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.
Contemporary uses of the word “Muslim” in France illustrate the variety of ways in which minorities identify themselves. In a book that straddles semantics and ethnography, Marie-Claire Willems sheds light on the diversity of forms of belonging available to populations exposed to exclusion.
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.
Katharina Pistor has renewed the critique of economic inequality by showing how the institutions of private law form the lock of an unequal economic and social system.
The encounter between British miners and gay and lesbian activists during the strikes of 1984-85 was explored in the celebrated film Pride. A historian looks back at this memorable period and reveals the continuities between the two movements.
What economic impacts and consequences did conversion carry in early modern Rome? The history of an elite Jewish family offers revelations about Jewish conversions to Catholicism and the shifts in social status that followed baptism.
About: Guillaume Alonge & Olivier Christin, Adam et Eve, le paradis, la viande et les légumes, Anacharsis
About: Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Yale University Press
About: Antoine Grandjean, Métaphysiques de l’expérience. Empirisme et philosophie transcendantale selon Kant, Vrin
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.
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.
The economic crisis that has plagued a great part of the world since 2008 remains baffling as ever, all questions and no answers. Why not start by listing the former, and then imagine what the latter could look like?
Is it really the case, as is often alleged, that money decides everything about elections? As the US presidential election is looming, La Vie des idées/Books & Ideas and Public Books team up to examine the influence of money in today’s electoral democracies.
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.
A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history.
Books & Ideas is going on holiday for the summer, and will resume its publication schedule in September. In the meantime, we present you with a weekly roundup of our most recent essays and reviews. Our second summer selection features portraits of prominent intellectual figures: Albert Camus, René Dumont, Ronald Dworkin, Joan W. Scott and Max Weber.
Entre les 15 et 31 janvier 2025, les agriculteurs sont appelés à voter pour leurs représentants syndicaux au sein des Chambres d’agriculture. S’ouvrant dans un climat de revendications et de défiance tous azimuts, ces élections professionnelles sont l’occasion de se pencher sur un malaise agricole aux multiples dimensions.
Les sociétés qui effacent leur passé en pensant par là éliminer leur culpabilité ne font que menacer leur avenir. Telle est la conviction d’O. Bartov, lui qui a cherché à reconstituer une histoire en première personne de l’Holocauste.
Le mouvement pour les droits civiques aux États-Unis est plus complexe que ce que le grand public en connaît. O. Mahéo en reconstitue la multiplicité discordante et marginalisée.
À propos de : Evanghelia Stead, Goethe’s Faust I Outlined. Moritz Retzsch’s Prints in Circulation, Brill
À propos de : Jean-Pascal Anfray, Descartes- More. Correspondance 1648-1655, Éliott
À propos de : Vincent Tiberj, La droitisation française. Mythe et réalités, Puf
