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.
Is France heading to the right, as everyone seems to think? According to Vincent Tiberj, it all depends on how this rightward turn is defined. For now, the French prefer the left’s values.
In their recent research about Israeli politics, Noam Gidron and his coauthors explore the country’s affective polarization, the support for the judicial overhaul, Likud’s populism, and the relations between them.
The international and industrialized market for used or secondhand clothes—known in French as “fripes” - is not a genuine alternative to “fast fashion”. Rather, it preserves, pursues, and reproduces economically, socially, and symbolically the characteristics of the market for new clothes.
Primitive societies, Lévy-Bruhl explains, are on the lookout for signs of catastrophes, though they are unpredictable. Since we, too, are in a constant state of alert, this insight should inspire us.
About: Frédéric Porcher, La « question-Nietzsche ». Les normes au carrefour du vital et du social, Vrin
About: Julia Cagé & Thomas Piketty, A History of Political Conflict: Elections and Social Inequalities in France, 1789-2022, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
About: Julia Cagé & Thomas Piketty, A History of Political Conflict : Elections and Social Inequalities in France, 1789-2022, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
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.
In our second winter selection of reviews and essays, Books & Ideas takes a look back at a few important articles published over the last year on the current developments and trends affecting public spaces for expression and debate : from the traditional media to the world wide web, these different spaces are all under pressure from ongoing changes. Rules and practices are evolving, as the traditional public space is being radically enlarged.
In the U.S., in France as well with Hugues Lagrange’s book on “the denial of cultures”, culture has again become the focus of poverty studies. Our dossier on “culture of poverty” reviews this new trend and examines a notion that has paradoxically been given a new lease of life by the economic downturn, half a century after Oscar Lewis controversially introduced it.
During the Christmas season, Books and Ideas offers a selection of reviews and essays that tackle the subject of cities and the issues they raise as complex centers of urban life: how could we live better in them? How to reduce the inequalities they create? Can they become more sustainable? The following texts cast a new light on all of these questions.
Among the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was Elinor Ostrom, for her analysis of economic governance, especially in relation to the commons. While this choice took many in the profession by surprise, her life-long quest for an understanding of successful common property resource management holds important lessons for our future.
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.
Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a controversial figure in Japan. And rightly so, for there are a great many contradictions in both his fictional and theoretical work. He is a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and yet continues to celebrate the heroism of the soldier who finds glory through sacrifice.
L’extrême droite n’en a pas fini avec Rousseau. A. de Benoist et M. Onfray, dans un livre paru chez Fayard, souhaitent à nouveau s’en débarrasser, le premier en expliquant qu’en réalité il est conservateur (et donc récupérable), le second en affirmant qu’il est moderne (et donc irrécupérable).
S’appuyant sur l’histoire de la pensée économique, le testament intellectuel du grand économiste français Daniel Cohen montre que la croissance économique n’a de sens que si elle contribue au bonheur et invite à repenser l’économie comme un art de vivre.
Que disent les signalements de galériens du XVIIIᵉ siècle sur l’institution judiciaire et policière ? En confrontant archives administratives et notes personnelles, Arlette Farge donne à voir une histoire où l’identification des corps engage aussi l’émotion et le regard de l’historienne.
À propos de : Fabrice Teroni, L’ombre du doute. Une analyse des Méditations métaphysiques de Descartes, Elliot
À propos de : “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides”, par Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeiera et Stefanie Stantcheva, American Economic Review
À propos de : Romain Bertrand et Jean Dytar, Les Sentiers d’Anahuac, La Découverte/Delcourt
