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.
By adopting a child’s perspective, Camille Mahé shows that younger children perceived the Second World War differently than adults.
The female silhouette – understood as the body’s visible form and socially perceived appearance – has long been shaped by social norms. In the age of social media, these norms are intensifying, prompting, in response, the rise of so-called “body-positive” movements.
How can we move beyond the double deadlock of state socialism and market capitalism? For Lea Ypi, returning to Kant and the Enlightenment offers a perspective to provide a new ground to freedom as social responsibility, and to open up towards a cosmopolitan horizon against the authoritarianism of profit.
By analyzing nearly 8,000 recruitments for assistant professor positions in France between 2017 and 2024, Olivier Godechot, Rachel Issiakou, Yann Renisio, and Adrien Rougier revisit the long-standing and controversial issue of academic inbreeding.
School is mandatory and fully justified in being so. Educational authority in no way impairs freedom, provided it focuses on developing students’ multiple capacities.
About: Félix Tréguer, Technopolice. La surveillance policière à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle, Divergences
About : Christine van Geen, Allumeuse. Genèse d’un mythe, Seuil
A rumour is circulating in some African countries: the French state is organising penis thefts to offset declining fertility. The rumour, spread by Russian propaganda, has become fake news.
The American sociologist Harrison White made a vital contribution to the development of social network analysis. Besides his work in this field, his theoretical synthesis and his understanding of social formations have influenced a variety of fields such as the sociology of art and economic sociology.
Ukraine’s water networks have been mobilized since the start of the war in 2014. Infrastructure workers are some of the last to leave settlements attacked by the Russian army. Water systems and people are resisting but are reaching the limits of their capacity to adapt to violence and disruptions.
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.
Disasters and the tragedies that they entail accumulate, along with human and social science research trying to grasp the significance of their repetition. The aim of the dossier launched today by Books & Ideas is to comprehend the nature of these studies.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, reviews and interviews published over the past year, exploring the relationship between music and politics.
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.
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?
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.
Alors qu’il s’est effondré sur la scène nationale, le Parti socialiste a trouvé dans les mairies un espace de résistance, sinon de résilience. Cependant, au fil du temps, les maires socialistes sont essentiellement devenus des techniciens locaux, dont la notabilité s’est affaiblie.
En étudiant l’histoire et les pratiques récentes de greffes d’animal à humain, Catherine Rémy explore les frontières entre les êtres vivants. Les hiérarchies « dualistes » et « gradualistes » qu’elle met au jour fixent les limites de l’acceptable en médecine de la transplantation.
Comment rendre compte de la complexité et de la pluralité des liens de voisinage ? Au-delà des simples échanges devant les boîtes aux lettres, il s’agit notamment de comprendre les dynamiques inégalitaires qui structurent les rapports sociaux de proximité.
À propos de : Caroline Piketty, Harmonies volées. Printemps 1945 : le retour des pianos pillés par les nazis, L’Archipel
À propos de : Christophe Grellard, Est-il permis de se tromper ? Penser la tolérance au Moyen Âge, Éditions de la Sorbonne
À propos de : Sanyu A. Mojola, Death by Design : Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol, University of California Press
