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.
At a time when public museums are struggling due to budget cuts and the need for renovations, the opening of many private foundations marks a shift in the Parisian museum landscape. Against this backdrop, G. Adam offers a comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding the rise of private museums.
The female silhouette – understood as the body’s visible form and socially perceived appearance – has long been shaped by social norms. In the age of social media, these norms are intensifying, prompting, in response, the rise of so-called “body-positive” movements.
How can we move beyond the double deadlock of state socialism and market capitalism? For Lea Ypi, returning to Kant and the Enlightenment offers a perspective to provide a new ground to freedom as social responsibility, and to open up towards a cosmopolitan horizon against the authoritarianism of profit.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, as the monarchy established its authority across French territory, the rivers of the Paris Basin continued to be managed by various actors through negotiations aimed at coordination.
How are television series written? Muriel Mille’s study sheds light on a collective process based on a division of labor and time constraints. It represents a total break with the auteur ideal of New Wave cinema.
About: Jérôme Baschet, Quand commence le capitalisme ? De la société féodale au monde de l’économie, Crise et critique
About: Camille Mahé, La Seconde Guerre Mondiale des Enfants, Allemagne, France, Italie (1943-1949), PUF
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.
Food is now a conspicuous topic, from culinary blogs to magazines, diet books, TV shows and contests. Yet unbeknownst to many, it often holds an underground, clandestine place in some of social science’s major works. This dossier assesses the current importance of such scholarly endeavors, known as “food studies” in the United States.
A selection of five essays and reviews recently published in Books&Ideas discusses the legacy and renewal of social class studies in France, Great-Britain and India.
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.
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.
According to Nancy Fraser, the renewal of socialism requires a conflation of activism and political theory; indeed, emancipation can only exist on the basis of equal participation in all spheres of life, and can only be understood in terms of social struggles, which today appear in multiple forms.
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.
La rencontre entre la post-croissance et les espaces urbains concrétise une économie du bien-être qui peut redonner vie au projet européen à l’heure où le continent s’interroge à raison sur son identité mais à tort sur son déclin.
De ses origines populaire et contestataire sur les places de Barcelone à son entrée dans le « palais » municipal, David Hamou présente une ethnographie de Barcelone en Commun et de son « pari municipaliste ».
Pour réussir leur carrière, les élu·es gays et lesbiennes sont confronté·es à un choix difficile : comment révéler publiquement leur homosexualité. Hugo Bouvard étudie ces trajectoires sociales et politiques en France et aux États-Unis, ainsi que les mouvements qui les ont rendues possibles.
À propos de : Philippe Sands , 38, rue de Londres. De l’impunité, Pinochet et le nazi de Patagonie, Albin Michel
À propos de : Edward Berenson, Perfect communities. Levitt, Levittown, and the dream of white suburbia, Yale University Press
À propos de : Laleh Khalili, Extractive Capitalism. How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy, Profile Books
