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.
Alongside its Paris branch, the French terrorist group Action Directe also operated a Lyon branch, responsible for dozens of attacks and robberies, and marked by a crude ideology and domestic abuse within the group. We look back at far-left violence in the post-1968 era.
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.
Is Foucault’s genealogy concerned with the will to truth or with truth itself? According to Pascal Engel, in maintaining the ambiguity between the two, Foucault ignored the norms of knowledge as an essential source of emancipation.
Our understanding of nature differs from that of the Greeks and Romans. From the “month of the ox” to “the forest goddess,” the ancients never thought to separate humans from the flora and fauna around them.
About: Marina Touilliez, Parias. Hannah Arendt et la « tribu » en France (1933-1941), L’échappée
About: Constance Pâris de Bollardière and Sharon Kangisser Cohen (eds.), After the Darkness? Holocaust Survivors’ Emotional, Psychological and Social Journeys in the Early Postwar Period, Yad Vashem
About: Gwendal Châton, Calmann-Lévy, éditeur engagé. Défendre l’antitotalitarisme dans la guerre froide des idées, Calmann-Lévy
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 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.
Books&Ideas presents a second summer selection, in which contemporary historians tell us about the future of history as a discipline, about how they research and write history, and the way history affects their bodies and minds.
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.
Ronald Dworkin’s innovative and politically ambitious work has become essential reading in political and legal theory. Taking issue with classical political liberalism, he argues that liberty and equality are not mutually exclusive, and are indeed inseparable. And against traditional interpretations of law, he argues that law must be understood by comparing it to a collective novel, a mixture of creativity and interpretation.
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.
Though poorly known in France, the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas is nonetheless essential for understanding the elementary forms of social organization and daily life. By shedding light on her academic career and personal life, this portrait rehabilitates the thought of a major intellectual.
Le 23 juin 2026, Marc Bloch entre au Panthéon. Entre héritage savant, usages mémoriels et civiques, et postérité de l’œuvre : comment se dessine le legs de l’historien ?
Les machines peuvent désormais dialoguer avec nous, mais en quel sens est-ce du langage ? Loin de répéter aléatoirement des fragments de texte appris, ces nouveaux systèmes d’IA semblent se construire une représentation interne de ce dont ils parlent.
Et si l’impossibilité de parler en disait davantage sur la société que sur les individus ? Deux philosophes dialoguent au confluent de l’expérience et du politique.
À propos de : Aaron Reeves, Sam Friedman, Born to Rule. The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
À propos de : Sylvain Kahn, L’Europe : Un État qui s’ignore, CNRS éditions
À propos de : Mateusz Chmurski, Hélène Martinelli, Devenir-sœur. Repères dans un siècle de féminismes polonais, Michalon
