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.
Étienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali examine a key moment in interdisciplinary dialogue: Pierre Bourdieu’s translation and editing of the art historian Erwin Panofsky.
Bernard Manin sees Montesquieu as a political philosopher who was attentive to the plurality of political forms and the way that such pluralism can, in moderate regimes, prevent the abuse of power. This is why it is important, he explains, to keep reading this Enlightenment philosopher.
The intensive use of carbon energies has brought prosperity, particularly since 1945, along with relatively peaceful international relations. Decarbonation makes it necessary, according to Pierre Charbonnier, to invent a new form of geopolitics.
About: Geneviève Verdo, Des peuples en mal d’union. Aux origines de l’Argentine, Flammarion
About: Denis Crouzet, Paris criminel. 1572, Les Belles Lettres
About: Anne-Marie Cheny, Le cercle des byzantinistes. Comment bibliothécaires, savants et voyageurs inventèrent Byzance (XVIe-XIXe siècle), Les Belles Lettres
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.
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.
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.
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.
In our second winter selection of reviews and essays, Books & Ideas takes a look back at a few important articles published over the last year on the current developments and trends affecting public spaces for expression and debate : from the traditional media to the world wide web, these different spaces are all under pressure from ongoing changes. Rules and practices are evolving, as the traditional public space is being radically enlarged.
“Do we have the right to make bets on the future of mankind?” Forty-one years after being the first ecologist candidate in a presidential campaign and publishing his manifesto book, René Dumont’s intuitions and warnings have lost little of their relevance.
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.
A great historian of the English working class, a major intellectual figure in debates surrounding Marxism in the years 1960-1970, and an anti-nuclear activist who initiated an environmentalist critique of capitalism—such were the many faces of Edward Palmer Thompson, whose work deeply permeates the different social sciences to this day.
La victoire électorale au Pérou de Keiko Fujimori, la fille de l’ancien autocrate des années 1990, doit s’apprécier au regard d’une modification institutionnelle : le retour du bicamérisme.
Menée à Paris, à Lampedusa et à Lesbos, une enquête ethnographique plonge dans les coulisses de l’enfermement administratif des étrangers en situation irrégulière.
Jusqu’à quel point l’œuvre de J. R. R. Tolkien se prête aux lectures politiques ? Entre critique de la modernité industrielle, préoccupations écologiques et rejet des formes de domination, la Terre du Milieu continue d’alimenter les interprétations concurrentes.
Patricia Arancibia Clavel et Francisco Balart Páez, Sergio de Castro : arquitecto del modelo económico chileno, Providencia, Ediciones Universidad Finis Terrae
Laurent Joly (dir.), Vichy. Histoire d’une dictature 1940-1944, Tallandier
À propos de : Amina Hassani, La justice du capital, La Fabrique
