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.
Thirty years after La Nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy (Saint Bartholomew’s Night), Denis Crouzet revisits the massacres of August 1572—a collective purge, a royal enigma, and a popular initiative, which his new book illuminates with bold erudition by reintroducing confessional violence, with all its historical depth, into the story.
It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that Byzantine studies acquired their official scientific and academic status, after a long process involving rigorous selection of the documents that have survived to the present day.
In an era marked by ideological conflict and geopolitical rivalry between the two superpowers, France managed to chart its own course, far from traditional bipolar frameworks.
About: Paulin Ismard et Arnaud Macé, La Cité et le nombre. Clisthène d’Athènes, l’arithmétique et l’avènement de la démocratie, Les Belles Lettres
About Jeanne Guien, Le Désir de nouveautés. L’obsolescence au cœur du capitalisme (XVe-XXIe siècle), La Découverte
About: Laurent Jaffro, Le miroir de la sympathie. Adam Smith et le sentimentalisme, Vrin
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.
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.
After four years of monetary crisis in Europe, with serious political and social consequences for some countries, as well as a general mistrust of Europe’s political and economic models, new analyses bring light on what happened in 2009 and on how to improve the current situation. Books&Ideas presents them in a selection of essays and reviews on Europe, its money, its construction, and its politics.
In the U.S., in France as well with Hugues Lagrange’s book on “the denial of cultures”, culture has again become the focus of poverty studies. Our dossier on “culture of poverty” reviews this new trend and examines a notion that has paradoxically been given a new lease of life by the economic downturn, half a century after Oscar Lewis controversially introduced it.
The current world-wide demand for “real” democracy as embodied in the Indignados (15-M) movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement reiterates long-lasting frustrations as regards representative government and the incompleteness of democratic experiences throughout the world. This dossier gathers interviews and essays by renowned scholars on the conception of democracy as an on-going experience and not as a finished model.
Ronald Coase (1910-2013), the 1991 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is famous for his oft-quoted and just as often misunderstood “theorem.” His seminal works on transaction costs, property rights, and regulation continue to stimulate a rich reflection in economics and beyond.
Michel Crozier’s work was shaped by the conviction that organizational phenomena create society. He helped pioneer the tools for analyzing groups established to carry out a common project according to a specific system of action and rules of the game.
According to Nancy Fraser, the renewal of socialism requires a conflation of activism and political theory; indeed, emancipation can only exist on the basis of equal participation in all spheres of life, and can only be understood in terms of social struggles, which today appear in multiple forms.
Le Centre Pompidou a été un modèle pour la politique culturelle française, mais aussi le témoin et victime de ses dérives, de ses impasses, de la réduction des budgets publics à la massification-marchandisation de la culture.
L’aggravation du changement climatique se fait de plus en plus visible et touche désormais même les milieux a priori les plus éloignés, comme les fonds marins. Pourtant, ceux-ci sont intégrés aux transformations du monde depuis le XVe siècle, selon des mouvements pluriels et concurrents.
La pensée néoréactionnaire qui se développe aujourd’hui sur le net est-elle la matrice idéologique du trumpisme ? Peut-être, mais il est difficile d’évaluer la réception de ses idées au-delà de cercles très restreints.
À propos de : Ziad Majed, Le Proche-Orient, miroir du monde. Comprendre le basculement en cours, La Découverte
À propos de : Guillaume Carnino, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez et Jérôme Lamy (dir.), Histoire globale des techniques, CNRS éditions
À propos de : Sophie Guérard de Latour, Le multiculturalisme à l’épreuve du féminisme, Vrin
