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 History
At the beginning of the eleventh century, the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate coincided with political fragmentation. It was in this unusual context, soon to be exacerbated by Christian incursions from the north and Berber incursions from the south, that this part of the Muslim world experienced a flourishing culture.
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.
Educating children by respecting their spontaneous interests: Such is the promise of alternative pedagogies. Subjecting these promises to sociological critique, Ghislain Leroy shows that they are not necessarily emancipatory and may even contribute to the reproduction of social inequalities.
While Chinese immigrants and their descendants have long been portrayed as a “model minority”, Ya-Han Chuang shows how this qualifier papers over the representations that are imposed on members of this minority in France – who are now fighting back against racism.
About: Jérémie Foa, Tous ceux qui tombent. Visages de la Saint-Barthélemy, La Découverte
About: Denis Colombi, Pourquoi sommes-nous capitalistes (malgré nous) ? Dans la fabrique de l’homo œconomicus, Payot
About: Clément Viktorovitch, Le pouvoir rhétorique, apprendre à convaincre et à décrypter les discours, Seuil
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. In the meantime, here is our weekly selection of reviews published over the past year.
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.
As populism is rising on a global level, Books & Ideas offers a series on media politics in East Asian countries, to be published over the next two weeks. Though situations are extremely diverse, they can teach us a lot on the relationship between the state and journalists in authoritarian contexts. What role is left for the media to play in non-democracies?
How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.
Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a controversial figure in Japan. And rightly so, for there are a great many contradictions in both his fictional and theoretical work. He is a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and yet continues to celebrate the heroism of the soldier who finds glory through sacrifice.
L’État peut-il changer le comportement des individus ? Il s’y efforce, mais les changements les plus remarquables sont le plus souvent des effets non intentionnels.
Dans le premier tiers du XXe siècle, une école littéraire a brillé sous l’appellation de « merveilleux scientifique ». Puisant dans la fiction, la science et les techniques, elle a nourri les imaginaires de la modernité.
Comment se fait le théâtre à la fin du Moyen Âge, et que fait-il à la cité qui l’organise ? Par son caractère exceptionnel autant que la richesse de la documentation, le Mystère des trois doms représenté à Romans-sur-Isère en 1509 révèle sa dimension collective – religieuse, sociale et civique.
À propos de : Judith Herrin, Ravenne. Capitale de l’Empire, creuset de l’Europe, Passé composés
À propos de : Frédéric Keck, Préparer l’imprévisible. Lévy-Bruhl et les sciences de la vigilance, Puf
À propos de : David Edmonds, Parfit : A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, Princeton University Press