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.
How did French Jews view Nazism? Beginning in 1933, they organized and prepared for war with a lucid yet often resigned outlook on Hitler’s Germany.
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.
By scapegoating international organisations, Trump’s attacks are undermining multilateralism and the liberal order that emerged in 1945. This American disengagement is reopening the debate on a possible alternative leadership role for the EU.
Christianity is based on an egalitarian indifference to sexual difference, but in practice treats women very unequally. God the father has replaced the pagan idea of the Earth Mother, who celebrates humanity’s shared belonging to Gaia.
French liberalism, which first emerged during the Restoration, focused not only on individual rights: it also shaped the history of the mass as a subjugated political entity.
About: Stéphanie Soubrier, Races guerrières. Enquête sur une catégorie impériale (1850-1918), CNRS Editions
About: Jérôme Gaillardet, La Terre habitable ou l’épopée de la zone critique (The Habitable Earth or the Epic of the Critical Zone), La Découverte
About: Frédéric Monferrand, La nature du capital. Politique et ontologie chez le jeune Marx, Éditions Amsterdam
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.
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 media industry has undergone dramatic changes in its technologies and business models. To help us understand the effects of these changes on democracy, Books and Ideas takes the discussion away from simplistic dichotomies between the Internet and the so-called “traditional” press.
Summer is here; Books&Ideas is off on holiday. We will be back with new publications starting August 30. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Comment comprendre et soigner une douleur que les médecins peinent à identifier ? Première maladie génétique rare en France, la drépanocytose provoque une souffrance de tous les instants, mais reste largement méconnue.
Aurait-il pu y avoir, en lieu et place de l’Argentine que nous connaissons, 14 pouvoirs indépendants en compétition incessante ? Des “provinces désunies” du Rio de la Plata à l’affirmation d’un seul État-nation, G.Verdo décrit cinq décennies de recherche d’unité.
Contre les dualismes qui ont structuré l’histoire de la philosophie, Dewey construit une métaphysique d’inspiration naturaliste et empirique qui propose une interprétation des réalités les plus générales qui donnent sens à nos expériences.
À propos de : Fatma Çingi Kocadost, La promesse qu’on nous a faite, Éditions EHESS
À propos de : Julien Garric & Françoise Lorcerie (coord.), Les personnels scolaires et la pluralité ethnoreligieuse. Confrontations, L’Harmattan
À propos de : Thomas Angeletti, L’invention de l’économie française, Les Presses de Sciences Po
