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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
About: Adeline Grand-Clément, Au plaisir des dieux. Expériences du sensible dans les rituels en Grèce ancienne, Anacharsis
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
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.
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 our global consumerism, looks back in its history and analyses its legal framework.
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.
Food is now a conspicuous topic, from culinary blogs to magazines, diet books, TV shows and contests. Yet unbeknownst to many, it often holds an underground, clandestine place in some of social science’s major works. This dossier assesses the current importance of such scholarly endeavors, known as “food studies” in the United States.
Umberto Eco is best known to the general public for his novels and critical works in which he developed his theory of reception. Who realizes, however, that this aspect of his work is only one part of a general semiology organized around a philosophy of signs?
A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history.
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.
Comment retracer l’histoire des personnes d’ascendance africaine ? Les recherches d’Olivette Otele montrent combien les multiples trajectoires individuelles, ainsi que leur perception et leurs représentations, sont intimement liées à l’histoire du continent européen et aux enjeux du présent.
L. Coumel offre un bel essai d’histoire sociale sur l’Union soviétique tardive. Il montre comment la société soviétique fut exposée aux mêmes dynamiques que les sociétés d’Europe occidentale : montée de l’individualisme, du loisir, de la recherche de confort.
Les séries distribuées par les plateformes numériques constituent un loisir-phare du quotidien actuel. En analysant le mode de consommation qui s’y articule, il est possible de rendre compte du rapport que ces consommateurs entretiennent avec le temps, le récit et la décision.
À propos de : Philippe Simay, Bâtir avec ce qui reste : quelles ressources pour sortir de l’extractivisme ?, Éditions Terre urbaine
Isabelle Jonveaux, Une culture de la satiété. Enquête sociologique sur le jeûne comme expérience spirituelle, Presses Universitaires de Rennes
À propos de : Sarah Delale, Élodie Pinel, Marie-Pierre Tachet, Pour en finir avec la passion. L’abus en littérature, Éditions Amsterdam
