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.
At a time when public museums are struggling due to budget cuts and the need for renovations, the opening of many private foundations marks a shift in the Parisian museum landscape. Against this backdrop, G. Adam offers a comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding the rise of private museums.
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.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, as the monarchy established its authority across French territory, the rivers of the Paris Basin continued to be managed by various actors through negotiations aimed at coordination.
How are television series written? Muriel Mille’s study sheds light on a collective process based on a division of labor and time constraints. It represents a total break with the auteur ideal of New Wave cinema.
About: Jérôme Baschet, Quand commence le capitalisme ? De la société féodale au monde de l’économie, Crise et critique
About: Camille Mahé, La Seconde Guerre Mondiale des Enfants, Allemagne, France, Italie (1943-1949), PUF
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.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will resume its publication schedule on August 26. In the meantime, we present to you a weekly selection of essays and reviews published over the past year.
In the U.S., in France as well with Hugues Lagrange’s book on “the denial of cultures”, culture has again become the focus of poverty studies. Our dossier on “culture of poverty” reviews this new trend and examines a notion that has paradoxically been given a new lease of life by the economic downturn, half a century after Oscar Lewis controversially introduced it.
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.
Umberto Eco is best known to the general public for his novels and critical works in which he developed his theory of reception. Who realizes, however, that this aspect of his work is only one part of a general semiology organized around a philosophy of signs?
“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.
Ronald Coase (1910-2013), the 1991 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is famous for his oft-quoted and just as often misunderstood “theorem.” His seminal works on transaction costs, property rights, and regulation continue to stimulate a rich reflection in economics and beyond.
La rencontre entre la post-croissance et les espaces urbains concrétise une économie du bien-être qui peut redonner vie au projet européen à l’heure où le continent s’interroge à raison sur son identité mais à tort sur son déclin.
Qui se cache derrière les noms « Mahomet » ou « Muhammad » ? Dans une vaste étude pluridisciplinaire, les auteurs du Mahomet des historiens sondent la diversité des traditions et la complexité de l’ancrage culturel et linguistique du fondateur de l’islam.
De ses origines populaire et contestataire sur les places de Barcelone à son entrée dans le « palais » municipal, David Hamou présente une ethnographie de Barcelone en Commun et de son « pari municipaliste ».
À propos de : Hugo Bouvard, Gay et lesbiennes en politique. Représenter les minorités sexuelles en France et aux États-Unis, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion
À propos de : Philippe Sands , 38, rue de Londres. De l’impunité, Pinochet et le nazi de Patagonie, Albin Michel
À propos de : Edward Berenson, Perfect communities. Levitt, Levittown, and the dream of white suburbia, Yale University Press
