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.
As 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s death, a new book offers a fresh perspective on a little-known yet pivotal period in the philosopher’s life and work.
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.
A collective work traces the emotional and psychological journeys of Holocaust survivors in the immediate postwar period. It examines both the practices of caregivers and the strategies survivors employed to reintegrate into society.
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.
About: Adeline Barbin, La démocratie des techniques, Hermann
About: Claire Larroque, Philosophie du déchet, Presses universitaires de France
About: Catherine Malabou, Il n’y a pas eu de Révolution, Payot & Rivages
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.
In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, six contributors from France, Russia and the US address the issue of contemporary Russia and its often tense relations with the West.
A selection of four essays recently published on Books & Ideas offers new perspectives on the definition, historiography and potential applications of environmental theory.
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.
Umberto Eco is best known to the general public for his novels and critical works in which he developed his theory of reception. Who realizes, however, that this aspect of his work is only one part of a general semiology organized around a philosophy of signs?
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?
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.
Selon la première ministre japonaise, les Japonais doivent travailler toujours plus. Ce discours productiviste doit être replacé dans l’histoire longue du conservatisme japonais et de son rapport avec le libéralisme.
Nicolas Soulas replace la figure du « robespierriste » Claude-François Payan dans une vaste biographie familiale. Il montre comment une famille négocie le virage révolutionnaire, à la fois moment d’opportunité unique et parenthèse à l’échelle de stratégies familiales de plus long terme.
Avocat du New Deal, ministre de la Justice sous Roosevelt et membre de la Cour Suprême, Robert Jackson fut aussi l’un des acteurs centraux des procès contre les nazis. Son parcours rappelle qu’en des temps pas si éloignés les États-Unis jouaient un rôle essentiel dans la justice internationale.
À propos de : Gabriel Entin, En quête de République. Une histoire de la communauté politique en Amérique hispanique, Presses universitaires de Rennes
À propos de : Jean-Pascal Anfray, Leibniz. Temps, nécessité, conscience, Honoré Champion
À propos de : Clair Juilliet et Jean-Marc Olivier, De Blériot à Airbus : une histoire des industries aéronautiques européennes, 1910-2024, Armand Colin
