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.
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.
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.
Following in Paul Ricœur’s footsteps, Olivier Mongin proposes an interpretation of politics as a tension between state domination at “the top” and living together at “the bottom.” This tension, he argues, contains a potential for reciprocal violence that poses a threat to democracy.
A new archaeology has emerged whose contributions to our understanding of twentieth-century mass violence oscillate between history and memory. A specialist in the field provides an impressive overview that sounds very much like a plea.
About: Laurence Fontaine, Vivre pauvre. Quelques enseignements tirés de l’Europe des Lumières, Gallimard
About: Jean-Marc Berlière, La Police à Paris en 1900. Plongée dans l’univers violent de la Belle Époque, Nouveau Monde Édition
About: Adeline Grand-Clément, Au plaisir des dieux. Expériences du sensible dans les rituels en Grèce ancienne, Anacharsis
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.
How to combat growing inequalities and injustice in a given country? Recent research suggests that solutions lie in better understanding and controlling access to education and working conditions but also in regulating tax havens and the salaries of executives.
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.
As protests against racism break out all over the world following the murder of George Floyd, Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts examining the history of these multifaceted discriminations and of the struggles for racial justice.
From the margins to which he was confined, Georges Devereux (1908-1985) formulated some of the most original scientific work of his century. In the wake of Freud, whose legacy he firmly defended, Devereux initiated the transcultural practice of psychiatry. François Laplantine, one of his former disciples, reconsiders the legacy of ethnopsychoanalysis’ founder.
How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.
A great historian of the English working class, a major intellectual figure in debates surrounding Marxism in the years 1960-1970, and an anti-nuclear activist who initiated an environmentalist critique of capitalism—such were the many faces of Edward Palmer Thompson, whose work deeply permeates the different social sciences to this day.
Deux ans et demi de siège, près de deux millions de morts dont la moitié de civils : le siège de Leningrad est l’un des épisodes les plus meurtriers de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans le discours officiel, cette histoire de famine, de froid et de mort a été convertie en un exploit glorieux.
Le théâtre n’existe pas sans comédiennes ni comédiens. Mais quelles étaient leurs conditions de travail au XVIIIe siècle ? Comment étaient-ils rémunérés ? Que se passait-il lorsqu’ils étaient malades et incapables de jouer ?
Méconnu pour beaucoup, mésestimé par d’autres, José Ortega y Gasset a été l’un des premiers et des plus fervents défenseurs d’une Europe communautaire à inventer. La biographie intellectuelle que lui a consacrée Béatrice Fonck nous permet de (re)découvrir cet influent philosophe espagnol
À propos de : Laura Tatoueix, Défaire son fruit. Une histoire sociale de l’avortement en France à l’époque moderne, Éditions de l’EHESS
À propos de : Erik Olin Wright, Pourquoi la classe compte. Capitalisme, genre et conscience de classe, Amsterdam
À propos de : Maud Gelly, Les Politiques du tri. D’une épidémie à l’autre (SIDA, COVID), Le Croquant.
