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 France heading to the right, as everyone seems to think? According to Vincent Tiberj, it all depends on how this rightward turn is defined. For now, the French prefer the left’s values.
In their recent research about Israeli politics, Noam Gidron and his coauthors explore the country’s affective polarization, the support for the judicial overhaul, Likud’s populism, and the relations between them.
The international and industrialized market for used or secondhand clothes—known in French as “fripes” - is not a genuine alternative to “fast fashion”. Rather, it preserves, pursues, and reproduces economically, socially, and symbolically the characteristics of the market for new clothes.
Primitive societies, Lévy-Bruhl explains, are on the lookout for signs of catastrophes, though they are unpredictable. Since we, too, are in a constant state of alert, this insight should inspire us.
About: Frédéric Porcher, La « question-Nietzsche ». Les normes au carrefour du vital et du social, Vrin
About: Julia Cagé & Thomas Piketty, A History of Political Conflict: Elections and Social Inequalities in France, 1789-2022, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
About: Julia Cagé & Thomas Piketty, A History of Political Conflict : Elections and Social Inequalities in France, 1789-2022, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
A rumour is circulating in some African countries: the French state is organising penis thefts to offset declining fertility. The rumour, spread by Russian propaganda, has become fake news.
The American sociologist Harrison White made a vital contribution to the development of social network analysis. Besides his work in this field, his theoretical synthesis and his understanding of social formations have influenced a variety of fields such as the sociology of art and economic sociology.
Ukraine’s water networks have been mobilized since the start of the war in 2014. Infrastructure workers are some of the last to leave settlements attacked by the Russian army. Water systems and people are resisting but are reaching the limits of their capacity to adapt to violence and disruptions.
The media industry has undergone dramatic changes in its technologies and business models. To help us understand the effects of these changes on democracy, Books and Ideas takes the discussion away from simplistic dichotomies between the Internet and the so-called “traditional” press.
Five leading scholars of Big Tech studies share their views on the hopes and dangers of the on-going Digital Revolution. Their answers reveal the pressing need for more political, social and economic theorizing of these dynamics.
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 focuses on digital tools, their relationship to political power and capitalism.
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.
Fred Block & Margaret Somers, two key members of an international network of scholars appealing to Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece of 1944, forcefully argue that it constitutes a critical resource for understanding not only the nature and origins of the market economy but also its recurrent crises, including the current one.
Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), a poor child who went onto become a university professor, was the epitome of a successful scholarship student. The trajectory of this “exemplary counter-example” sheds light on the mechanisms of social reproduction when they prove inoperative and the distance that can be traveled from one’s native milieu.
L’extrême droite n’en a pas fini avec Rousseau. A. de Benoist et M. Onfray, dans un livre paru chez Fayard, souhaitent à nouveau s’en débarrasser, le premier en expliquant qu’en réalité il est conservateur (et donc récupérable), le second en affirmant qu’il est moderne (et donc irrécupérable).
Que disent les signalements de galériens du XVIIIᵉ siècle sur l’institution judiciaire et policière, qui décrit et classe les visages dangereux ? En confrontant archives administratives et notes personnelles, Arlette Farge donne à voir une histoire où l’identification des corps engage aussi l’émotion et le regard de l’historienne.
F. Teroni suit pas à pas les Méditations de Descartes, sans craindre d’en relever les insuffisances en retournant l’arme du doute contre lui et en le confrontant aux débats contemporains.
À propos de : “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides”, par Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeiera et Stefanie Stantcheva, American Economic Review
À propos de : Romain Bertrand et Jean Dytar, Les Sentiers d’Anahuac, La Découverte/Delcourt
À propos de : Anouche Kunth, Au bord de l’effacement. Sur les pas d’exilés arméniens dans l’entre-deux-guerre, La Découverte
