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.
Review Philosophy
Are we free, or are our actions determined by natural causes? The problem thus posed is a metaphysical construct: From late antiquity onwards, the authentic meaning of freedom as a principle of action has been obscured by the invention of free will and the excessive importance given to the concept of the will.
How did African-Americans attempt to overturn the relations of racial domination in the United States? From the post-war period onwards, by creating cultural and educational institutions specific to their community, which are still useful today in the fight against discrimination.
Vygotsky is a major educational theorist credited with showing how the mind of the child is formed. In this book, Pascal Sévérac explains what Vygotsky’s theory owes to Spinoza’s.
Delphine Dulong analyses the role of the French Prime Minister, who does not so much embody a clearly-defined institution as a relational structure: a diarchy with the President, incessant interministerial work, parliamentary obligations. Is the job a powerful position, or that of an underling?
About: Jean Vioulac, Anarchéologie. Fragments hérétiques sur la catastrophe historique, Puf
About: Carole Gayet-Viaud, La civilité urbaine. Les formes élémentaires de la coexistence démocratique, Economica
About: Thibault Le Texier, La main visible des marchés. Une histoire critique du marketing, la Découverte
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 1947, Princess Elizabeth promised to serve ‘the great imperial family’, as part of the attempt to remake post-war Britain as a global power. The British Empire collapsed; but this language of service and Commonwealth allowed the Queen to take up the postcolonial concerns of the 21st century.
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 ways to shift our intellectual categories.
In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, six contributors from France, Russia and the US address the issue of contemporary Russia and its often tense relations with the West.
A selection of four essays recently published on Books & Ideas offers new perspectives on the definition, historiography and potential applications of environmental theory.
Though poorly known in France, the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas is nonetheless essential for understanding the elementary forms of social organization and daily life. By shedding light on her academic career and personal life, this portrait rehabilitates the thought of a major intellectual.
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.
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.
En quoi l’eau peut-elle être conçue comme un bien commun ? En partant de la faculté de l’eau à mettre en rapport des individus et des territoires, cet essai caractérise différentes formes de communalité formées par et autour de l’eau.
Contre le néo-industrialisme vert et l’inefficacité des politiques climatiques, un sociologue et un économiste prônent une planification écologique à grande échelle, sur une base sociale et démocratique.
Papes, rois et autres conciles : le Moyen Âge serait « réformateur ». Alors que les discours contemporains sont saturés de « réformes », un livre collectif s’interroge sur le sens et la rareté du mot en Occident entre le XIIIe et le XVe siècle.
À propos de : John Dewey, Nature humaine et conduite, Gallimard
À propos de : Laurent Nespoulous, Pierre-François Souyri, Le Japon. Des chasseurs-cueilleurs à Heian, 36000 à l’an mille, Belin
À propos de : Bram Büscher et Robert Fletcher, Le vivant et la révolution, Actes Sud