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.
Patrick Chastenet examines the anarchist roots of political ecology. He considers five authors who connected the defense of nature to the defense of freedom: Reclus, Ellul, Charbonneau, Illich, and Bookchin. Chastenet offers a rich and instructive presentation that leads to many questions.
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.
The “California dream” does not date back to the Gold Rush of the 19th century, but only to the 20th, and is more a matter of criticism than enthusiasm. Louis Warren invites us to put this myth into perspective, and to be wary of the tendency to see California as the laboratory of the United States.
Despite repeated proclamations of the death of metaphysics, the contemporary philosophical landscape is marked by the proliferation of ontologies. Sébastien Motta sets out to demonstrate the sterility of the ontological enterprise through a logical analysis of their assumptions.
Whether conceived as advocacy of disorder or as “the highest expression of order,” as the abolition of the state or as state-led deregulation, anarchy feeds on every ambiguity. This is the case even in contemporary philosophy.
About: Olivier Mongin, Démocraties d’en haut, démocraties d’en bas, Dans le labyrinthe du politique, Seuil
About: Vincent Carpentier, Pour une archéologie de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, La Découverte
About: Laurence Fontaine, Vivre pauvre. Quelques enseignements tirés de l’Europe des Lumières, Gallimard
The EU aims for net climate neutrality by 2050, utilizing the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) as its main tool. But the climate crisis demands more than market mechanisms. It requires comprehensive planning and legal frameworks that prioritize public over private interests.
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.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be back at the end of August. In the meantime, here is a selection of interviews, reviews and essays on popular music published over the past year.
In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, six contributors from France, Russia and the US address the issue of contemporary Russia and its often tense relations with the West.
How can we define democracy today? What role does or should the people play in the democratic process ? Through its summer selection, Books&Ideas offers to rediscover a group of four interviews and reviews, published in 2015 and 2016, which have tackled these questions through the prism of history, philosophy and political sciences.
Though poorly known in France, the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas is nonetheless essential for understanding the elementary forms of social organization and daily life. By shedding light on her academic career and personal life, this portrait rehabilitates the thought of a major intellectual.
One of Albert O. Hirschman’s contributions to economic theory is a richer understanding of the concept of the “rational actor,” which, he demonstrated, possesses the deliberative capacities that democratic market societies require. This following is a profile of an economist who was also a dissident and an activist.
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.
Les propos racistes tenus notamment à l’encontre des immigrés en situation irrégulière par Donald Trump ne l’ont pas empêché d’obtenir les voix d’un nombre croissant d’électeurs noirs, hispaniques et asiatiques lors du scrutin de novembre 2024. Que peut-on conclure de ce paradoxe apparent ?
En raison de leur parenté avec le souverain, les « princes de sang » peuvent lui succéder. Élevés au-dessus de toute la noblesse, mais tenus à distance des affaires de l’État, ils ne renoncent pourtant pas à jouer un rôle politique.
Mobilisant les ressources de l’ethnocomptabilité, G. Pruvost mène une enquête stimulante sur le mode de vie “alternatif” en milieu rural.
À propos de : Jean-Baptiste Comby, Ecolos, mais pas trop… Les classes sociales face à l’enjeu environnemental, Raisons d’Agir
À propos de : Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself : Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Yale University Press
À propos de : Hélène Blais, L’Empire de la nature. Une histoire des jardins botaniques coloniaux (fin XVIIIe-années 1930), Champ Vallon
