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.
Is scientific evaluation sufficient to improve educational practices? For many teachers, evidence-based policy constitutes an obstacle to their own practices because it relies on statistical generalizations without taking into account their professional intuitions.
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.
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.
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.
About: Stéphanie Roza, Lumières de la gauche, Éditions de la Sorbonne
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
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 the U.S., in France as well with Hugues Lagrange’s book on “the denial of cultures”, culture has again become the focus of poverty studies. Our dossier on “culture of poverty” reviews this new trend and examines a notion that has paradoxically been given a new lease of life by the economic downturn, half a century after Oscar Lewis controversially introduced it.
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.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection questions the relationship between gender and politics.
What distinguishes a blank canvas from an empty frame? A simple object from a readymade? What is this mysterious gap that art digs as it separates from life? Such are the questions posed by Arthur Danto, a major figure of contemporary art theory.
By asserting that structuralism is a fruitful approach to kinship relations or the difference between the sexes, Françoise Héritier radically renewed anthropological methodology. Her life’s work has also shown us that scientific commitment goes hand-in-hand with societal involvement.
Now a well-known Chinese lawyer of the democratic dissidence in China, Zhang Sizhi was once a young nationalist, a high-ranking official in the court of Beijing and a victim of anti-rightist repression. In his memoirs, he provides a detailed and fascinating description of the profession and China in the second half of the 20th century.
Réécrite, instrumentalisée, défigurée jusqu’à l’abject dans les discours, sanctifiée par la religion, les médias et l’école, l’histoire en Russie rend la guerre non seulement légitime, mais aussi moralement pure.
La domestication des espèces, fondement de la révolution néolithique, ne doit pas être lue selon des critères productivistes. Les mythes entrent aussi dans la « technopoïèse », cette invention de techniques nouvelles.
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.
À propos de : Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Arranger les choses, des conséquences de la classification, EHESS
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