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.
School is mandatory and fully justified in being so. Educational authority in no way impairs freedom, provided it focuses on developing students’ multiple capacities.
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.
Not only in Texas, where a professor was ordered to remove Plato from his syllabus, but throughout the United States, ideological dictatorship has begun. It amounts to nothing less than an attack on universities, the freedom of speech, and thought. How is it possible to resist in the face of this onslaught?
The rise of surveillance technologies is redefining the approach to security amid economic pressures. Wherever it is implemented, this surveillance, boosted by new technologies, raises the question of abuses that threaten civil liberties.
About : Christine van Geen, Allumeuse. Genèse d’un mythe, Seuil
About: Solène Brun, Derrière le mythe métis. Enquête sur les couples mixtes et leurs descendants en France, La Découverte
About: Sandra Hoibian, La mosaïque française. Comment (re)faire société aujourd’hui, Flammarion
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.
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.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer. In the meantime, here is our weekly selection of reviews published over the past year.
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 articles published over the last year.
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.
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.
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.
Souvent considérés comme les oubliés de l’histoire, les Kurdes sont pourtant au coeur des transformations du Moyen-Orient contemporain. Hamit Bozarslan dresse un panorama de la question kurde depuis le Rojava en Syrie jusqu’à la répression sanglante en Iran, en passant par l’avenir du Kurdistan irakien et la question de la fin de la lutte armée dans la Turquie d’Erdogan.
1967 : lutte pour les civil rights, guerre du Vietnam, Sergent Pepper des Beatles, Velvet Underground, début des Doors … Au même moment, Bob Dylan enregistre des morceaux qui renouvellent le langage culturel américain.
La pensée cosmologique des Mésopotamiens, où ciel et terre sont structurés de la même manière, révèle un certain rapport au monde. Et si l’astrologie avait été l’ancêtre de l’astronomie et, plus généralement, de la pensée scientifique ?
À propos de : Elsa Génard et Mathilde Rossigneux-Méheust (dir.), Routines punitives. Les sanctions du quotidien, XIXe-XXe siècle, CNRS Éditions
À propos de : Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, Maghreb noir. Rabat, Alger et Tunis dans les luttes panafricaines, Ròt-Bò-Krik
À propos de Adam Hochman, The Race Illusion. On the Reality of Racialization and the Myth of Race, Oxford University Press, 2025
