Books & ideas

An Anti-Totalitarian Publisher

Robin Freymond — 2026-04-16T07:30:00Z

Backed by Raymond Aron and Manès Sperber, the French publishing house Calmann-Lévy championed anti-communism and the fight against totalitarianism from the end of World War II.

Gramsci in the Face of the Great and Terrible World

Yohann Douet — 2025-05-13T06:00:00Z

The life and work of Antonio Gramsci are inseparable. To grasp the coherence and theoretical depth of the Prison Notebooks, one must read them in the context in which they were written.

The Militarisation of Russian Society

Clémentine Fauconnier — 2019-11-25T08:00:00Z

Russia has seen a huge increase in commemorations of the Soviet victory. Some of these parades are organized by civilians, while others are more official. But all of them reveal a rise in a nationalism that Putin would like to epitomise.

Where Does the Left Stand in India?

Jules Naudet & Stéphanie Tawa-Lama Rewal — 2018-09-10T07:00:00Z

In India as in Europe, the left wing is struggling. Looking beyond the financialisation of the economy and disparities in social conditions, this essay sheds light on other factors explaining the weakness of the Indian left wing, from electoral dynamics to the criminalisation of the political class.

The Psyche of Fascists

Grégory Dufaud — 2017-08-31T07:00:00Z

The experience of the Second World War prompted the in-depth reform of psychiatry, as social factors were included in the explanation of psychic illnesses. It also served as a justification for the psychiatric and political re-education of political opponents—as Ana Antic shows, based on patient files from a Yugoslav institute.

E. P. Thompson: A Life of Struggle

François Jarrige — 2016-03-14T08:00:00Z

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.

Reading with Dissidents

Weronika Parfianowicz-Vertun — 2014-12-15T11:15:00Z

In the 1970s and 1980s, Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovakian dissidents used illegal, home-made books and papers to voice their anti-Communist protests. Weronika Parfianowicz-Vertun examines the history and relevance of this phenomenon, which remains little known outside ex-Sovietic countries. [1]

Reform in China: Sluggish or Dynamic?

Émilie Frenkiel — 2013-10-11T07:16:34Z

Lucien Bianco is a historian of Chinese peasantry and the author of Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949. In this interview for Books&Ideas, he draws a mixed portrait of the changes undergone by China for a couple of decades, and mentions the ‘de-Maoization process', the single child policy, the ‘new socialist countryside', as well as the elitiste discourse of Chinese intellectuals.

Recovering Privacy

Benjamin Cope — 2011-06-13T20:35:20Z

The latest issue of the St Petersburg based social science journal, Laboratorium, is devoted to gender sensitive ethnographies in the post-Soviet space. Despite the fact that it lacks an overarching thesis, it convincingly questions the notion of private sphere in a space clouded by the legacy of an ideologically intrusive communist system.

Political change and democracy in China

Émilie Frenkiel — 2009-07-15T07:26:15Z

Can Western political concepts accurately describe the Chinese political regime? In this interview, Wang Shaoguang defines democracy as “a combination of responsibility, responsiveness, and accountability”. He claims that only when political reform is no longer solely equated with competitive elections can the true nature of political change in China come to light.