The hyper-specialisation of historical studies is not inevitable. For Harvard Professor David Armitage, intellectual history urgently needs to rediscover its taste for the longue durée. Otherwise, naturalist approaches may end up dominating what we now know as Big History.
Recent social movements in Brazil, characterized by diffuse claims and a diversity of actors, should not be solely interpreted as reactions to the overwhelming cost of organizing the 2014 World Cup. This article emphasizes the elitist nature and the inefficiency of recent urban policy.
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.
In June 2013, Brazil faced an unprecedented wave of protests. First denouncing the rising fare of public transportation, the June protests gained momentum, showing that Brazilians craved for no less than a complete political reform. Assessing the legacy of this social movement, this essay points to the limits of citizen participation as it was implemented in Brazil in the preceding decades.
Environmental economics, the economics of natural resources, sustainable development, green economics, sustainability science, bioeconomics, ecodevelopment: the disciplines and concepts situated at the crossroads of environmentalism and economics are many. This article examines “ecological economics,” a field that has achieved academic recognition and launched numerous debates.
Bodies that are excluded, ill, damaged: this is often the first glimpse that a historian gets of men and women in the past. Philippe Artières talks about the physical and emotional experience that this creates: “Their history flows through my body.” The writing of history is influenced by other people’s suffering, but also by our own.
The non take-up of social benefits is becoming increasingly widespread as a phenomenon, and is now a central concept within public policy analysis. Philippe Warin examines the diverse reasons for why people fail to claim the benefits they are entitled to, which range from a simple lack of awareness and entitlement to more complex issues of indifference towards and even rejection of the social security system.
Originally conceived to help physicians make enlightened decisions, evidence-based medicine in North America and elsewhere has become a risk management method fostering the standardization of medical practice and the dehumanization of relations between doctors and patients.
In the context of increasing uncertainty regarding how we will source our energy in the future, the bio-inspired chemistry of carbon and hydrogen is, according to Marc Fontecave, destined to play a major role in the development of renewable energies. His laboratory, which works at the crossroads of chemistry and biology, uses biological phenomena such as photosynthesis as its inspiration in inventing new materials, new catalysts and new reactions.
What turns a literary work into a classic? Something critical is “lived experience,” that is, people read the literary work to make sense of current events. The fact that Orwell’s 1984 is selling hundreds of copies after Trump’s inauguration is telling as Alvaro Santana-Acuña explained in his analysis of One Hundred Years of Solitude and current affairs such as the BP oil spill in 2010. [updated introduction following Donald Trump’s election to the White House]
What is the situation for women’s employment in the different European countries and what are the latest developments? This study aims to identify the policies that seem most favourable to women’s employment in the context of a “life cycle”, in other words taking into account the specific phase that is the potential birth and upbringing of very young children.
In the run-up to Ukraine’s presidential election, political scientist Tatiana Zhurzhenko reflects on the conditions for political representation in a situation of civil conflict. The present state of public opinion is difficult to assess, both inside and outside the country, while an ongoing information war fuels fears and rumours in the regions of Eastern and Southern Ukraine.
Thanks to new scientific instruments and the globalisation of research, astronomy is currently an expanding science. F. Combes explains the directions she is taking with her research into our Universe, about which we still have so much left to discover.
Focusing on the massive increase in socio-economic inequality of the last few decades, Mettler’s book shows that much activity financed by the American federal government have obscured its role, making the real actors appear to be private organizations. Instead of lessening inequality, she shows how the policies of the “submerged state” have promoted the upward distribution of riches.
Why has the right to workplace representation been historically denied to millions of employees in the United States? In his highly original history of the category of “employee,” Jean-Christian Vinel lays bare the political stakes embedded in this term. In this way, he fills an important gap in the social history of the United States.
Bruno Trentin’s last book, which has just come out in French, fifteen years after it was published in Italy and five years after his death, explores the failure of the European left to respond to the jobs crisis of the final decades of the 20th century. Will the modern-day left succeed in forging a new nexus between citizens’ rights and workers’ rights?
Just one year after Philip Roth’s announcement that he was retiring from fiction making, Claudia Roth Pierpoint’s Roth Unbound offers a review of his long and versatile career as a writer of subversive fictions and American counterlives.
What do we actually mean when we say we want our identity to be recognized? How much do our identities depend on the choices we have made? How are collective identities constructed? These questions are addressed in the work of Vincent Descombes, who although acknowledging the multiplicity of our affiliations tends to give priority to the national one. Stéphane Haber’s review here is followed by Decombes’ reply.
How can the police force be reformed in a way that puts an end to corruption and localism without cutting ties with citizens or losing legitimacy? This was the dilemma faced by the municipal government of New York City at the beginning of the 20th century, before community policing was established between the 1970s and the 1990s.
Michael Jackson was a lot more than just a singer: Sylvie Laurent recounts the story of the pop star who became a “monster,” whose quest for white-skinned androgyny reveals in several respects the agonizing indecision of the African-American community in the face of racism and sexism.
