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 French Third Republic, the gender of “citizenship” and “philosophy” was masculine. Yet women pioneers managed to obtain university degrees and rise to positions of responsibility from which they had been excluded.
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.
Rachel St. John explores the diverse range of nation-building projects that vied for legitimacy and land across the continent during the XIXe century, illuminating the diversity of North American political history and the contingency of national growth and definition.
Arrests, torture, massacres: the Assad clan has been tormenting the Syrian people for the past 50 years. This major collective work provides conclusive evidence of the violence to which Europe turns a blind eye.
Have France’s Jews been excluded from the great national narrative? The fact is, their archives are as rich as they are significant, bearing witness to a very long history. Moreover, they provide a basis for writing the “external” as well as the “internal” history of Jewish communities.
Reviewed: Daniel Laurison, Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Priviledged Few Shape Politics for All of Us, Beacon Press
About: Serge Paugam, L’attachement social, Seuil
About: Camille Dejardin, John Stuart Mill, libéral utopique. Actualité d’une pensée visionnaire, Gallimard
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.
In order to better grasp protests and social movements in China, whose number has impressively swollen in recent years, Books&Ideas presents a dossier on the evolution of social mobilization and on the representation of social instability in this country.
The current world-wide demand for “real” democracy as embodied in the Indignados (15-M) movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement reiterates long-lasting frustrations as regards representative government and the incompleteness of democratic experiences throughout the world. This dossier gathers interviews and essays by renowned scholars on the conception of democracy as an on-going experience and not as a finished model.
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.
“Do we have the right to make bets on the future of mankind?” Forty-one years after being the first ecologist candidate in a presidential campaign and publishing his manifesto book, René Dumont’s intuitions and warnings have lost little of their relevance.
André Gorz’s multiform thought is entirely centred on liberation: from work, which prevents individuals from thriving; from consumption, which grows ever higher; and from the social system, which reduces individuals to mere pawns in a “megamachine”.
Although now considered a pseudo-science, phrenology was tremendously successful in its Victorian heyday. Tracing the intellectual and scientific journey of George Combe, the ’science’s most prominent promoter in Great Britain, this paper addresses the phrenologists’ little-known contribution to the ’social question’ debate of the day, and the ambiguities of their social gospel.
Un an après la grève massive du secteur automobile étatsunien en 2023, quels sont les acquis du puissant syndicat United Auto Workers et pourquoi cette grève est-elle l’événement écologique le plus important du mandat de Joe Biden ?
Sacralisée depuis les deux Guerres mondiales, prépondérante dans la mémoire historique, la victime est devenue la nouvelle figure du héros, formant ainsi une exemplarité nouvelle et controversée.
En suivant le parcours de Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbdallāh, mamlouk à Tunis ayant connu une belle ascension sociale au XIXe siècle, M. Oualdi nous guide entre l’Empire ottoman, la Tunisie et l’Europe, et en profite pour bousculer les cloisonnements entre historiographie ottomane, coloniale et maghrébine.
À propos de : Stéphanie Soubrier, Races guerrières. Enquête sur une catégorie impériale (1850-1918), CNRS Editions
À propos de : Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Universaliser. « L’humanité par les moyens d’humanité », Albin Michel ; Ubuntu. Entretien avec Françoise Blum, Éditions de l’EHESS
À propos de : Jean-Marc Lalanne, Delphine Seyrig en constructions, Capricci