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.
Alongside its Paris branch, the French terrorist group Action Directe also operated a Lyon branch, responsible for dozens of attacks and robberies, and marked by a crude ideology and domestic abuse within the group. We look back at far-left violence in the post-1968 era.
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.
Is Foucault’s genealogy concerned with the will to truth or with truth itself? According to Pascal Engel, in maintaining the ambiguity between the two, Foucault ignored the norms of knowledge as an essential source of emancipation.
Our understanding of nature differs from that of the Greeks and Romans. From the “month of the ox” to “the forest goddess,” the ancients never thought to separate humans from the flora and fauna around them.
About: Marina Touilliez, Parias. Hannah Arendt et la « tribu » en France (1933-1941), L’échappée
About: Constance Pâris de Bollardière and Sharon Kangisser Cohen (eds.), After the Darkness? Holocaust Survivors’ Emotional, Psychological and Social Journeys in the Early Postwar Period, Yad Vashem
About: Gwendal Châton, Calmann-Lévy, éditeur engagé. Défendre l’antitotalitarisme dans la guerre froide des idées, Calmann-Lévy
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.
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 China today, its uses of digital technologies to govern, and the political theories developed by its intellectuals.
In order to better grasp protests and social movements in China, whose number has impressively swollen in recent years, Books&Ideas presents a dossier on the evolution of social mobilization and on the representation of social instability in this country.
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.
Although now considered a pseudo-science, phrenology was tremendously successful in its Victorian heyday. Tracing the intellectual and scientific journey of George Combe, the ’science’s most prominent promoter in Great Britain, this paper addresses the phrenologists’ little-known contribution to the ’social question’ debate of the day, and the ambiguities of their social gospel.
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.
What distinguishes a blank canvas from an empty frame? A simple object from a readymade? What is this mysterious gap that art digs as it separates from life? Such are the questions posed by Arthur Danto, a major figure of contemporary art theory.
Le 23 juin 2026, Marc Bloch entre au Panthéon. Entre héritage savant, usages mémoriels et civiques, et postérité de l’œuvre : comment se dessine le legs de l’historien ?
Les machines peuvent désormais dialoguer avec nous, mais en quel sens est-ce du langage ? Loin de répéter aléatoirement des fragments de texte appris, ces nouveaux systèmes d’IA semblent se construire une représentation interne de ce dont ils parlent.
Et si l’impossibilité de parler en disait davantage sur la société que sur les individus ? Deux philosophes dialoguent au confluent de l’expérience et du politique.
À propos de : Aaron Reeves, Sam Friedman, Born to Rule. The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
À propos de : Sylvain Kahn, L’Europe : Un État qui s’ignore, CNRS éditions
À propos de : Mateusz Chmurski, Hélène Martinelli, Devenir-sœur. Repères dans un siècle de féminismes polonais, Michalon
