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.
Right to a healthy environment, rights of nature or of non-human animals: can environmental rights serve the cause of environmentalism? Legal expert Diane Roman analyses the pathways towards the jurisdictional enforcement of these new rights, and highlights the progress they have made, as well as their limitations.
Quotas in India contribute to the emancipation of lower castes while producing perverse effects that are difficult to control. Rohini Somanathan questions the right balance between targeted positive discrimination policies and public policies with a universal vocation.
Is another world possible? Answering this question requires us to first ask ourselves what “possible” might mean. We must return to the classics: from Aristotle to Bourdieu, many authors can help us understand what an alternative might look like.
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.
About: Pascal Sévérac, Puissance de l’enfance. Vygotski avec Spinoza, Vrin
About: Delphine Dulong, Premier ministre, CNRS Éditions
About: Jean Vioulac, Anarchéologie. Fragments hérétiques sur la catastrophe historique, Puf
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.
How to combat growing inequalities and injustice in a given country? Recent research suggests that solutions lie in better understanding and controlling access to education and working conditions but also in regulating tax havens and the salaries of executives.
A selection of five essays and reviews recently published in Books&Ideas discusses the legacy and renewal of social class studies in France, Great-Britain and India.
Over the past few months, Books and Ideas has been running a series of interviews with leading contemporary scholars, who took the time to discuss their particular topics of research with us. For the Christmas season, we have put together a selection of seven discussions with intellectuals across the humanities and sciences: sociology, history, comparative literature, neuro-biology, anthropology and political science.
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.
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.
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.
Quelle est la part de la référence religieuse dans le discours de Vox, le parti d’extrême droite espagnol ? Le catholicisme est au cœur de sa revendication identitaire et nationaliste, mais sert aussi de ressource symbolique pour combattre les courants féministes et progressistes.
Critiquée pour des manquements à répétition, la police française semble désespérément manquer d’une ligne d’action explicite en matière d’encadrement des manifestations. Celle-ci pourrait pourtant s’inspirer de la logique de désescalade promue ailleurs sur le continent européen.
Günther Anders voyait en l’homme un “animal jeteur” et projeteur, mais par là aussi un être “pauvre en instincts”, déficient, lacunaire, inadapté et finalement voué à l’autodestruction.
À propos de : Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Histoire de la papesse Jeanne. Une enquête au cœur des textes, Presses Universitaires de Lyon
À propos de : Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Sans transition. Une nouvelle histoire de l’énergie, Seuil
À propos de : Cédric Durand, Razmig Keucheyan, Comment bifurquer. Les principes de la planification écologique, La Découverte