By studying key concepts such as frontier, wilderness and rewilding in the United States, William Cronon shows that human history unfolds within a geographical framework, using natural resources that profoundly shape it. This serves as a reminder that ecology is a humanism.
Our internet-driven world has given conspiracy theories a new lease of life. They have, however, always been a central feature of American politics, and they should be regarded as more than a mere pathology.
The black ghetto has garnered much attention from researchers and American society alike. Revisiting the intellectual trajectory of many of its key thinkers, ethnographer Mitchell Duneier examines the consolidation of its progressive layers of meaning. An endeavour in intellectual, political, and social history.
Alongside the usual reductive condemnations, studies on pornography have increased in the academic world. Florian Vörös examines the field’s key texts, which reveal the diversity of productions and uses of pornography and analyse the emotional experiences pornography awakens as well as the hierarchies it shapes and recreates.
After the war on poverty, the United States declared a war on crime. This history of penal policy since 1960 looks at the intellectual and political roots of the punitive treatment often reserved for minorities.
In Poland, one can purchase a strange good luck charm to become rich: the picture of a Jew holding a gold coin. What is the significance of this popular re-appropriation of the figure of the Jew in the context of post-Holocaust Poland? And how conscious are anti-Semitic prejudices in this representation?
Playing with shade and light, The Coal Nation explores the cultural politics of large and small-scale coal mining in India. Above all, the book highlights the dark side of coal, produced in the most marginalized areas of the country with a strong concentration of tribal communities and a complex history of informal coal mining.
What responses does racial stigma awaken in its victims? Researching in Brazil, the United States and Israel, a group of sociologists sheds new light on the experience of discrimination and collective sources of resilience.
Far from lessening inequality between social groups in France, the organisation of the healthcare system and the practices of healthcare professionals actually serve to increase disparity. The sociology of social relations shows that the health system is not used or organised in the same way depending on the social class to which patients belong.
Since Narenda Modi, the strongman of Hindu nationalism, was elected prime minister, discrimination against minorities has increased in India and freedom of expression no longer seems guaranteed. Can Indian democracy resist the rise of an authoritarian and xenophobic right?
Retracing the genealogy of the idea of human ‘races’, Claude-Olivier Doron returns to the role of the Enlightenment, and particularly Buffon, in the emergence of monogenistic racial thought. He examines how the idea of ‘race’ and the affirmation of universalism appeared concomitantly.
Former Governor of the Bank of England and a renowned economist, Mervyn King presents his views on the recent financial crisis and urges economists to accomplish a “necessary intellectual revolution leading to a complete reform program”.
Addressing the issue of state intervention in agricultural markets, La Politique du Blé by Alain Chatriot examines the political debate behind the creation of the Office Interprofessionnel du Blé, the French national wheat pool, that was established in 1936 by the leftist government.
In economics, the study of behavior has been enriched by a productive dialogue between theory and experiments. Challenging the model of rationality associated with “homo economicus,” it is shedding new light on decision-making in situations of strategic interaction.
Gregory Mann considers the history of the Sahel as a state, between precolonial imaginary, colonial structures and postcolonial conflicts. His conclusions reveal that the states in that particular region have a tendency to give up their state power and authority by sub-contracting state responsibilities to international organisations and NGOs.
The texts are clear: far from proscribing joking and joviality, Muslim culture gives significant place to laughter, whether by madmen, social parasites, and Bedouins or by the two main figures of authority, the caliph and the Prophet themselves.
Do animals have a moral life in the same way as humans do? The philosopher Alice Crary argues that they are visible bearers of moral qualities, as literature suggests. But can values be the object of empirical observation?
French law is not always very clear when it comes to punishing racist speech. Judges, aware that this prohibition is crucial in a democracy, are forced to interpret the law with the utmost rigour.
What determines the value of a drug? Quentin Ravelli’s ethnographic study of the pharmaceutical industry reveals the ubiquity of drugs manufacturers, from university training programmes to doctors’ practices, and the commercial logic that underpins the medical use of drugs.
A meticulous historical enquiry reveals the liberties taken by the author of Journey to the End of the Night in recounting his war experience. These flattering inventions made it possible for him to disseminate his pamphlets in the 1930s and clear his name in the purge.
