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.
The encounter between British miners and gay and lesbian activists during the strikes of 1984-85 was explored in the celebrated film Pride. A historian looks back at this memorable period and reveals the continuities between the two movements.
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.
Katharina Pistor has renewed the critique of economic inequality by showing how the institutions of private law form the lock of an unequal economic and social system.
What economic impacts and consequences did conversion carry in early modern Rome? The history of an elite Jewish family offers revelations about Jewish conversions to Catholicism and the shifts in social status that followed baptism.
The question of original sin no longer concerns us as much as that of diet. But what if it were the same?
About: Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Yale University Press
About: Antoine Grandjean, Métaphysiques de l’expérience. Empirisme et philosophie transcendantale selon Kant, Vrin
About: Sylvain Mary, Décoloniser les Antilles ? Une histoire de l’État post-colonial (1946-1982), Sorbonne Université Presses
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.
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.
Historians, sociologists, and social scientists in general have long tried to “think big” and “global.” The rise of Asia in the world economy has stimulated anew this attraction for the macro-level. Books and Ideas proposes to look at some of the most innovative ways this work has been done recently, in the history of ideas, of trade and cultural exchanges, economic convergences and decolonization.
How can we define democracy today? What role does or should the people play in the democratic process ? Through its summer selection, Books&Ideas offers to rediscover a group of four interviews and reviews, published in 2015 and 2016, which have tackled these questions through the prism of history, philosophy and political sciences.
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.
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’.
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.
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”.
Gilles Deleuze est né le 18 janvier 1925. Cent ans après sa naissance, cet essai explore l’actualité de la pensée deleuzienne au large des théories écologiques.
Dans un monde dont la physique mécaniste explique parfaitement les lois, y a-t-il encore de la place pour la croyance en Dieu ? La question est posée à Descartes par More – et le philosophe français doit alors revenir sur la cohérence de sa philosophie.
La France vire-t-elle à droite, comme on l’entend partout ? Tout dépend de ce qu’on nomme droitisation, explique V. Tiberj, car ce sont les valeurs de gauche qui, aujourd’hui, semblent avoir la préférence.
À propos de : Nina Valbousquet, Les âmes tièdes. Le Vatican face à la Shoah, La Découverte
À propos de : Isabelle Poutrin, Les convertis du pape. Une famille de banquiers juifs à Rome au XVIe siècle, Seuil
À propos de : Emmanuelle Durand, L’envers des fripes. Les vêtements dans les plis de la mondialisation, Premier Parallèle
