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 economic impacts and consequences did conversion carry in early modern Rome? The history of an elite Jewish family offers revelations about Jewish conversions to Catholicism and the shifts in social status that followed baptism.
Michel Crozier’s work was shaped by the conviction that organizational phenomena create society. He helped pioneer the tools for analyzing groups established to carry out a common project according to a specific system of action and rules of the game.
Katharina Pistor has renewed the critique of economic inequality by showing how the institutions of private law form the lock of an unequal economic and social system.
The question of original sin no longer concerns us as much as that of diet. But what if it were the same?
Cold War liberalism is hardly discussed in France, even though its theoretical importance should not be overlooked: its attacks on the welfare state have notably fostered neoconservatism.
About: Antoine Grandjean, Métaphysiques de l’expérience. Empirisme et philosophie transcendantale selon Kant, Vrin
About: Sylvain Mary, Décoloniser les Antilles ? Une histoire de l’État post-colonial (1946-1982), Sorbonne Université Presses
About: Danouta Liberski-Bagnoud, La souveraineté de la terre. Une leçon africaine sur l’habiter, Seuil
The EU aims for net climate neutrality by 2050, utilizing the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) as its main tool. But the climate crisis demands more than market mechanisms. It requires comprehensive planning and legal frameworks that prioritize public over private interests.
Jane Mansbridge has made a major contribution to political theory. She has spent her life combining empirical research with a theoretical approach, and has played a vital role in developing the critique of rational choice and the study of democracy as a permanent process continually in flux.
Rorty made conversation a philosophical genre in its own right, which led him to reject any distinctions he considered futile: between analytic and continental philosophy, between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, between philosophy and literature.
As protests against racism break out all over the world following the murder of George Floyd, Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts examining the history of these multifaceted discriminations and of the struggles for racial justice.
Summer is here; Books&Ideas is off on holiday. We will be back with new publications starting August 30. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.
At a time when Europe is equated with sovereign debt and political powerlessness, one should not forget that the foundations for a European citizenship have already been laid. Its potential for democracy needs to be interrogated, as do the cultural resources that it can rely on.
A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history.
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.
Gilles Deleuze est né le 18 janvier 1925. Cent ans après sa naissance, cet essai explore l’actualité de la pensée deleuzienne au large des théories écologiques.
Longtemps objet de mythes, l’attitude de Pie XII face à la Shoah et aux persécutions antijuives peut enfin être justement évaluée à l’aune des archives. Nina Valbousquet le montre de manière très convaincante : c’est de tiédeur dont il faut parler, non d’impartialité.
Quelles sont les conséquences économiques des conversions dans la Rome de la première modernité ? Le destin d’une famille juive de l’élite éclaire la question des conversions au catholicisme, et les changements de statut social consécutifs le baptême.
À propos de : Emmanuelle Durand, L’envers des fripes. Les vêtements dans les plis de la mondialisation, Premier Parallèle
À propos de : Stéphane Madelrieux, La philosophie comme attitude, Puf
À propos de : Christine Laurière (dir.), Les Années 50. Aux origines de l’anthropologie française contemporaine, Les Carnets de Bérose
