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.
School is mandatory and fully justified in being so. Educational authority in no way impairs freedom, provided it focuses on developing students’ multiple capacities.
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.
Not only in Texas, where a professor was ordered to remove Plato from his syllabus, but throughout the United States, ideological dictatorship has begun. It amounts to nothing less than an attack on universities, the freedom of speech, and thought. How is it possible to resist in the face of this onslaught?
The rise of surveillance technologies is redefining the approach to security amid economic pressures. Wherever it is implemented, this surveillance, boosted by new technologies, raises the question of abuses that threaten civil liberties.
About : Christine van Geen, Allumeuse. Genèse d’un mythe, Seuil
About: Solène Brun, Derrière le mythe métis. Enquête sur les couples mixtes et leurs descendants en France, La Découverte
About: Sandra Hoibian, La mosaïque française. Comment (re)faire société aujourd’hui, Flammarion
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.
How do images shape our worldview ? What do their study bring to our understanding of society ? Through interviews, essays and reviews this dossier shows how the close study of still or moving images has become central to the social sciences. From anthropology to history or literature, taking into account the overwhelming presence of visual representation yields unexpected and original information about human, social and political relationships.
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?
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, reviews and interviews published over the past year, exploring the relationship between music and politics.
Although now considered a pseudo-science, phrenology was tremendously successful in its Victorian heyday. Tracing the intellectual and scientific journey of George Combe, the ’science’s most prominent promoter in Great Britain, this paper addresses the phrenologists’ little-known contribution to the ’social question’ debate of the day, and the ambiguities of their social gospel.
Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), a poor child who went onto become a university professor, was the epitome of a successful scholarship student. The trajectory of this “exemplary counter-example” sheds light on the mechanisms of social reproduction when they prove inoperative and the distance that can be traveled from one’s native milieu.
Rediscovering an activist thinker who was at the origins of eco-feminism, but remains unknown. Her work inspired an extremely heterogeneous movement, but has her ambition to concretely transform the social, economic and political organisation of society been pursued?
Au-delà du Texas, où un enseignant a été sommé de retirer Platon du programme, la dictature idéologique a commencé aux États-Unis. Il s’agit d’un assaut contre les universités, la liberté de pensée et d’expression. Comment résister à ce rouleur compresseur ?
1967 : lutte pour les civil rights, guerre du Vietnam, Sergent Pepper des Beatles, Velvet Underground, début des Doors … Au même moment, Bob Dylan enregistre des morceaux qui renouvellent le langage culturel américain.
La pensée cosmologique des Mésopotamiens, où ciel et terre sont structurés de la même manière, révèle un certain rapport au monde. Et si l’astrologie avait été l’ancêtre de l’astronomie et, plus généralement, de la pensée scientifique ?
À propos de : Elsa Génard et Mathilde Rossigneux-Méheust (dir.), Routines punitives. Les sanctions du quotidien, XIXe-XXe siècle, CNRS Éditions
À propos de : Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, Maghreb noir. Rabat, Alger et Tunis dans les luttes panafricaines, Ròt-Bò-Krik
À propos de Adam Hochman, The Race Illusion. On the Reality of Racialization and the Myth of Race, Oxford University Press, 2025
