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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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
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.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, reviews and interviews published over the past year, exploring the relationship between music and politics.
The economic crisis that has plagued a great part of the world since 2008 remains baffling as ever, all questions and no answers. Why not start by listing the former, and then imagine what the latter could look like?
In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, four participants from France, Germany and the US re-visit the inequalities debate sparked by Thomas Piketty’s Capital, comparing perceptions of income, economic equality and political economy.
How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.
Though poorly known in France, the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas is nonetheless essential for understanding the elementary forms of social organization and daily life. By shedding light on her academic career and personal life, this portrait rehabilitates the thought of a major intellectual.
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.
L’historien Romain Bertrand et le dessinateur Jean Dytar retracent les premières années de la colonisation du Mexique en s’inspirant des gravures sur bois de l’art colonial et des codex mésoaméricains.
Derrière les milliers de certificats d’exilés arméniens passés par Marseille se cachent les traces d’un génocide et des chemins innombrables empruntés par ses survivants. Dans les marges, les ratures et les silences des formulaires administratifs se lisent la fin d’un monde et la survie.
À propos de : Anne Cheng, Chloé Froissart (dir.), Penser en résistance dans la Chine d’aujourd’hui, Folio essais
À propos de : Mélanie Plouviez, L’injustice en héritage, La Découverte
À propos de : Pierre Nevejans, Diplomaties plurielles au XVIᵉ siècle. Florence et la France à la fin des guerres d’Italie, Classiques Garnier
