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.
What are the emancipatory prospects for women excluded from salaried work? By analyzing working-class Maghrebin women’s attitudes towards work, family, and heterosexuality, Fatma Çingi Kocadost shows the limits of individual emancipation through work.
Black women—whether from the Caribbean, Africa, or of African descent—have conceptualized and embodied French citizenship. Their often hidden trajectories and struggles illustrate an alternative history of the nation, shaped by colonialism, when seen through the lenses of race, class, and gender.
How does justice vanquish force? Simone Weil’s thought unifies politics and religion while proposing a radical conception of power, understood not as domination but as retreat, in a world in which violence gives way to obedience.
About: Vanina Mozziconacci, Apprendre à philosopher en féministe, La Dispute
About: Étienne Anheim et Paul Pasquali, Bourdieu et Panofsky. Essai d’archéologie intellectuelle, Les Éditions de Minuit
About: Bernard Manin, Montesquieu, Hermann
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.
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.
Twenty years after the publication of Viviana Zelizer’s “The Social Meaning of Money”, this special issue brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to examine the genesis of the book, its impact in shaping the analysis of economic value, and its enduring intellectual influence on both sides of the Atlantic.
Disasters and the tragedies that they entail accumulate, along with human and social science research trying to grasp the significance of their repetition. The aim of the dossier launched today by Books & Ideas is to comprehend the nature of these studies.
As populism is rising on a global level, Books & Ideas offers a series on media politics in East Asian countries, to be published over the next two weeks. Though situations are extremely diverse, they can teach us a lot on the relationship between the state and journalists in authoritarian contexts. What role is left for the media to play in non-democracies?
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.
What distinguishes a blank canvas from an empty frame? A simple object from a readymade? What is this mysterious gap that art digs as it separates from life? Such are the questions posed by Arthur Danto, a major figure of contemporary art theory.
Thanks to his work on Greco-Roman antiquity, his intellectual curiosity, his pronounced taste for interdisciplinarity, his sense of humor, and the freedom that informs all his research, Paul Veyne is a twentieth-century historian whose work cannot be avoided. A loose cannon at the heart of the academic establishment, a deep thinker and a dilettante, Veyne invites us, through his work, to a festival of thought.
En transformant l’épopée homérique en récit de culpabilité, de traumatisme et de rédemption, Christopher Nolan ne se contente pas d’adapter L’Odyssée. Il la soumet à une grille morale, psychologique et politique qui dénature souvent le monde grec qu’il prétend restituer.
Le sommeil a changé depuis la révolution industrielle : les contraintes de tous ordres, liés aux impératifs de production, lui nuisent fortement. Notre capacité physiologique d’adaptation, pour grande qu’elle soit, reste cependant limitée.
Un travail collectif propose une cartographie des enjeux, des modalités et des dynamiques de sortie des sociétés capitalistes. Ce volume prend sens à partir de la conjoncture ouverte par la crise financière de 2007-2009, où les propositions visant à dépasser le capitalisme ont trouvé un nouvel écho.
A propos de : Clément Thibaud, 1815 : Fin de l’âge des révolutions ?, Puf
À propos de : Olivier Ritz, Une histoire littéraire de la Révolution française, Gallimard
À propos de : Dominique Boullier, Déshumanités numériques, Armand Colin
