th century, but only to the 20th, and is more a matter of criticism than enthusiasm. Louis Warren invites us to put this myth into perspective, and to be wary of the tendency to see California as the laboratory of the United States.
Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city’s lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.
In ancient Greece, religious rites were designed to produce a unique state of receptivity. This book, which focuses on the tools used in sensory encounters with the gods, contributes to the sensory turn that is currently revitalizing historical studies.
About : Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, La verticale de la peur. Ordre et allégeance en Russie poutinienne, La Découverte
About: Olivier Alexandre, La Tech. Quand la Silicon Valley refait le monde, Seuil
About: Annabelle Bonnet, La barbe ne fait pas le philosophe (1880-1949), CNRS Éditions
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 there still room for hope at the White House?
Books & Ideas is going on holiday for the summer, and will resume its publication schedule in September. In the meantime, we present to you a weekly roundup of our most recent essays and reviews. Our first summer selection features compelling interviews on subjects as varied as food and media studies, African-American history, quantum physics, Russian political culture, and Muslim-Jewish relations.
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.
Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), a poor child who went onto become a university professor, was the epitome of a successful scholarship student. The trajectory of this “exemplary counter-example” sheds light on the mechanisms of social reproduction when they prove inoperative and the distance that can be traveled from one’s native milieu.
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?
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.
Construit pour bloquer le passage des migrants illégaux du Mexique, le Mur constitue aussi en Arizona un barrage pour les non-humains. Au nom de la sécurité nationale, toutes les lois de protection environnementale ont été ignorées.
Les architectes rendent aujourd’hui la terre inhabitable : au lieu de réutiliser ce qui est déjà là, ils poussent à l’extraction des ressources et produisent des déchets impossibles à recycler.
Pendant que les appels à la sobriété et à l’adoption de modes de vie plus respectueux de la nature se multiplient, cet ouvrage propose une approche originale : comprendre les pratiques de renoncement volontaire comme une expérience spirituelle, à partir du concept d’ascèse.
À propos de : Sarah Delale, Élodie Pinel, Marie-Pierre Tachet, Pour en finir avec la passion. L’abus en littérature, Éditions Amsterdam
À propos de : Christine Van Geen, Allumeuse. Genèse d’un mythe, Seuil
À propos de : Jean-Louis Fournel et Jean-Claude Zancarini. Savonarole. L’arme de la parole, Passés composés
