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.
Through his research into little-known aspects of twentieth-century French thought and authors sensitive to the diversity of modes of knowledge, Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos has issued a manifesto for empiricism and a rallying cry against ethnocentrism.
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.
Secularisation is often presented as a Western model that was exported during decolonisation; but according to M. A. Meziane, it was in fact spread by colonialism itself as an instrument of domination.
Right to a healthy environment, rights of nature or of non-human animals: can environmental rights serve the cause of environmentalism? Legal expert Diane Roman analyses the pathways towards the jurisdictional enforcement of these new rights, and highlights the progress they have made, as well as their limitations.
About: Haud Guéguen et Laurent Jeanpierre, La perspective du possible. Comment penser ce qui peut nous arriver, et ce que nous pouvons faire, La Découverte
About: Olivier Boulnois, Généalogie de la liberté, Seuil
About: Pascal Sévérac, Puissance de l’enfance. Vygotski avec Spinoza, Vrin
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.
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change is three years old this week but is already under attack. In support of further necessary action to address the changing climate, Public Books & La Vie des Idées offer a collaborative series of articles examining the intersection of climate change and capitalism.
How do images respond to political events and how do they shape them ? What is the political power of images ? Should images of violence be shown in the media ? Through its winter selection, Books&Ideas offers to rediscover a group of four essays and reviews, all published in 2015, which have tackled these questions through the prism of history, philosophy, aesthetics and political sciences.
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.
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.
Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), a poor child who went onto become a university professor, was the epitome of a successful scholarship student. The trajectory of this “exemplary counter-example” sheds light on the mechanisms of social reproduction when they prove inoperative and the distance that can be traveled from one’s native milieu.
Miguel Abensour profoundly renewed thinking about democracy. His political philosophy paid close attention to the desire for emancipation and was based on an original conception of utopia breaking with the mythology of the ‘ideal city’ or of a ‘good society’.
Quelle est la part de la référence religieuse dans le discours de Vox, le parti d’extrême droite espagnol ? Le catholicisme est au cœur de sa revendication identitaire et nationaliste, mais sert aussi de ressource symbolique pour combattre les courants féministes et progressistes.
Pour quelles raisons estime-t-on que nos sociétés sont plus libres, prospères ou démocratiques grâce à l’institution de la propriété privée – et non pas malgré elle ?
À partir d’une enquête collective, Christine Detrez propose de déconstruire le terme de “crush” et la manière dont ses sens sociaux éclairent les modalités de formation du couple et d’éducation sentimentale chez les jeunes de 12 à 25 ans.
À propos de : Gilles Havard, Les Natchez. Une histoire coloniale de la violence, Tallandier / Flammarion
A propos de : Jean Boutier, Sandro Landi et Jean-claude Waquet (dir.), Le temps des Italies. XIIe-XIXe siècle, Passés/Composés
À propos de : Sebastian Roché et François Rabaté, La police contre la rue, Grasset