Books & ideas

What’s in an individual once under the public gaze? Building on recent academic trends, two books – one in English, one in French – explore the historical construct of the self in the context of eighteenth-century France.

From the margins to which he was confined, Georges Devereux (1908-1985) formulated some of the most original scientific work of his century. In the wake of Freud, whose legacy he firmly defended, Devereux initiated the transcultural practice of psychiatry. François Laplantine, one of his former disciples, reconsiders the legacy of ethnopsychoanalysis’ founder.

According to Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, animals are far more than just creatures to whom we have a duty; they are indeed our fellow citizens. The theory is radical yet fragile: it misconceives the nature of both the animal and the citizen. The problem is the lack of responsibility, accountability and liberty – in other words, the irreducible innocence of animals.

Acknowledging that the world is in dire need of religion, Roberto Unger’s latest book envisions something ambitious, namely the creation of a “religion of the future”, which will not only revolutionize the way humans think about and practice religion but will also lead to a political revolution.

Intellectual history and global history have both experienced a welcome revival in recent years, but is there a way to reconcile these two (re)emerging trends? This collection of essays offers a stimulating guide for future research, as well as some salutary warnings about the limitations of a global approach.

The tragedy of Lampedusa has shed a harsh light on the effects of border control, which Europe is outsourcing and privatising in order to make responsibilities more opaque and sustain a market of fear. Claire Rodier reveals the ideological and economic implications of this process, and its perverse effects.

Two recent books, focusing on the American corporate elite & high-technology innovation in the US, reveal much about the particular characteristics and operation of the US state. With diverging but compatible approaches, they provide bases for understanding why the US is in decline.

The key notion of caste often goes beyond the strict framework of Hinduism, in which it originated, to influence the social structures of other religious groups. Rémy Delage shows us the extent to which caste categories are important for understanding the social organization of Muslims in the region.

Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a controversial figure in Japan. And rightly so, for there are a great many contradictions in both his fictional and theoretical work. He is a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and yet continues to celebrate the heroism of the soldier who finds glory through sacrifice.

Between the start of the Franco-Prussian War and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, art historians in Germany and France were studying the Italian Renaissance and the Gothic monuments of the Middle Ages. Passini’s recent book analyses the role of French and German nationalism in the shaping of art history.

Antoine Coppolani’s masterful biography offers a carefully constructed account of Nixon’s half-century at the centre of the American scene. The result is a compelling book that tells us much about the post–World War II years in the United States, as well as about Richard Nixon himself.

A selection of four essays recently published on Books & Ideas offers new perspectives on the definition, historiography and potential applications of environmental theory.

Denouncing the neglect of the independence era by African historians, Frederick Cooper asserts that a continent of nation-states was not the inevitable outcome of decolonization.

In the lecture delivered between January and March 1980, Michel Foucault, after completing his studies of “power-knowledge,” attached new importance to the subject—specifically, to a form of subjectivity experienced in the injunction to speak of oneself, to better submit onself to others.

Winner of the 2013 David Pinkney Book Prize, Alice L. Conklin’s most recent book takes us on a journey leading to the establishment of ethnology in France and its colonies. Through a biographical approach, she shows how the “general science of man” evolved in the 19^th century from the obsessive search for universal laws.

To understand the concept of political representation, Roger Chartier, the historian of the book, proposes to relate it to the different meanings encompassed by the French term “représentation,” from its broadest sense—to show an absent object—to its legal and political sense—to hold someone’s place.

One of Albert O. Hirschman’s contributions to economic theory is a richer understanding of the concept of the “rational actor,” which, he demonstrated, possesses the deliberative capacities that democratic market societies require. This following is a profile of an economist who was also a dissident and an activist.

Jacques Bouveresse has written a book on religion in the thought of Russell and Wittgenstein. While the position of the atheist Russell on religion’s obscurities is clear, Wittgenstein’s is far more difficult to elucidate.

Through a comparative study of France, India and the United States, Jules Naudet’s book shows how certain “instituted ideologies” specific to each country are either a barrier or a resource when it comes to moving from a dominated social situation to a dominant occupational position.

Horace Walpole’s “Serendipity” has become a word commonly used in a wide range of disciplinary fields. Two recent books explore contemporary uses of the concept, in relation both to professional research and to creative processes more generally.

An ambitious environmental tax policy must be part of a broader reform that addresses several problems simultaneously: the equity and progressivity of the tax system, reducing social security withholdings, pension finance, and paying down the debt.