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.
School is mandatory and fully justified in being so. Educational authority in no way impairs freedom, provided it focuses on developing students’ multiple capacities.
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.
Not only in Texas, where a professor was ordered to remove Plato from his syllabus, but throughout the United States, ideological dictatorship has begun. It amounts to nothing less than an attack on universities, the freedom of speech, and thought. How is it possible to resist in the face of this onslaught?
The rise of surveillance technologies is redefining the approach to security amid economic pressures. Wherever it is implemented, this surveillance, boosted by new technologies, raises the question of abuses that threaten civil liberties.
About : Christine van Geen, Allumeuse. Genèse d’un mythe, Seuil
About: Solène Brun, Derrière le mythe métis. Enquête sur les couples mixtes et leurs descendants en France, La Découverte
About: Sandra Hoibian, La mosaïque française. Comment (re)faire société aujourd’hui, Flammarion
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.
After four years of monetary crisis in Europe, with serious political and social consequences for some countries, as well as a general mistrust of Europe’s political and economic models, new analyses bring light on what happened in 2009 and on how to improve the current situation. Books&Ideas presents them in a selection of essays and reviews on Europe, its money, its construction, and its politics.
Protectionism, a solution? Really? The economic crisis may not have turned the tide against liberalization, but we certainly cannot look at protectionism the same as we used to.
How to renew the currently dwindling support for democratic governance? To the minds of theorists and historians, whether advocating going back to classical political traditions like Republicanism or drawing lots, or experimenting new approaches, increased political participation may be the best path to follow.
“Do we have the right to make bets on the future of mankind?” Forty-one years after being the first ecologist candidate in a presidential campaign and publishing his manifesto book, René Dumont’s intuitions and warnings have lost little of their relevance.
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.
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.
Souvent considérés comme les oubliés de l’histoire, les Kurdes sont pourtant au coeur des transformations du Moyen-Orient contemporain. Hamit Bozarslan dresse un panorama de la question kurde depuis le Rojava en Syrie jusqu’à la répression sanglante en Iran, en passant par l’avenir du Kurdistan irakien et la question de la fin de la lutte armée dans la Turquie d’Erdogan.
1967 : lutte pour les civil rights, guerre du Vietnam, Sergent Pepper des Beatles, Velvet Underground, début des Doors … Au même moment, Bob Dylan enregistre des morceaux qui renouvellent le langage culturel américain.
La pensée cosmologique des Mésopotamiens, où ciel et terre sont structurés de la même manière, révèle un certain rapport au monde. Et si l’astrologie avait été l’ancêtre de l’astronomie et, plus généralement, de la pensée scientifique ?
À propos de : Elsa Génard et Mathilde Rossigneux-Méheust (dir.), Routines punitives. Les sanctions du quotidien, XIXe-XXe siècle, CNRS Éditions
À propos de : Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, Maghreb noir. Rabat, Alger et Tunis dans les luttes panafricaines, Ròt-Bò-Krik
À propos de Adam Hochman, The Race Illusion. On the Reality of Racialization and the Myth of Race, Oxford University Press, 2025
