laviedesidees

Books & ideas

Envisaging the Future of Republicanism in France

About: T. Ménissier, La liberté des contemporains. Pourquoi il faut rénover la république, P.U. Grenoble, 2011

by Sophie Guérard de la Tour [17-05-2012]
To Thierry Ménissier, France’s republicanism is not a thing of the past. In fact, the republican regime is still the best guarantee of liberty in France, but only if it is overhauled so that it takes on board the important role of political participation. Republicanism’s continuing relevance requires that it get back in touch with the classical republican tradition.
[Read more]

Chicago: A City on the Brink

by Andrew J. Diamond [15-05-2012]
Originally scheduled to host the next G8 summit, Chicago has been bypassed in favor of Camp David. No wonder: the “the city that works” works no more. With a terrible youth unemployment rate and (...)
[Read more]

Is There a Dictatorship in the E.U.?

by Andrew Arato [11-05-2012]
The Orban government has enacted sweeping changes that have raised the specter of autocracy in Hungary: is the European Union about to have a dictatorship among its member states? For Andrew (...)
[Read more]

Post-Racial America?

About: Desmond S. King, Rogers M. Smith, Still a House Divided: Race and politics in Obama’s America, Princeton University Press.

by Sarah Fila-Bakabadio [10-05-2012]
Obama cannot fully inscribe himself in a traditional vision of African American racial politics as the struggle of slave-descendants for equality. He is better approached as a participant of (...)

The Numbers of Crime

About: Ph. Robert et R. Zauberman, Mesurer la délinquance, Presses de Sciences Po

by Bilel Benbouzid [08-05-2012]
When it comes to delinquency, the press, as well as political discourse, tends to emphasize the “crime angle” over the “sociological angle.” Moreover, when quantitative data is used in public debate, (...)

A So-Called Silence

About: Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962, New York University Press.

by Simon Perego [04-05-2012]
The American historian Hasia Diner sets out to dispel a “myth:” it is mistaken, she argues, to claim that American Jews showed little interest in the Holocaust before the 1970s. This so-called (...)

Novel Spatial Formats For Urban Inclusion

by Saskia Sassen [03-05-2012]
Focusing on the two cases of megaregions and global cities, sociologist Saskia Sassen explores how a more equitable distribution of benefits can be reached at the level of great urban (...)

Europe: Another Useless Treaty?

An interview with Renaud Dehousse

by Stéphanie Novak [01-05-2012]
On March 2012, 25 EU Member States signed a new treaty to increase coordination between economic policies within the Union, something Germany in particular was keen on. Will this allow them to (...)

Chicago and Paris

Second part of the article

by Marco Oberti [27-04-2012]
French programs of “positive discrimination” are supposed to help open elite education to socially disadvantaged students. While challenging the idea that diversity is truly promoted in the United (...)

Chicago and Paris

First part of the article

by Marco Oberti [26-04-2012]
French programs of “positive discrimination” are supposed to help open elite education to socially disadvantaged students. While challenging the idea that diversity is truly promoted in the United (...)

New Light on a Colonial Massacre

About: Emmanuel Blanchard, La Police parisienne et les Algériens (1944-1962), Nouveau Monde éditions; Jacques Panijel, Octobre à Paris; and Yasmina Adi, Ici on noie les Algériens.

by Muriel Cohen [24-04-2012]
A recent book and two documentaries shed new light on the repression of the demonstration by Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961. By looking at these events in their long-term context, they (...)

Giving Gifts

Debate between Anne Bory, Nicolas Guilhot, Sabine Rozier and Olivier Zunz

by Pauline Peretz [20-04-2012]
There is a long-standing tradition of contrasting the French and American models of philanthropy. According to four scholars invited to discuss the matter for Books and Ideas, this contrast, (...)

In the Land of Voluntarism

An interview with Claude S. Fischer

by Nicolas Duvoux [19-04-2012]
In Made in America, sociologist Claude S. Fischer develops the idea that voluntarism, not individualism, is the key feature to describe social ties in America and that this notion of voluntarism (...)

Louis Dumont’s Political Thought

by Vincent Descombes [17-04-2012]
Louis Dumont is very well known for his anthropological work on India, but rather less for his political thought. Vincent Descombes emphasizes the substantial originality of that thought, which (...)

Fukushima: The Unremitting Disaster

An Interview with Paul Jobin, sociologist

by David Bornstein & Bernard Thomann [13-04-2012]
Paul Jobin, who has been monitoring workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant, provides an analysis of the Japanese government’s denial of the health implications for these workers and, more broadly, (...)

Challenging the Libertarian Mind

About: Reviewed: Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, Princeton University Press.

by Jack Vromen [12-04-2012]
In a book that uses Darwinian insights alongside Adam Smith to change our thinking on economics, Robert H. Frank sets out to convince libertarians that more taxes can mean more growth and more (...)

The Soviet Union: A Shaky Welfare State

À propos de : Dorena Caroli, Histoire de la protection sociale en Union soviétique (1917-1939), L’Harmattan.

by Grégory Dufaud [10-04-2012]
Though the Soviet system’s ambitions were initially universalistic, the system of social protection that it established quickly proved discriminatory and insufficiently generous. In a recent book, (...)

The Fight against Corruption

Interviews with Philippe Aghion and William Bourdon

by David Bornstein & Ivan Jablonka [06-04-2012]
Democracies must be able to promote economic innovation. In France, however, the media and the judicial system are not independent from the state and public policies are not evaluated. The (...)

What Images Show

An Interview with Philippe Descola

by Philippe Simay [05-04-2012]
The curator of the recent La fabrique des images exhibit at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, anthropologist Philippe Descola offers a new approach of pictorial representations on the five (...)

Archives


 © laviedesidees.fr - Any replication forbidden without the explicit consent of the editors. - SPIP - Legal notice