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.
How are television series written? Muriel Mille’s study sheds light on a collective process based on a division of labor and time constraints. It represents a total break with the auteur ideal of New Wave cinema.
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.
Is it possible to identify the origin of the shift from feudalism to capitalism? Such a transition cannot be reduced to the expansion of trade or a linear evolution. It implies a transformation of social relations, work, and production.
By adopting a child’s perspective, Camille Mahé shows that younger children perceived the Second World War differently than adults.
About: Guillaume Durieux, Faut-il en finir avec l’école ? Autonomie & justice scolaire, Éditions Eliott
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.
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.
Our Books and Ideas dossier on the American presidential elections will make no forecasts - instead it will look back on four years of Democratic leadership at the White House and four years of right-wing radicalization inside and outside of the G.O.P. Whoever wins will have to deal with the Tea Party, and the record shows it will not be easy for anyone.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on ways to shift our intellectual categories.
What distinguishes a blank canvas from an empty frame? A simple object from a readymade? What is this mysterious gap that art digs as it separates from life? Such are the questions posed by Arthur Danto, a major figure of contemporary art theory.
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.
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.
Delphine Rouilleaut est la présidente du collectif Alerte, réseau qui rassemble 34 associations et fédérations actives dans la lutte contre la pauvreté. Elle exprime la voix de la société civile et explique les ressorts de la construction d’un plaidoyer en faveur des personnes en situation de vulnérabilité ou d’exclusion.
Caroline Muller et Frédéric Clavert engagent une réflexion sur ce que l’usage du numérique transforme dans le métier d’historien, depuis le travail sur les sources jusqu’à la structuration de la discipline elle-même.
D’utopie à dystopie, comment Internet s’est-il retourné contre ses propres valeurs libertaires en quelques décennies ? Par l’analyse d’un vaste corpus documentaire, Sébastien Broca étudie cette transformation sous l’angle des critiques de l’empire des « big tech » du numérique.
À propos de : Catherine Rémy, Hybrides. Transplanter des organes de l’animal à l’humain, CNRS Éditions
À propos de : Jean-Yves Authier et Joanie Cayouette-Remblière (dir.), Ce que voisiner veut dire. Une grande enquête sur les liens sociaux de proximité, Puf
À propos de : Caroline Piketty, Harmonies volées. Printemps 1945 : le retour des pianos pillés par les nazis, L’Archipel
