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.
By adopting a child’s perspective, Camille Mahé shows that younger children perceived the Second World War differently than adults.
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.
By analyzing nearly 8,000 recruitments for assistant professor positions in France between 2017 and 2024, Olivier Godechot, Rachel Issiakou, Yann Renisio, and Adrien Rougier revisit the long-standing and controversial issue of academic inbreeding.
School is mandatory and fully justified in being so. Educational authority in no way impairs freedom, provided it focuses on developing students’ multiple capacities.
About: Félix Tréguer, Technopolice. La surveillance policière à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle, Divergences
About : Christine van Geen, Allumeuse. Genèse d’un mythe, Seuil
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.
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.
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 going on holiday for the summer, and will resume its publication schedule in September. In the meantime, we present you with a weekly roundup of our most recent essays and reviews. Our second summer selection features portraits of prominent intellectual figures: Albert Camus, René Dumont, Ronald Dworkin, Joan W. Scott and Max Weber.
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.
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.
Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a controversial figure in Japan. And rightly so, for there are a great many contradictions in both his fictional and theoretical work. He is a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and yet continues to celebrate the heroism of the soldier who finds glory through sacrifice.
Alors qu’il s’est effondré sur la scène nationale, le Parti socialiste a trouvé dans les mairies un espace de résistance, sinon de résilience. Cependant, au fil du temps, les maires socialistes sont essentiellement devenus des techniciens locaux, dont la notabilité s’est affaiblie.
En étudiant l’histoire et les pratiques récentes de greffes d’animal à humain, Catherine Rémy explore les frontières entre les êtres vivants. Les hiérarchies « dualistes » et « gradualistes » qu’elle met au jour fixent les limites de l’acceptable en médecine de la transplantation.
Comment rendre compte de la complexité et de la pluralité des liens de voisinage ? Au-delà des simples échanges devant les boîtes aux lettres, il s’agit notamment de comprendre les dynamiques inégalitaires qui structurent les rapports sociaux de proximité.
À propos de : Caroline Piketty, Harmonies volées. Printemps 1945 : le retour des pianos pillés par les nazis, L’Archipel
À propos de : Christophe Grellard, Est-il permis de se tromper ? Penser la tolérance au Moyen Âge, Éditions de la Sorbonne
À propos de : Sanyu A. Mojola, Death by Design : Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol, University of California Press
