La Vie des Idées is on vacation. We will resume our publications on Monday, August 26. In the meantime, here is a selection of texts and interviews published this year.
Attempts
How an oracle is made. The prophecy of the African rush on Europe, by Francois Héran.
Alarmist predictions about African migration are all the rage. François Héran shows that they are not so much based on a demographic approach as on an economic conjecture, and a sophism: the development of Africa could only be to the detriment of Europe.
The return of the third class, by Dominique Memmi.
Hospital, dental care, funeral homes, universities, TGV : everywhere the public service is re-establishing without saying it a “third class”, reserved for the poorest. What does this segmentation tell us about the evolutions of the welfare state?
Internet and the brutalization of public debate, by Romain Badouard.
Is the Internet making us more aggressive, or more tolerant of aggression, in our everyday political discussions? Romain Badouard maps the violence of online debates, its uses and its effects.
The color of the Yellow Vests, by Aurelien Delpirou.
Jacquerie, revolt of the peripheries, revenge of the proles… The first analyses of the yellow vest movement mobilize many sociological preconceptions. This movement, however, does not reflect a France cut in two, but a multiplicity of territorial interdependencies.
The rise of the far right in Brazil, by Maud Chirou.
Started on 1er January, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil outside the mainstream parties and despite his repeated outrages. A combination of factors may explain an election that compromises the future of democracy in South America’s largest country.
Meetings at the roundabouts, by Raphael Challier.
Based on local observation by sociologist R. Challier, the yellow vest movement reveals its transformative power on class consciousness.
Discomfort in French agriculture, by Thomas Roulet and Bertrand Valiorgue.
Are French farmers too productive to be considered by their fellow citizens? This is the paradox highlighted in this essay, which questions the sources of the French people’s disenchantment with an agricultural world that is today fractured, even balkanized.
Protest Music in the Age of Trump, by Ron Eyerman.
Donald Trump’s election campaign and then his unexpected election triggered an immediate reaction in the music world, both in the United States and around the world. Ron Eyerman offers an overview of these musical reactions.
The Afro cut, a simple story of hair?, by Ary Gordian.
The hair of people of African descent is controversial. For anthropologist Ary Gordien, the stigmatization of frizzy hair has its origins in the colonial and slavery period, but more recently also in its association with political and cultural radicalism.
Interviews
Seeing Red. Interview with Christian Joschke, by Sarah Al-Matary.
Documentary and social photography was not born with the Spanish Civil War. The exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou from November 7, 2018 to February 4, 2019 sheds light on the practices of amateurs and professionals who – often on the fringes of the Party – put their cameras at the service of struggles from the end of the 1920s. It shows this avant-garde in all its radicalism.
When India becomes urbanized. Interview with Marie-Hélène Zerah, by Jules Naudet
According to Marie-Hélène Zérah, the development of Indian cities is characterized by a dynamic of informal and creative privatization. Beyond the reductive paradigm of the “neoliberal city”, she paints a portrait of a cobbled-together urban planning based on the exploitation of migrants and lower castes.
Michael Doyle: Liberalism, between war and peace. Under what conditions should a democracy wage war?
Are war and democracy compatible? How can we think about the conditions for armed intervention at the international level? In this interview, Michael Doyle brings together various theorists of liberalism in order to shed light on contemporary international relations.
Notre-Dame, a heritage emotion. Interview with Nathalie Heinich, by Nicolas Delalande.
Flames, shock and terror. A cathedral burns and tears flow. But why do heritage and its disappearance move us so much? Elements of an answer with sociologist Nathalie Heinich.
What Philosophy Means. Interview with Quentin Skinner, by Florent Guénard.
Quentin Skinner has profoundly renewed the history of ideas by insisting on the need to consider philosophical works as interventions in ongoing political debates. In this interview, he returns to the main aspects of his work.
The Spirit of Bridges. Interview with Michel Virlogeux, by Ivan Jablonka.
What could be more ordinary than a bridge? Yet this living structure must be designed, then built and, finally, maintained. Interview with a legendary bridge designer, who is also a man of art.
Podcasts
The Voice of Ideas
The reviews
The Man Who Throws Away and Forgets, by Sylvie Lupton.
About: Baptiste Monsaingeon, Homo Detritus. Critique of the waste societyAnthropocene Collection, Seuil.
Producer of ever-increasing amounts of waste, modern man no longer has the same relationship with it. What do these wastes that we try to hide or keep away from our societies reveal? Do we control the waste that we try to manage or does it escape us?
Naming Evil Correctly, by Nicolas Patin.
About: Ugo Palheta, The Possibility of Fascism. France, the Trajectory of DisasterDiscovery.
What to do in the face of the slow rise of racism and the rooting of the extreme right? Fascism has become possible again in France, says sociologist Ugo Palheta. Faced with a protean crisis of the State, we must name the evil if we want to fight it.
The glory of carbon, by Marc Fontecave.
About: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Sacha Loeve, Carbon, his lives, his worksThreshold.
If carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, it is also, like carbon itself, an essential partner of man and life. Two philosophers of science remind us of this with as much rigor as poetry.
Programmed Exhaustion, by Étienne Forestier-Peyrat. About: Carmel Finley, All the Boats on the Ocean. How Government Subsidies Led to Global OverfishingChicago.
The depletion of global fish resources is not so much the result of anarchic developments affecting the oceans as of concerted policies, supported by states, of industrialization of fishing and maximization of catches. At the heart of this predation, armadas of factory ships…
Treatise on Mechanism, by Anne Le Goff.
About: Rebecca Solnit, These men who explain life to meEditions de l’Olivier
The war on women begins by forbidding them to speak. Men, explains R. Sonit, reserve the right to explain. This is a constitutive trait of our cultures, which leads to the worst forms of sexist aggression.
The bright future of inequalities, by Nicolas Delalande.
About: Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: The Fate of the Middle Class, the Ultra-Rich, and Equal OpportunityDiscovery.
What is the value of the promise of democratic equality when the material situation of the middle and working classes stagnates or regresses? Through a relentless analysis of global inequalities, Branko Milanovic highlights the difficulty of the fight for social justice at the beginning of the XXIe century.
Above all, by Claude Reichler.
About: Pierre-Henry Frangne, MountaineeringRennes University Press.
In mountaineering, there is both self-transcendence, excess and practical wisdom. P.-H. Frangne explains to us, as a philosopher, that this activity is a major experience of decentering, capable of perceiving the incomparable sublime of high mountain landscapes.