12th June 2012

Presenting Books and Ideas

I’m member of the advisory committee of another website which could be of some interest to Charisma network members, called Books & Ideas. It is an English-language version of the French online journal www.laviedesidees.fr.

Books & Ideas includes hitherto unpublished articles and book reviews written in English, but also translations of a selection of the texts published in French on laviedesidees.fr. The site’s purpose is to provide quality information about current intellectual life and publications in France and internationally, as well as discussions of major contemporary issues, in the form of in-depth essays, interviews and public debates.

The purpose of the two websites is to echo current intellectual discussions, review major publications, and participate, both in France and across the Atlantic, in social and political debates. They cover not only the social sciences, but also aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, as well as many others.

It includes multiple articles related to economic sociology: I give you here a few recent examples:

• Book reviews:

Vincent Antonin Lépinay, Codes of Finance. Engineering derivatives in a global bank, Princeton, 2011.

L. Hyman, Debtor Nation. The History of America in Red Ink, Princeton University Press, 2011.

Sébastien Lechevalier, La Grande transformation du capitalisme japonais, Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2011, 420 pp. Robert Boyer, Hiroyasu Uemura et Akinori Isogai, eds, Diversity and Transformations of Asian Capitalisms, Routledge Studies in the Modern World Economy, 2011, 390 pp.

Karl Polanyi, Essais. Paris Seuil, 2008. Published by Michèle Cangiani and Jérôme Maucourant, with a postface by Alain Caillé and Jean-Louis Laville.

• Some other formats:

An Essay from Saskia Sassen: Novel Spatial format for Urban Inclusion.

Giving gifts, a written discussion between four scholars (sociologists and historians) about Philanthropy in France and the United States.

A translation of an interview (in French) with Luc Boltanski

• Dossiers on recent issues linked to economic sociology:

The culture of poverty (a dossier built from the special issue of the journal Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science edited by the American sociologists David J. Harding, Michèle Lamont, and Mario L. Small examines the relations between culture and poverty).

The economic crisis: Questions and a few answers