Martha Nussbaum has written a prolific body of work, all of it aimed at correcting the failings of political liberalism and constructing a more fully developed democracy. The theory of capabilities is at the root of this endeavour: it allows us to combat all forms of inequality by analysing the conditions out of which they emerge.
Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer are two important figures in contemporary political art. Visual artists as well as co-writers of the comics Bitterkomix, these two South-African artists came of age in the early days of Post-Apartheid South-Africa. In the following interview, we discover among other things how their art evolved from a scathing social satire against race issues in South Africa to a more global criticism of racism, political interference and military violence.
Active euthanasia, which is defined as the intentional act of causing the death of a patient experiencing great suffering, is illegal in France, whereas allowing patients to die is authorized by law under certain conditions. However, the distinction between the different end-of-life decisions that healthcare professionals can make is perhaps less clearly defined than we might think; administering a lethal injection is far from being the only method by which a doctor can ‘kill’.
Although its action tends to be perceived as undemocratic by fellow EU member states, Hungary’s right-wing conservative party Fidesz has just been confirmed in power by a large majority. Hungary has become a test case for the Copenhagen Criteria, according to which the stability of democratic institutions is a condition for EU accession, but not for continued EU membership.
If rights and obligations only apply between human beings, how can we feel obliged to protect our environment? Catherine Larrère shows that the answers provided by ecological philosophies are largely based on modern Western thought: if there are values that we should respect in nature, this must mean that we are not alone in the world.
Between literary and sociological experimentation, the publication of the email exchange that led to the book by Howard S. Becker and Robert R. Faulkner on jazz repertoires reveals the secrets of the creative process.
Is man responsible for climate change? Two historians, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, argue that this question is anything but new. Modern thinkers did not wait for the turn of this century to begin reflecting on the impact of human activities on the environment.
While women are first and foremost seen as victims of violence, C. Cardi and G. Pruvost show that they can also perpetrate it. Women’s violence tends to be sidelined, downplayed or made invisible, and is inextricably linked to their image, testifying to the sexual dimension of the notion of violence itself.
Most banks have now abandoned their previous function of providing advice. Instead, they view their services as products designed to maximize profits. They have started invoking the client’s autonomy as a way of passing on the risk of financial exclusion to their customers. In what ways have bank employees reacted to these new circumstances?
In a new biography, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings recount the decisive moments of Walter Benjamin’s life – his work on tragic drama and allegory, his friendship with Gershom Scholem and Bertolt Brecht, his flight from Germany in 1933 and subsequent years in Paris –, focusing on his fascination with the messianic meaning of the everyday.
What if social mix was not always the best way to promote equality and social justice? Éric Charmes argues in favour of a pragmatic approach to diversity, and is not afraid of challenging some of our most deep-seated ideas about education, housing or urban policy. But how can we live together if public spaces are being increasingly restricted? Let the debate begin.
Explaining the genesis of his work, the anthropologist Tim Ingold stresses the contemporary and interdisciplinary dimension of anthropology, as well as the strong relationship this discipline maintains with the art world.
Despite its recent return to the stage, Cardenio’s play remains a literary ghost. In his latest book, Roger Chartier sheds light on this title without a text, tracing clues that lead from Cervantes to Shakespeare and from one genre to another. Along the way, he manages to date the birth of the Foucauldian author function.
Whereas the country was still considered 10 years ago as a model of post-communist transition, the political choices of Hungary are now disquieting to many. A group of Hungarian economists, sociologists, legal experts and former politicians analyzes the oligarchic system set up by Victor Orbán’s party.
Enlargement of the sphere of social disadvantage, conversion of some of the higher social categories to a culture of measuring performance, and opposition in some low-income categories to policies that are too focused on the poorest ones; in Olivier Schwartz’s view, those are three of the main factors that make for difficulties in reconstructing a city of fellow creatures. In this picture, France is both less and more a class society than it was forty years ago.
Some rare and hitherto unpublished writings by Rothko provide invaluable insight into the making of one of the iconic painters of the 20th century, placing him squarely in the historical and artistic context of 1930s and ’40s America.
How can art, creativity and genius be subject to sociological and economic analysis? According to Pierre-Michel Menger, their rational status can be based on the idea of uncertainty. In Nathalie Heinich’s view, although Menger’s project has both theoretical density and captivating reflections on artistic life, it sometimes fails to get very deeply into the subject, because it does not pay enough attention to the point of view of the actors, especially when it comes to the issue of recognition.
Pierre-Michel Menger presents the central argument of his book on creative work, in response to Nathalie Heinich’s questions and objections. His primary concern is to think about artistic creation as labour, and to subject it to the same sort of sociological and economic analyses as any other kind of labour.
Are we better able to make decisions and to produce knowledge as a group? Do the many have virtues that elude the individual? In this volume, the authors attempt to provide a collective answer to this question, thus laying the foundations for a theory of collective wisdom.
According to Ukrainian economist V. Vakhitov, the analyses of the Ukrainian political crisis overstate the importance of the Russian tutelage. The country is not as divided as it is said to be, between Pro-European West and pro-Russian East. Today’s revolts against authorities should be seen as a larger protest against a corrupt regime.
