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.
In this analysis of animal behavior, Florence Burgat brilliantly examines a continent that Freud left unexplored: the animal unconscious. But is psychoanalysis the right framework for such a project?
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.
The “California dream” does not date back to the Gold Rush of the 19th century, but only to the 20th, and is more a matter of criticism than enthusiasm. Louis Warren invites us to put this myth into perspective, and to be wary of the tendency to see California as the laboratory of the United States.
Patrick Chastenet examines the anarchist roots of political ecology. He considers five authors who connected the defense of nature to the defense of freedom: Reclus, Ellul, Charbonneau, Illich, and Bookchin. Chastenet offers a rich and instructive presentation that leads to many questions.
Despite repeated proclamations of the death of metaphysics, the contemporary philosophical landscape is marked by the proliferation of ontologies. Sébastien Motta sets out to demonstrate the sterility of the ontological enterprise through a logical analysis of their assumptions.
About: Catherine Malabou, Au voleur ! Anarchisme et philosophie, Puf
About: Olivier Mongin, Démocraties d’en haut, démocraties d’en bas, Dans le labyrinthe du politique, Seuil
About: Vincent Carpentier, Pour une archéologie de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, La Découverte
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.
Is it really the case, as is often alleged, that money decides everything about elections? As the US presidential election is looming, La Vie des idées/Books & Ideas and Public Books team up to examine the influence of money in today’s electoral democracies.
Food is now a conspicuous topic, from culinary blogs to magazines, diet books, TV shows and contests. Yet unbeknownst to many, it often holds an underground, clandestine place in some of social science’s major works. This dossier assesses the current importance of such scholarly endeavors, known as “food studies” in the United States.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on ways to shift our intellectual categories.
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?
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.
Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), a poor child who went onto become a university professor, was the epitome of a successful scholarship student. The trajectory of this “exemplary counter-example” sheds light on the mechanisms of social reproduction when they prove inoperative and the distance that can be traveled from one’s native milieu.
Claude Nicolet a marqué tout autant par ses travaux sur Rome et par ses essais, très connus et très engagés, sur l’idée républicaine. Il a aussi fait école, en systématisant l’usage de la méthode prosopographique.
En raison de leur parenté avec le souverain, les « princes de sang » peuvent lui succéder. Élevés au-dessus de toute la noblesse, mais tenus à distance des affaires de l’État, ils ne renoncent pourtant pas à jouer un rôle politique.
Mobilisant les ressources de l’ethnocomptabilité, G. Pruvost mène une enquête stimulante sur le mode de vie “alternatif” en milieu rural.
À propos de : Jean-Baptiste Comby, Ecolos, mais pas trop… Les classes sociales face à l’enjeu environnemental, Raisons d’Agir
À propos de : Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself : Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Yale University Press
À propos de : Hélène Blais, L’Empire de la nature. Une histoire des jardins botaniques coloniaux (fin XVIIIe-années 1930), Champ Vallon
