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.
The intensive use of carbon energies has brought prosperity, particularly since 1945, along with relatively peaceful international relations. Decarbonation makes it necessary, according to Pierre Charbonnier, to invent a new form of geopolitics.
Could Argentina, instead of being the modern country we know, have developed into fourteen independent states engaged in never-ending competition? From the “disunited province” of Rio de la Plata to the affirmation of a single nation-state, a new book describes a quest for unity that lasted five decades. Reviewed: Geneviève Verdo, Des peuples en mal d’union. Aux origines de l’Argentine (Peoples without unity: The origins of Argentina) Paris Flammarion, 2025.
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.
About: Anne-Marie Cheny, Le cercle des byzantinistes. Comment bibliothécaires, savants et voyageurs inventèrent Byzance (XVIe-XIXe siècle), Les Belles Lettres
About: Nicolas Badalassi, La France, la guerre froide et la Méditerranée. Des accords d’Évian à la Perestroïka, Presses universitaires de Rennes
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
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.
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.
Summer is here. Books&Ideas is off on holiday. We will be back with new publications starting August 29th. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.
How to renew the currently dwindling support for democratic governance? To the minds of theorists and historians, whether advocating going back to classical political traditions like Republicanism or drawing lots, or experimenting new approaches, increased political participation may be the best path to follow.
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?
A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history.
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.
Historien, citoyen, résistant : la figure de Marc Bloch invite à penser le rôle public des sciences sociales. À l’occasion de sa panthéonisation, Patrick Boucheron éclaire une vie consacrée à la recherche historique au service de la société, où la rigueur érudite se confond avec l’exigence de liberté.
Le populisme prétend défendre la cause du “peuple”. Mais qu’est-ce que le peuple ? Selon G. Bras, il en existe plusieurs sortes, autant qu’il y a de manières de “faire peuple”.
Qui la nation choisit-elle d’honorer, et selon quelles modalités ? Des révolutionnaires aux héros ordinaires, deux siècles de panthéonisations révèlent les usages politiques de la mémoire, les conflits idéologiques et les valeurs que les pouvoirs successifs ont entendu consacrer.
À propos de : Peter Schöttler, Marc Bloch. Une biographie intellectuelle,, Gallimard
Rodrigo Turin et Walter Francisco Figueiredo Lowande (dir.), Antropoceno. Perspectivas historiográficas, Rio de Janeiro, Nau Editora
À propos de : Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, Bruno Latour et l’anthropologie des modernes. Contre-enquête, Vrin
