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.
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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.
How did African-Americans attempt to overturn the relations of racial domination in the United States? From the post-war period onwards, by creating cultural and educational institutions specific to their community, which are still useful today in the fight against discrimination.
Vygotsky is a major educational theorist credited with showing how the mind of the child is formed. In this book, Pascal Sévérac explains what Vygotsky’s theory owes to Spinoza’s.
Delphine Dulong analyses the role of the French Prime Minister, who does not so much embody a clearly-defined institution as a relational structure: a diarchy with the President, incessant interministerial work, parliamentary obligations. Is the job a powerful position, or that of an underling?
About: Jean Vioulac, Anarchéologie. Fragments hérétiques sur la catastrophe historique, Puf
About: Carole Gayet-Viaud, La civilité urbaine. Les formes élémentaires de la coexistence démocratique, Economica
About: Thibault Le Texier, La main visible des marchés. Une histoire critique du marketing, la Découverte
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.
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 digital tools, their relationship to political power and capitalism.
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.
The June protests which shook Brazil in 2013 stunned the world. This dossier, published by Books&Ideas, discusses the main issues at the core of these protests, analyzing them in the light of previous mobilizations and explaining why they are essential to the understanding of contemporary Brazil.
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.
According to Nancy Fraser, the renewal of socialism requires a conflation of activism and political theory; indeed, emancipation can only exist on the basis of equal participation in all spheres of life, and can only be understood in terms of social struggles, which today appear in multiple forms.
En quoi l’eau peut-elle être conçue comme un bien commun ? En partant de la faculté de l’eau à mettre en rapport des individus et des territoires, cet essai caractérise différentes formes de communalité formées par et autour de l’eau.
Papes, rois et autres conciles : le Moyen Âge serait « réformateur ». Alors que les discours contemporains sont saturés de « réformes », un livre collectif s’interroge sur le sens et la rareté du mot en Occident entre le XIIIe et le XVe siècle.
Le philosophe américain John Dewey réactualise dans un livre inédit en français la notion de nature humaine et en tire toutes les conséquences sur le plan éthique et social afin de justifier une conception mélioriste de l’expérience.
À propos de : Laurent Nespoulous, Pierre-François Souyri, Le Japon. Des chasseurs-cueilleurs à Heian, 36000 à l’an mille, Belin
À propos de : Bram Büscher et Robert Fletcher, Le vivant et la révolution, Actes Sud
À propos de : Dinah Ribard, Le Menuisier de Nevers. Poésie ouvrière, fait littéraire et classes sociales (XVIIe-XIXe siècle), EHESS-Gallimard-Seuil