Books & ideas

How China Governs

Editorial Team — 2020-08-03T07:00:00Z

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 focuses on China today, its uses of digital technologies to govern, and the political theories developed by its intellectuals.

Chinese Intellectuals Speak to the World

Émilie Frenkiel — 2020-03-09T08:00:00Z

With China's regained power on the world stage, making accessible and studying the way intellectuals reflect on their country and contribute to the global conversation has become indispensable.

Writing Intellectual History

Iain Stewart — 2019-10-07T07:00:00Z

Should the history of intellectuals also be a history of ideas? François Dosse's book reorients scholarship in this field by integrating ideas and high culture into the traditionally more sociologically informed history of French intellectuals.

Theories as Social Action

Florent Guénard — 2019-04-11T06:00:00Z

By insisting on the need to consider philosophical works as interventions in the general, ongoing political debates of their time, Quentin Skinner has profoundly renewed the history of ideas. In this interview, he revisits the main themes of his work.

Weber's Legacy

Gianfranco Poggi — 2015-11-23T08:00:00Z

Proving his mastery of Weber's oeuvre, Scaff's new book considers the imprint left by various aspects of Weber's work on the imagination and production of three generations of authors from Europe and North America. He shows that the confrontation between contemporary scholars and Weber's legacy is a show that will run and run…

Ideologues and Cassandras: the Thinkers behind Putinism

Michel Eltchaninoff — 2015-11-02T08:27:25Z

What lies beneath Putinism? Taking a look at Russia's history and culture, Michel Eltchaninoff shows that the success of Vladimir Putin's anti-Western rhetoric, though drawn partly from pre-Revolutionary thought, is as much the result of the post-war Soviet Union's strong nationalist streak that continues to shape Russian society.

Global Thinking

Emile Chabal — 2014-10-13T08:30:00Z

Intellectual history and global history have both experienced a welcome revival in recent years, but is there a way to reconcile these two (re)emerging trends? This collection of essays offers a stimulating guide for future research, as well as some salutary warnings about the limitations of a global approach.

The Tumults of the Twentieth Century

Lucie Campos — 2014-09-19T08:00:00Z

Antoine Compagnon discusses two recent projects that throw light on the intellectual history of the 20^th century. The controversies surrounding the institutionalisation of sociology or anthropology illustrate how academic subjects have developed in France; a literary anthology situates the literature of the Great War within an international context.

History in the Making

Cristelle Terroni — 2014-08-11T07:00:00Z

Books&Ideas presents a second summer selection, in which contemporary historians tell us about the future of history as a discipline, about how they research and write history, and the way history affects their bodies and minds.

Are Historians Guilty of Short-term Thinking?

Nicolas Delalande — 2014-06-25T13:29:14Z

The hyper-specialisation of historical studies is not inevitable. For Harvard Professor David Armitage, intellectual history urgently needs to rediscover its taste for the longue durée. Otherwise, naturalist approaches may end up dominating what we now know as Big History.