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.
Backed by Raymond Aron and Manès Sperber, the French publishing house Calmann-Lévy championed anti-communism and the fight against totalitarianism from the end of World War II.
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.
Against the trend towards experts having exclusive control over technological development — justified on the grounds of the public’s alleged incompetence — Adeline Barbin argues that citizens should be given greater power so as to ensure that techniques are consistent with democratic values.
We would rather not see or even think about our waste, but it has a lot to tell us about our habits, our lives, and more importantly, about what we are doing to our world today.
About: Catherine Malabou, Il n’y a pas eu de Révolution, Payot & Rivages
About: Dimitri Tilloi d’Ambrosi, Le Régime romain, Presses universitaires de France
Reviewed: Georgina Adam, The Rise and Rise of the Art Private Museum, Lund Humphries
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.
The media industry has undergone dramatic changes in its technologies and business models. To help us understand the effects of these changes on democracy, Books and Ideas takes the discussion away from simplistic dichotomies between the Internet and the so-called “traditional” press.
How can we define democracy today? What role does or should the people play in the democratic process ? Through its summer selection, Books&Ideas offers to rediscover a group of four interviews and reviews, published in 2015 and 2016, which have tackled these questions through the prism of history, philosophy and political sciences.
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.
Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a controversial figure in Japan. And rightly so, for there are a great many contradictions in both his fictional and theoretical work. He is a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and yet continues to celebrate the heroism of the soldier who finds glory through sacrifice.
André Gorz’s multiform thought is entirely centred on liberation: from work, which prevents individuals from thriving; from consumption, which grows ever higher; and from the social system, which reduces individuals to mere pawns in a “megamachine”.
“Do we have the right to make bets on the future of mankind?” Forty-one years after being the first ecologist candidate in a presidential campaign and publishing his manifesto book, René Dumont’s intuitions and warnings have lost little of their relevance.
Face à la défaite de 1940, Marc Bloch mettait en accusation le système d’enseignement. Notre temps appelle à relire son diagnostic.
Le débat sur l’existence des « cathares » divise. Hérétiques dualistes organisés en contre-Église ou fruit d’une construction médiévale reprise et amplifiée au XIXe siècle pour des raisons identitaires ? Le choix s’impose désormais, qui empêche toute synthèse de compromis.
Les massifications scolaires favorisent-elles la mobilité sociale ? Une analyse comparative de 40 pays montre qu’elles ont contribué à desserrer le lien entre origine et destinée sociale.
À propos de : Julian Mischi, Des élus en campagne : Luttes municipales dans les bourgs industriels (XXe-XXIe siècles), Presses de Sciences Po
À propos de : Marc Lazar, Pour l’amour du peuple. Histoire du populisme en France, XIXe-XXe siècles, Gallimard
À propos de : Frédéric Ramel, Espace mondial, Presses de Sciences Po