In his 2015 book, The Figure of the Migrant, Thomas Nail offers a reverse approach of migration, focusing on the migrant from the perspective of movement. Claire Gallien questions the relevance of Nail’s dialectic between the ’kinopolitics’ of the state and the ’pedetic force’ of migrants.
The border between Bangladesh and India has created an artificial rift within a space connected by intense circulations. Thrown into illegality, the many migrants who continue to circulate between the two States face heightened risks of exploitation and increasing marginalisation.
Analyzing the reasons for the loss of momentum of the American economy, this in-depth study reveals how the evolution of mixed economy in the United States has led to a crisis of the political power.
While the spotlight is focused on the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe, researcher Kamel Doraï reminds us that the main countries concerned are primarily those in the region. Jordan is among the countries that has received the highest number of Syrians, sharpening economic and social tensions in a country already gripped by the presence of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees.
In a desire to write a total history, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel proposes a novel sociocultural and transnational approach to the artistic avant-gardes. Beyond a mere history of styles, the avant-gardes appear in her book as genuine political and social events, caught in complex networks of influence.
Linsey McGoey discusses philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Addressing the problematic aspects of “philanthrocapitalism”, she draws attention to the growing lack of transparency and accountability of those foundations.
Neither passante nor pedestrian, the flâneuse has been left out of history books. Yet, according to Lauren Elkin, flânerie is connected to emancipation, and to revolt. Is urban space then a feminist issue?
Through an ethnographic investigation behind the closed doors of the European quarter in Brussels, Sylvain Laurens studies the relationships between the business community and European institutions, showing that their proximity derives less from ideological complicity than from a shared history.
It is now incongruous to imagine Vietnamese people identifying themselves as “Indochinese”. For a long time, however, the colonial territory served as a framework for the expression of Vietnam’s national identity. This phenomenon does not illustrate so much the effectiveness of the education given in schools under the French empire as the negotiated nature of colonisation in Asia. A fresh look at a classic work.
The recent success of books on economic history – at a time when this specialism often seems disregarded in universities – coupled with parallel developments in both history and economics gives hope for new links between the two disciplines.
An in-depth study of the recent history of the right to know in the United States traces the origins of the rise of transparency back to practical, anti-bureaucratic demands rather than to any ideological claims made by the generation of 1968.
Randomized controlled experiments hold out the promise of heightened scientificity and new forms of social action. In this essay, Agnès Labrousse points out some of the practical limits of these experiments and situates them within a longer history of social experimentation and governing by evidence.
With the ‘Arab Springs’, the question of revolution was raised afresh. Taking a comparative approach, H. Bozarslan and G. Delemestre analyse the link between revolution and the democratic process, focusing on the role played by intellectuals in the revolutionary dynamic.
The name of the new UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, was revealed in October 2016. Although the transparency of this election has been celebrated, no democratic debate has really taken place concerning the programs of the different candidates, which have received very little press coverage.
In La Prison des Pauvres, Jacques Carré considers the history of poverty and poor relief in England between the 17th and early 20th centuries, focusing in particular on the complex evolution of the workhouse system. Often dreaded by paupers for its harsh discipline, it dominated English responses to poverty for several centuries, and was not abolished until after World War Two.
The state of exception has a long history in France. Intended as a measure for dealing with crises of any sort, it is now used as a response to terrorism. According to legal expert François Saint-Bonnet, however, there is no evidence that it is the right solution to the kind of terrorism that strikes today.
Climate change has fueled scientific, economic, and political debates for over fifty years. Roman Felli offers an economic history of the idea of adapting to climate change and denounces the way it has been instrumentalized by market principles at the expense of society’s most vulnerable citizens.
Books & Ideas is taking a break for the holiday. We will be back with new publications starting January 5th. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, reviews and interviews published in the past years.
Judging by the opinions of the Front National’s members and supporters, no matter what its president says, the party has never stopped being racist and xenophobic. This is clearly shown by the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights’ annual survey.
By studying political and legal debates over citizenship through the prism of the colonial situation in the nineteenth century, in the metropole as well as the colonies, Silyane Larcher proposes a new genealogy of citizenship and asks us to rethink how the French Republic was constructed.
