How can social sciences think through the constitutive disorder of a society? When groups marked by “bad reputation” refuse to be an object of knowledge, how can we write about them? This is the challenge presented to researchers by the Tubu of Chad.
Summer is here; Books&Ideas is off on holiday. We will be back with new publications starting August 30. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.
How can economic policy-makers use economic history as a guide for their deliberations and decisions? Focusing on the case of central banking, this essay argues that the virtue of history is not only to improve economic models and quantitative studies, but to provide a perspective distinct from standard economic reasoning.
How did the French Revolution, after abolishing privilege, also become the foundation of modern inequality? Thomas Piketty’s latest book focuses on the evolving ideological constructions of property across the ages and offers ways to solve the problem of inequality without challenging to the individual right to private property.
Is there a better way than drinking tea and chatting in a local teahouse to get a sense of everyday life in Sichuan’s capital city? A historian of Chengdu and tea culture explains the role of teahouses in public life and the business opportunities they offer to migrant workers.
An Irish landowner, economist, philosopher and defender of women’s rights, William Thompson was one of the greatest Socialist figures before Marx. Nowadays neglected, his thought nevertheless has many echoes with important contemporary debates, from the critique of capitalism to the rise of feminism.
Visual artist Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus is this year’s commissioned work for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. While addressing the current debates regarding memorials, it goes beyond a mere rewriting or righting of history.
Books & Ideas is going on holiday for the summer. We will be back with new publications starting August 26th. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.
How can we think about our responsibility in the face of past crimes whose consequences continue to weigh on the living conditions of their victims or descendants? One first step, for the philosopher Catherine Lu, would be to acknowledge and theorise the colonial roots of our world order.
“Wood runners” is the name given to travelling fur traders in the age of pioneers. Focusing on two centuries of their risky adventures and on their relationship with Amerindian populations allows Gilles Havard to write a monumental multicultural history of the early North American West.
Michel Brunet, a paleontologist and paleoanthropologist at the Collège de France and the discoverer of the oldest pre-human remains yet to be found, describes to Books & Ideas the obsessive quest for the human family’s ancestors and the circumstances in which his field, situated at the crossroads between the natural and human sciences, is practiced.
In Russia, the government’s propaganda machine is not limited to the political sphere. In rewriting the country’s history, it is promoting “the decay of rationality and the de-installation of a scientific worldview”. Historian Ekaterina Pravilova addresses the effects of this crisis of knowledge for Russia’s intelligentsia and academic community.
What is anthropology, and what type of knowledge does it produce? Gérard Lenclud applies his background in epistemology and questions the future of anthropology in relation to other disciplines as a means of highlighting both the similar challenges they face and the different methodologies they employ.
Sylvain Venayre responds to politicians who, only yesterday, were asking historians to define national identity. With an exploration of the French nation’s roots, hedeliberately shifts the question by proposing a history of how historians are themselves involved in the production of a collective identity.
Denouncing the neglect of the independence era by African historians, Frederick Cooper asserts that a continent of nation-states was not the inevitable outcome of decolonization.
Books&Ideas presents a second summer selection, in which contemporary historians tell us about the future of history as a discipline, about how they research and write history, and the way history affects their bodies and minds.
The American debate over the current crisis offers different attitudes towards history. Analyzing the way historical knowledge has been brought to bear on the crisis, Adam Tooze especially focuses on the analysis put forward by Paul Krugman, and emphasizes the possible contradictions between history and political action.
In his latest book - now an international bestseller - anthropologist David Graeber analyses the role of debt in the evolution of human history. Focusing on the morality of debt, the book shows a comeback of anarchist positions, reflecting a growing frustration with the institutions of the state and the market.
From Vasco de Gama to 11 September 2001, a collection of articles reveals the diversity of registers and themes the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam looks at. Demonstrating a keen sense of sociological observation and a vast culture, what most surprises his readers is his critical mind and freedom of thought.
François Godement reminds us that the process of economic and cultural integration that is currently taking place in Asia is undermined by the heavy militarization of the countries in that region, by their competing visions of history and by diverse political factors of instability.
Why is the photographic record of 9/11, the most photographed event in history, limited to an endlessly repeated loop of a handful of images? In a book as rich as it is concise, Clément Chéroux, a historian of photography and a curator at the Pompidou Center, dissects this “9/11 paradox”.
