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.
Ancient Roman diets were based on health concerns as well as moral and political considerations. Frugality and pleasure were not mutually exclusive. Eating was about more than filling one’s stomach.
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.
At a time when public museums are struggling due to budget cuts and the need for renovations, the opening of many private foundations marks a shift in the Parisian museum landscape. Against this backdrop, G. Adam offers a comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding the rise of private museums.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, as the monarchy established its authority across French territory, the rivers of the Paris Basin continued to be managed by various actors through negotiations aimed at coordination.
About: Muriel Mille, Le travail de la fiction. Dans les coulisses d’une série télévisée, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes
About: Jérôme Baschet, Quand commence le capitalisme ? De la société féodale au monde de l’économie, Crise et critique
About: Camille Mahé, La Seconde Guerre Mondiale des Enfants, Allemagne, France, Italie (1943-1949), PUF
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.
A selection of four essays recently published on Books & Ideas offers new perspectives on the definition, historiography and potential applications of environmental theory.
In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, six contributors from France, Russia and the US address the issue of contemporary Russia and its often tense relations with the West.
How to combat growing inequalities and injustice in a given country? Recent research suggests that solutions lie in better understanding and controlling access to education and working conditions but also in regulating tax havens and the salaries of executives.
Rediscovering an activist thinker who was at the origins of eco-feminism, but remains unknown. Her work inspired an extremely heterogeneous movement, but has her ambition to concretely transform the social, economic and political organisation of society been pursued?
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.
Et s’il existait une alternative à la fin catastrophique de l’histoire et au progrès illimité du « bon Anthropocène » ? Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod propose de prendre l’histoire à contre-sens pour surmonter la crise écologique contemporaine en s’inspirant des rapports passés ou non modernes à la nature.
Qui se cache derrière les noms « Mahomet » ou « Muhammad » ? Dans une vaste étude pluridisciplinaire, les auteurs du Mahomet des historiens sondent la diversité des traditions et la complexité de l’ancrage culturel et linguistique du fondateur de l’islam.
De ses origines populaire et contestataire sur les places de Barcelone à son entrée dans le « palais » municipal, David Hamou présente une ethnographie de Barcelone en Commun et de son « pari municipaliste ».
À propos de : Hugo Bouvard, Gay et lesbiennes en politique. Représenter les minorités sexuelles en France et aux États-Unis, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion
À propos de : Philippe Sands , 38, rue de Londres. De l’impunité, Pinochet et le nazi de Patagonie, Albin Michel
À propos de : Edward Berenson, Perfect communities. Levitt, Levittown, and the dream of white suburbia, Yale University Press
