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.
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.
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.
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.
Opening the doors to the backstage of political campaigns, Daniel Laurison invites us to take a closer look at the work of politicos who have played critical roles in presidential elections in the United States.
About: Serge Paugam, L’attachement social, Seuil
About: Camille Dejardin, John Stuart Mill, libéral utopique. Actualité d’une pensée visionnaire, Gallimard
About: Grégory Salle, Qu’est-ce que le crime environnemental ?, 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 resume its publication schedule on August 26. In the meantime, we present to you a weekly selection of essays and reviews published over the past year.
During the Christmas season, Books and Ideas offers a selection of reviews and essays that tackle the subject of cities and the issues they raise as complex centers of urban life: how could we live better in them? How to reduce the inequalities they create? Can they become more sustainable? The following texts cast a new light on all of these questions.
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change is three years old this week but is already under attack. In support of further necessary action to address the changing climate, Public Books & La Vie des Idées offer a collaborative series of articles examining the intersection of climate change and capitalism.
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’.
Fred Block & Margaret Somers, two key members of an international network of scholars appealing to Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece of 1944, forcefully argue that it constitutes a critical resource for understanding not only the nature and origins of the market economy but also its recurrent crises, including the current one.
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 ?
Il faut reconstruire l’universel : non comme un modèle surplombant qui devrait s’appliquer à toutes les régions du monde, mais à partir de leur singularité – latéralement et non d’en haut.
Muse du cinéma moderne puis « insoumuse » révoltée, l’actrice et réalisatrice féministe Delphine Seyrig semble plus que jamais notre contemporaine, par la persistance de son aura comme par l’écho rencontré par ses combats.
À propos de : Victor Pereira, C’est le peuple qui commande, la révolution des Œillets 1974-1976, Éditions du Détour,
À propos de : Daniel Laurison, Producing Politics : Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Priviledged Few Shape Politics for All of Us, Beacon Press
À propos de : Constance Rimlinger, Féministes des champs. Du retour à la terre à l’écologie queer, Presses universitaires de France