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 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.
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.
In their recent research about Israeli politics, Noam Gidron and his coauthors explore the country’s affective polarization, the support for the judicial overhaul, Likud’s populism, and the relations between them.
From Salomé to Lolita, representations of “temptresses” haunt male fantasies. They entail a woman who has said “yes” before she has even been asked anything. And women who “fire up” men’s desire must pay the price.
How do children construct their racial identity? Based on a groundbreaking study of children from so-called “mixed” couples, Solène Brun explores the processes of racialization within family structures.
About: Sandra Hoibian, La mosaïque française. Comment (re)faire société aujourd’hui, Flammarion
About: Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les Images médiévales. La figure et le corps, Gallimard
About: Bertrand Cochard, Vide à la demande. Critique des séries, L’Échappée
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 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.
A selection of five essays and reviews recently published in Books&Ideas discusses the legacy and renewal of social class studies in France, Great-Britain and India.
Rediscovering an activist thinker who was at the origins of eco-feminism, but remains unknown. Her work inspired an extremely heterogeneous movement, but has her ambition to concretely transform the social, economic and political organisation of society been pursued?
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.
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.
Comment dépasser la double impasse du socialisme d’État et du capitalisme de marché ? Pour Lea Ypi, revenir à Kant et aux Lumières constitue une perspective afin de refonder la liberté comme responsabilité sociale, et pour ouvrir un horizon cosmopolite contre l’autoritarisme du profit.
L’État est-il l’acteur principal de la transition énergétique ? Faut-il, pour sortir du pétrole et du charbon, une politique ambitieuse de redistribution ? Questions discutées, qui supposent pour être bien comprises de ressaisir l’histoire longue de l’énergie.
Sans l’apport de la psychologie, la philosophie ne peut pas comprendre la déraison à laquelle a mené la pensée du progrès et des Lumières. L’école de Francfort en a fait le constat dès les années 1930.
À propos de : Kate Brown, Plutopia, une histoire des premières villes atomiques, Actes Sud
À propos de : Antoine Lilti, L’illusion d’un monde commun. Tahiti et la découverte de l’Europe, Flammarion
À propos de : Ana Lucia Araujo, Klara Boyer-Rossol, Myriam Cottias (dir.), Esclavages. Représentations visuelles et cultures matérielles, CNRS éditions
