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.
At a time when public museums are struggling due to budget cuts and the need for renovations, the opening of many private foundations marks a shift in the Parisian museum landscape. Against this backdrop, G. Adam offers a comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding the rise of private museums.
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.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, as the monarchy established its authority across French territory, the rivers of the Paris Basin continued to be managed by various actors through negotiations aimed at coordination.
How are television series written? Muriel Mille’s study sheds light on a collective process based on a division of labor and time constraints. It represents a total break with the auteur ideal of New Wave cinema.
About: Jérôme Baschet, Quand commence le capitalisme ? De la société féodale au monde de l’économie, Crise et critique
About: Camille Mahé, La Seconde Guerre Mondiale des Enfants, Allemagne, France, Italie (1943-1949), PUF
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.
In the U.S., in France as well with Hugues Lagrange’s book on “the denial of cultures”, culture has again become the focus of poverty studies. Our dossier on “culture of poverty” reviews this new trend and examines a notion that has paradoxically been given a new lease of life by the economic downturn, half a century after Oscar Lewis controversially introduced it.
How do images respond to political events and how do they shape them ? What is the political power of images ? Should images of violence be shown in the media ? Through its winter selection, Books&Ideas offers to rediscover a group of four essays and reviews, all published in 2015, which have tackled these questions through the prism of history, philosophy, aesthetics and political sciences.
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?
Among the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was Elinor Ostrom, for her analysis of economic governance, especially in relation to the commons. While this choice took many in the profession by surprise, her life-long quest for an understanding of successful common property resource management holds important lessons for our future.
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.
André Gorz’s multiform thought is entirely centred on liberation: from work, which prevents individuals from thriving; from consumption, which grows ever higher; and from the social system, which reduces individuals to mere pawns in a “megamachine”.
La rencontre entre la post-croissance et les espaces urbains concrétise une économie du bien-être qui peut redonner vie au projet européen à l’heure où le continent s’interroge à raison sur son identité mais à tort sur son déclin.
De ses origines populaire et contestataire sur les places de Barcelone à son entrée dans le « palais » municipal, David Hamou présente une ethnographie de Barcelone en Commun et de son « pari municipaliste ».
Pour réussir leur carrière, les élu·es gays et lesbiennes sont confronté·es à un choix difficile : comment révéler publiquement leur homosexualité. Hugo Bouvard étudie ces trajectoires sociales et politiques en France et aux États-Unis, ainsi que les mouvements qui les ont rendues possibles.
À propos de : Philippe Sands , 38, rue de Londres. De l’impunité, Pinochet et le nazi de Patagonie, Albin Michel
À propos de : Edward Berenson, Perfect communities. Levitt, Levittown, and the dream of white suburbia, Yale University Press
À propos de : Laleh Khalili, Extractive Capitalism. How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy, Profile Books
