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.
A new archaeology has emerged whose contributions to our understanding of twentieth-century mass violence oscillate between history and memory. A specialist in the field provides an impressive overview that sounds very much like a plea.
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.
Under the Ancien Régime, salaries were not enough to live on. Many people had to combine activities to make ends meet. Laurence Fontaine paints a vivid picture of this reality.
Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city’s lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.
About: Adeline Grand-Clément, Au plaisir des dieux. Expériences du sensible dans les rituels en Grèce ancienne, Anacharsis
About : Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, La verticale de la peur. Ordre et allégeance en Russie poutinienne, La Découverte
About: Olivier Alexandre, La Tech. Quand la Silicon Valley refait le monde, Seuil
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.
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.
The last year has been extremely tough for Europe as a political idea. The debt crisis, the rise of the radical right, repeated and widespread attacks against immigrants, foreigners, but also the very concept of supranational solidarity have seemed to bring one of the richest regions of the globe to the brink of collapse. Is the situation as hard as it has been made to look? And where should Europe’s efforts first turn to?
We seem to struggle to take the measure of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its onset was sudden, its effects are uncertain and its long term consequences are still unpredictable. Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts exploring the various facets of epidemics.
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.
“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.
A great historian of the English working class, a major intellectual figure in debates surrounding Marxism in the years 1960-1970, and an anti-nuclear activist who initiated an environmentalist critique of capitalism—such were the many faces of Edward Palmer Thompson, whose work deeply permeates the different social sciences to this day.
Comment retracer l’histoire des personnes d’ascendance africaine ? Les recherches d’Olivette Otele montrent combien les multiples trajectoires individuelles, ainsi que leur perception et leurs représentations, sont intimement liées à l’histoire du continent européen et aux enjeux du présent.
Si les classes sociales suscitent de nouveau un intérêt certain, leur définition comme leur articulation avec d’autres rapports sociaux souffrent souvent d’approximations. La traduction posthume d’un ouvrage du sociologue Erik Olin Wright apporte des clarifications et un éclairage marxiste utiles.
En dépit de l’égalité affichée devant le service public, la sélection des patients est au cœur des politiques publiques sanitaires. Or, en omettant certains de ses mécanismes, leurs agents contribuent fortement aux inégalités sociales de santé, comme le montre Maud Gelly dans un ouvrage éclairant.
À propos de : Théo Boulakia, Nicolas Mariot, L’attestation. Une expérience d’obéissance de masse, printemps 2020, Anamosa
A propos de : Laurent Coumel, 24 heures de la vie à Tchernobyl, Puf
À propos de : Bertrand Cochard, Vide à la demande. Critique des séries, L’Échappée
