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.
Experience can only lead to knowledge if it is organized by concepts that are not derived from experience. This is the paradox at the heart of Kant’s metaphysics, which Antoine Grandjean gives an entirely new interpretation.
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.
After 1946, the process of “decolonization by assimilation” ensured that the French Antilles remained part of France. The departmental framework, seen as the source of all the rights associated with citizenship, had a profound influence on Antillean politics and society.
In the Volta region, there is no such thing as land ownership: Land is not traded but shared. Why, then, do our societies consider the right to appropriate land to be perfectly legitimate?
About: Vincent Lemire, Au pied du Mur. Vie et mort du quartier maghrébin de Jérusalem (1187-1967), Seuil
About: Sarah Diffalah et Salima Tenfiche, Beurettes. Un fantasme français, Seuil
About: Stéphane Madelrieux, Philosophie des expériences radicales, Seuil
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.
The current world-wide demand for “real” democracy as embodied in the Indignados (15-M) movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement reiterates long-lasting frustrations as regards representative government and the incompleteness of democratic experiences throughout the world. This dossier gathers interviews and essays by renowned scholars on the conception of democracy as an on-going experience and not as a finished model.
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 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.
André Gorz’s multiform thought is entirely centred on liberation: from work, which prevents individuals from thriving; from consumption, which grows ever higher; and from the social system, which reduces individuals to mere pawns in a “megamachine”.
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.
Miguel Abensour profoundly renewed thinking about democracy. His political philosophy paid close attention to the desire for emancipation and was based on an original conception of utopia breaking with the mythology of the ‘ideal city’ or of a ‘good society’.
Des militants d’un type nouveau rejoignent les organisations de jeunesse du mouvement Identitaire. Si leur capacité à faire le coup de poing reste un facteur d’intégration, la violence physique n’est plus officiellement revendiquée par Génération Identitaire.
Comment échapper aux lectures mythifiantes et souvent contradictoires de la figure de Frantz Fanon, révolutionnaire et théoricien de l’anticolonialisme ? Son parcours permet de saisir sa pensée dans son contexte, à rebours des tendances contemporaines à la généralisation.
Aujourd’hui que la Terre a été explorée en totalité, il est possible de retrouver les lieux réels ou imaginaires qui évoquent un lieu perdu au milieu de nulle part. Dénonciation du tourisme, évocation nostalgique de l’ailleurs, rêverie sur nos derniers espaces de liberté ?
À propos de : Bruno Belhoste, Franz Anton Mesmer. Le magnétiseur des Lumières, Armand Colin
À propos de : Nicolas Renahy, Jusqu’au bout. Vieillir et résister dans le monde ouvrier, La Découverte
À propos de : Goulven Kérien, Pour l’honneur des familles. Les enfermements par lettres de cachet à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Champ Vallon
