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.
We would rather not see or even think about our waste, but it has a lot to tell us about our habits, our lives, and more importantly, about what we are doing to our world today.
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.
Marx misunderstood Proudhon: he criticized him for neglecting the relations of production, when in fact the French anarchist was interested in the political subjugation that, in his view, private property inevitably causes.
Ancient Roman diets were based on health concerns as well as moral and political considerations. Frugality and pleasure were not mutually exclusive. Eating was about more than filling one’s stomach.
Reviewed: Georgina Adam, The Rise and Rise of the Art Private Museum, Lund Humphries
About: Raphaël Morera, Une histoire au fil de l’eau. Paris et son environnement, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle, Éditions de l’EHESS
About: Muriel Mille, Le travail de la fiction. Dans les coulisses d’une série télévisée, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes
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.
We seem to struggle to take the measure of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its onset was sudden, its effects are uncertain and its long term consequences are still unpredictable. Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts exploring the various facets of epidemics.
Historians, sociologists, and social scientists in general have long tried to “think big” and “global.” The rise of Asia in the world economy has stimulated anew this attraction for the macro-level. Books and Ideas proposes to look at some of the most innovative ways this work has been done recently, in the history of ideas, of trade and cultural exchanges, economic convergences and decolonization.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be back at the end of August. In the meantime, here is a selection of interviews, reviews and essays on popular music published over the past year.
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.
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.
Célèbre pour sa critique du dualisme cartésien et pour son style plein d’esprit, le philosophe anglais Gilbert Ryle incarne le triomphe planétaire, mais oublié, de la philosophie du langage ordinaire d’Oxford de l’après-guerre aux années 1960.
Comment représenter un phénomène qui relie des processus aussi différents que le climat, les océans, l’agriculture, l’urbanisation ou les flux de ressources à l’échelle mondiale ? La réponse tient en une forme séculaire : l’atlas.
On s’inquiète beaucoup des conséquences que l’IA pourrait avoir sur les pratiques artistiques, l’homme pouvant être ainsi remplacé par la machine. Mais on n’est pas assez sensible à ses apports et à ses effets esthétiques nouveaux.
À propos de : Jean-Claude Passeron, Un itinéraire de sociologue. Trames, chaînes, bifurcations, Éditions de l’EHESS
À propos de : Wiktor Stoczkowski, Penser comme Poutine. Une menace pour nos démocraties, Éditions du Cerf
À propos de : Ludivine Eloy, Dans le vert des cartes. Agriculture et environnement au Brésil, Presses universitaires de Rennes
