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.
The current world-wide demand for “real” democracy as embodied in the Indignados (15-M) movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement reiterates long-lasting frustrations as regards representative government and the incompleteness of democratic experiences throughout the world. This dossier gathers interviews and essays by renowned scholars on the conception of democracy as an on-going experience and not as a finished model.
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 questions our global consumerism, looks back in its history and analyses its legal framework.
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.
From the margins to which he was confined, Georges Devereux (1908-1985) formulated some of the most original scientific work of his century. In the wake of Freud, whose legacy he firmly defended, Devereux initiated the transcultural practice of psychiatry. François Laplantine, one of his former disciples, reconsiders the legacy of ethnopsychoanalysis’ founder.
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.
“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.
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.
La plupart des préjugés antisémites existent toujours, sous une forme actualisée, sans que leur histoire soit bien connue : ces obsessions, fantasmes et schémas de pensée restent profondément sédimentés dans nos sociétés.
Depuis deux décennies les historiens étudient la nature impériale de la Monarchie Habsbourg à travers les identités, les nationalités, ou encore l’État. Mais qu’en est-il lorsqu’on prend au sérieux la question de la « nature », au sens du monde physique dans lequel cette société s’est inscrite ?
À propos de : Louise Tassin, Comme on les enferme. Dans les centres de rétention, de Paris à Lampedusa, La Découverte
À propos de : Sébastien Fontenelle, Tolkien contre les machines. Écologie et antifascisme en Terre du Milieu, Lux éditeur
Patricia Arancibia Clavel et Francisco Balart Páez, Sergio de Castro : arquitecto del modelo económico chileno, Providencia, Ediciones Universidad Finis Terrae
