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.
The complexity of contemporary biology is a source of wonder, fear, and misunderstanding. Thierry Hoquet reviews the major biological theories to help us think through the social implications of a science that is opening up fascinating, though not inevitable, horizons.
Since the 1980s, patient accompaniment has been considered a form of care in its own right. Yet, the “ethic of care,” now a key notion in philosophy, is also part of the solidarity pact that governs the welfare state in France.
“Fixers”, or dragomans, are vital intermediaries and interpreters for both journalists and soldiers in hostile terrain, and play a central role in a network of relationships and transfers. In the Middle Ages they embodied the need for otherness, and continue to do so today.
About: Manon Garcia (éd.), Philosophie féministe. Patriarcat, savoirs, justice, Vrin
About: Benjamin Lemoine, La démocratie disciplinée par la dette, La Découverte
About: Stéphane Dufoix, Décolonial, Anamosa
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.
In 1947, Princess Elizabeth promised to serve ‘the great imperial family’, as part of the attempt to remake post-war Britain as a global power. The British Empire collapsed; but this language of service and Commonwealth allowed the Queen to take up the postcolonial concerns of the 21st century.
In order to better grasp protests and social movements in China, whose number has impressively swollen in recent years, Books&Ideas presents a dossier on the evolution of social mobilization and on the representation of social instability in this country.
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 questions the social construction of racial identities, and the history of domination.
Books & Ideas is going on holiday for the summer, and will resume its publication schedule in September. In the meantime, we present to you a weekly roundup of our most recent essays and reviews. Our first summer selection features compelling interviews on subjects as varied as food and media studies, African-American history, quantum physics, Russian political culture, and Muslim-Jewish relations.
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.
“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.
Miguel Abensour profoundly renewed thinking about democracy. His political philosophy paid close attention to the desire for emancipation and was based on an original conception of utopia breaking with the mythology of the ‘ideal city’ or of a ‘good society’.
La crise politique vénézuélienne connaît un nouvel épisode avec une élection présidentielle frauduleuse par laquelle Nicolás Maduro tente de se maintenir au pouvoir au prix d’un nouveau saut en avant autoritaire. La répression étatique atteint des sommets sans précédent.
En trois volumes rassemblant l’œuvre écrite et parlée de Chantal Akerman, apparaît l’écrivaine derrière la cinéaste.
Au commencement il y a le Spasfon, un succès pharmaceutique français, un médicament banal, prescrit à des millions de femmes chaque mois pour soulager leurs douleurs menstruelles. À la fin, un médicament dont l’efficacité s’avère insuffisamment prouvée, et souvent prescrit comme placebo.
À propos de : Raphaële Andrault, Le Fer ou le Feu. Penser la douleur après Descartes, Classiques Garnier
À propos de : Justine Lacroix, Les valeurs de l’Europe. Un enjeu démocratique, Collège de France éditions
À propos de : Bernard Lahire, Les structures fondamentales des sociétés humaines, La Découverte