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.
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.
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.
‘Prevent disorder’ is the motto of Russian power, justifying all forms of repression and establishing a partly decentralized system of domination through fear at the hands of local mobs.
The hood-wearing entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are workers subject to often fierce competition. Inequalities abound in the world of innovation.
About: Annabelle Bonnet, La barbe ne fait pas le philosophe (1880-1949), CNRS Éditions
About: Catherine Coquio, Joël Hubrecht, Naïla Mansour, Farouk Mardam-Bey (dir.), Syrie, Le pays brûlé. Le livre noir des Assad (1970-2021), Seuil
About: Mathias Dreyfuss, Aux sources juives de l’histoire de France, 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.
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.
We seem to struggle to take the measure of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its onset was sudden, its effects are uncertain and its long term consequences are still unpredictable. Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts exploring the various facets of epidemics.
Is it really the case, as is often alleged, that money decides everything about elections? As the US presidential election is looming, La Vie des idées/Books & Ideas and Public Books team up to examine the influence of money in today’s electoral democracies.
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.
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.
Now a well-known Chinese lawyer of the democratic dissidence in China, Zhang Sizhi was once a young nationalist, a high-ranking official in the court of Beijing and a victim of anti-rightist repression. In his memoirs, he provides a detailed and fascinating description of the profession and China in the second half of the 20th century.
Le Parti républicain a-t-il vendu son âme au diable en choisissant pour la troisième fois Donald Trump comme candidat ? Comment peut-il porter un homme défiant à ce point tous les garde-fous de la démocratie et réinterprétant aussi radicalement la grammaire conservatrice ?
Prédicateur inspiré par Dieu ou fanatique obnubilé par la réforme des mœurs ? Républicain révolutionnaire et social ou intrigant politique ? Véritable prophète ou subtil imposteur ? Une nouvelle biographie refuse de prendre parti sur frère Savonarole (1452-1498).
Deux spécialistes de la Méditerranée explorent les mobilités qui se sont déployées depuis les expulsions des juifs au XVe siècle jusqu’aux prémices de la colonisation. Ils décrivent des déplacements qui constituent alors la norme, et participent à la construction de sociétés hiérarchisées.
À propos de : Indravati Félicité, Le Saint-Empire face au monde. Contestations et redéfinitions de l’impérialité, XVe-XIXe siècle, CNRS Éditions
À propos de : Anne Catherine Wagner, Coopérer. Les Scop et la fabrique de l’intérêt collectif, CNRS Éditions
À propos de : Marine Rouch, Chère Simone de Beauvoir. Vies et voix de femmes « ordinaires », Correspondances croisées 1958-1986, Flammarion