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 Foucault’s genealogy concerned with the will to truth or with truth itself? According to Pascal Engel, in maintaining the ambiguity between the two, Foucault ignored the norms of knowledge as an essential source of emancipation.
The female silhouette – understood as the body’s visible form and socially perceived appearance – has long been shaped by social norms. In the age of social media, these norms are intensifying, prompting, in response, the rise of so-called “body-positive” movements.
How can we move beyond the double deadlock of state socialism and market capitalism? For Lea Ypi, returning to Kant and the Enlightenment offers a perspective to provide a new ground to freedom as social responsibility, and to open up towards a cosmopolitan horizon against the authoritarianism of profit.
Our understanding of nature differs from that of the Greeks and Romans. From the “month of the ox” to “the forest goddess,” the ancients never thought to separate humans from the flora and fauna around them.
As 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s death, a new book offers a fresh perspective on a little-known yet pivotal period in the philosopher’s life and work.
About: Constance Pâris de Bollardière and Sharon Kangisser Cohen (eds.), After the Darkness? Holocaust Survivors’ Emotional, Psychological and Social Journeys in the Early Postwar Period, Yad Vashem
About: Gwendal Châton, Calmann-Lévy, éditeur engagé. Défendre l’antitotalitarisme dans la guerre froide des idées, Calmann-Lévy
About: Adeline Barbin, La démocratie des techniques, Hermann
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.
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.
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?
How do images shape our worldview ? What do their study bring to our understanding of society ? Through interviews, essays and reviews this dossier shows how the close study of still or moving images has become central to the social sciences. From anthropology to history or literature, taking into account the overwhelming presence of visual representation yields unexpected and original information about human, social and political relationships.
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.
One of Albert O. Hirschman’s contributions to economic theory is a richer understanding of the concept of the “rational actor,” which, he demonstrated, possesses the deliberative capacities that democratic market societies require. This following is a profile of an economist who was also a dissident and an activist.
A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history.
Pionnière de l’histoire des femmes avant que les études de genre s’institutionnalisent en France, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber a construit une œuvre multiforme ancrée dans l’histoire sociale et l’histoire de la parenté.
Et si l’impossibilité de parler en disait davantage sur la société que sur les individus ? Deux philosophes dialoguent au confluent de l’expérience et du politique.
Les élites britanniques se caractérisent par une très grande permanence de leurs stratégies de reproduction sociale. À partir d’une enquête originale sur les notices du Who’s Who, Aaron Reeves et Daniel Friedman tentent d’identifier les logiques sociales d’évolution de ce groupe sur le long terme.
À propos de : Sylvain Kahn, L’Europe : Un État qui s’ignore, CNRS éditions
À propos de : Mateusz Chmurski, Hélène Martinelli, Devenir-sœur. Repères dans un siècle de féminismes polonais, Michalon
À propos de : Nicolas Soulas, Familles et individus à l’épreuve. Les Payan, de la révocation de l’Édit de Nantes à l’âge des révolutions, Presses Universitaires de Rennes
