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.
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.
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 adopting a child’s perspective, Camille Mahé shows that younger children perceived the Second World War differently than adults.
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.
About: Guillaume Durieux, Faut-il en finir avec l’école ? Autonomie & justice scolaire, Éditions Eliott
About: Félix Tréguer, Technopolice. La surveillance policière à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle, Divergences
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.
Food is now a conspicuous topic, from culinary blogs to magazines, diet books, TV shows and contests. Yet unbeknownst to many, it often holds an underground, clandestine place in some of social science’s major works. This dossier assesses the current importance of such scholarly endeavors, known as “food studies” in the United States.
In order to better grasp protests and social movements in China, whose number has impressively swollen in recent years, Books&Ideas presents a dossier on the evolution of social mobilization and on the representation of social instability in this country.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer. In the meantime, here is our weekly selection of reviews published over the past year.
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.
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.
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.
La disparition des services de proximité inquiète. Les électrices et les électeurs avouent très souvent se déterminer en fonction de ces enjeux locaux, au détriment des considérations nationales ou internationales.
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
