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.
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 essays and reviews published over the past year.
During the Christmas season, Books and Ideas offers a selection of reviews and essays that tackle the subject of cities and the issues they raise as complex centers of urban life: how could we live better in them? How to reduce the inequalities they create? Can they become more sustainable? The following texts cast a new light on all of these questions.
A selection of five essays and reviews recently published in Books&Ideas discusses the legacy and renewal of social class studies in France, Great-Britain and India.
“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.
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?
Thanks to his work on Greco-Roman antiquity, his intellectual curiosity, his pronounced taste for interdisciplinarity, his sense of humor, and the freedom that informs all his research, Paul Veyne is a twentieth-century historian whose work cannot be avoided. A loose cannon at the heart of the academic establishment, a deep thinker and a dilettante, Veyne invites us, through his work, to a festival of thought.
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.
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.
L’Amérique hispanique n’a pas été qu’un réceptacle d’influences politiques, intellectuelles et institutionnelles venues de la Vieille Europe. Au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, les territoires du Bassin de la Plata réinventent la modernité républicaine.
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
À propos de : Stéphane Tonnelat, Sauver les terres agricoles, Seuil
