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.
Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing movement, is a paradoxical religion: it denies its status as a church, leaving individuals in a one-to-one relationship with God, yet in a way that allows dominated groups to acquire a degree of social legitimacy.
Quotas in India contribute to the emancipation of lower castes while producing perverse effects that are difficult to control. Rohini Somanathan questions the right balance between targeted positive discrimination policies and public policies with a universal vocation.
In a book that is learned and ambitious as well as accessible, Vincent Citot compares the philosophies of eight different civilizations to understand their cyclical evolution from a religious to a scientific stage.
For over a century, the left has owed its political identity and major political victories to a critical adherance to the Enlightenment. This is why, Stéphanie Roza argues, abandoning this legacy is dangerous.
About: Coralie Chevallier et Mathieu Perona, Homo sapiens dans la cité. Comment adapter l’action publique à la psychologie humaine, Odile Jacob
About : Julien Fretel & Michel Offerlé, Écrire au président. Enquête sur le guichet de l’Élysée, La Découverte
About: Hélène Tordjman, La croissance verte contre la nature. Critique de l’écologie marchande, La Découverte
Jane Mansbridge has made a major contribution to political theory. She has spent her life combining empirical research with a theoretical approach, and has played a vital role in developing the critique of rational choice and the study of democracy as a permanent process continually in flux.
Rorty made conversation a philosophical genre in its own right, which led him to reject any distinctions he considered futile: between analytic and continental philosophy, between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, between philosophy and literature.
In 1947, Princess Elizabeth promised to serve ‘the great imperial family’, as part of the attempt to remake post-war Britain as a global power. The British Empire collapsed; but this language of service and Commonwealth allowed the Queen to take up the postcolonial concerns of the 21st century.
In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, four participants from France, Germany and the US re-visit the inequalities debate sparked by Thomas Piketty’s Capital, comparing perceptions of income, economic equality and political economy.
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.
Books&Ideas presents a second summer selection, in which contemporary historians tell us about the future of history as a discipline, about how they research and write history, and the way history affects their bodies and minds.
Leading 19th century statesman, political economist, architect of the 1860 commercial treaty between France and the United Kingdom, and campaigner for peace between European nations, Michel Chevalier had also been a dominant voice in the Romantic socialism of Saint-Simonianism: the eclectic nature of his thought would lend itself to a particular vision of Europe, forerunner of today’s European Union.
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?
Fred Block & Margaret Somers, two key members of an international network of scholars appealing to Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece of 1944, forcefully argue that it constitutes a critical resource for understanding not only the nature and origins of the market economy but also its recurrent crises, including the current one.
Aux États-Unis, Jim Crow désigne un ensemble de coutumes et de lois qui a fait des Noirs une sous-caste d’“intouchables” dans les États sudistes pendant 70 ans. À partir de l’abondante littérature historique sur la période, le sociologue Loïc Wacquant forge un modèle de ce régime afin de l’étendre à d’autres systèmes de domination raciale.
John Bellamy Foster présente une approche marxiste de la crise écologique fondée sur le matérialisme écologique, l’hypothèse de la « rupture métabolique » et la dialectique de la nature.
Comment classe-t-on les stades d’une maladie, les meubles dans un catalogue, les races dans un système d’apartheid ? L’ouvrage classique de Star et Bowker est traduit en français 25 ans après sa parution, alors que la tentation discriminatrice revient en force.
À propos de : Chris Wickham, The Donkey and the boat. Reinterpreting the Mediterranean economy, 950-1180, Oxford University Press
À propos de : Yorim Spoelder, Vision of Greater India. Transimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism, c. 1800-1960, Cambridge University Press
À propos de : Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Metropolitan Books