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.
Can Nietzsche be considered a social thinker? Straddling social critique and critique of the social, French and German interpretive traditions that embrace Nietzsche make it necessary to revise the hasty conclusions of Marxists and anti-postmodernists.
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.
Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty’s economic history of political conflict in France is a defense of bipartition: The Left-Right divide, which is the foundation of our democracy, has enabled social progress. We must therefore work to restore it.
In his academic reading of Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty’s book, Michel Offerlé provides a critical analysis of the selected indicators, followed by a comparison with works of electoral sociology and electoral history.
About: Nina Valbousquet, Les âmes tièdes. Le Vatican face à la Shoah, La Découverte
About: François Azouvi, Du héros à la victime : la métamorphose contemporaine du sacré, Gallimard
About: Eric Fabri, Pourquoi la propriété privée (The Whys and Wherefores of Private Property), Le Bord de l’Eau
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.
Our Books and Ideas dossier on the American presidential elections will make no forecasts - instead it will look back on four years of Democratic leadership at the White House and four years of right-wing radicalization inside and outside of the G.O.P. Whoever wins will have to deal with the Tea Party, and the record shows it will not be easy for anyone.
Historians, sociologists, and social scientists in general have long tried to “think big” and “global.” The rise of Asia in the world economy has stimulated anew this attraction for the macro-level. Books and Ideas proposes to look at some of the most innovative ways this work has been done recently, in the history of ideas, of trade and cultural exchanges, economic convergences and decolonization.
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change is three years old this week but is already under attack. In support of further necessary action to address the changing climate, Public Books & La Vie des Idées offer a collaborative series of articles examining the intersection of climate change and capitalism.
Although now considered a pseudo-science, phrenology was tremendously successful in its Victorian heyday. Tracing the intellectual and scientific journey of George Combe, the ’science’s most prominent promoter in Great Britain, this paper addresses the phrenologists’ little-known contribution to the ’social question’ debate of the day, and the ambiguities of their social gospel.
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.
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’.
À l’heure de l’administration Trump II, l’Europe doit se tourner vers l’autonomie stratégique pour compenser le déclin de la relation transatlantique. Cela implique de financer les capacités militaires et l’indépendance économique de l’Europe par la dette communautaire.
Dans la Chine de Xi Jinping où toute dissidence semble impossible, des publications hétérodoxes ont continué à s’exprimer sur des supports divers, même s’il reste difficile de saisir les logiques de la censure et des sanctions auxquelles les auteurs se sont exposés : une anthologie en esquisse le panorama.
La taxation de l’héritage est très impopulaire, alors que la transmission des patrimoines est la source majeure des inégalités sociales. Au XIXe siècle pourtant, cette taxation et sa légitimité étaient discutées.
À propos de : Pierre Nevejans, Diplomaties plurielles au XVIᵉ siècle. Florence et la France à la fin des guerres d’Italie, Classiques Garnier
À propos de : Johann Michel, Lire les images. Herméneutique de l’art, Puf
À propos de : Bruno Cabanes, Les fantômes de l’île de Peleliu, Seuil
