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.
By analyzing nearly 8,000 recruitments for assistant professor positions in France between 2017 and 2024, Olivier Godechot, Rachel Issiakou, Yann Renisio, and Adrien Rougier revisit the long-standing and controversial issue of academic inbreeding.
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.
School is mandatory and fully justified in being so. Educational authority in no way impairs freedom, provided it focuses on developing students’ multiple capacities.
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?
About: Félix Tréguer, Technopolice. La surveillance policière à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle, Divergences
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
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.
Historians, sociologists, and social scientists in general have long tried to “think big” and “global.” The rise of Asia in the world economy has stimulated anew this attraction for the macro-level. Books and Ideas proposes to look at some of the most innovative ways this work has been done recently, in the history of ideas, of trade and cultural exchanges, economic convergences and decolonization.
The economic crisis that has plagued a great part of the world since 2008 remains baffling as ever, all questions and no answers. Why not start by listing the former, and then imagine what the latter could look like?
The June protests which shook Brazil in 2013 stunned the world. This dossier, published by Books&Ideas, discusses the main issues at the core of these protests, analyzing them in the light of previous mobilizations and explaining why they are essential to the understanding of contemporary Brazil.
In an innovative study that returns Albert Camus’ early works to their rightful place in the canon, Laurent Bove suggests we should view Camus as a philosopher of immanence and of acquiescence to the joy of the world. This reading is enlightening as far as Camus’ thoughts on history are concerned, but tends to gloss over the ruptures that run though his work, which is driven with multiple tensions.
Now a well-known Chinese lawyer of the democratic dissidence in China, Zhang Sizhi was once a young nationalist, a high-ranking official in the court of Beijing and a victim of anti-rightist repression. In his memoirs, he provides a detailed and fascinating description of the profession and China in the second half of the 20th century.
By asserting that structuralism is a fruitful approach to kinship relations or the difference between the sexes, Françoise Héritier radically renewed anthropological methodology. Her life’s work has also shown us that scientific commitment goes hand-in-hand with societal involvement.
Alors qu’il s’est effondré sur la scène nationale, le Parti socialiste a trouvé dans les mairies un espace de résistance, sinon de résilience. Cependant, au fil du temps, les maires socialistes sont essentiellement devenus des techniciens locaux, dont la notabilité s’est affaiblie.
Dans une étude compréhensive et multiscalaire des inégalités sociales, ethnoraciales et de genre face au VIH dans la capitale fédérale étatsunienne, Sanyu A. Mojola décrit une métropole où se combinent ségrégation résidentielle, consommations de drogues, violences et incarcération de masse, aux effets sanitaires durables.
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.
À propos de : Pascal Richet, Des savants et des dieux. I. De la divination babylonienne au miracle grec, l’émergence de la science, Les Belles Lettres
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
