The Open Society and Its Enemies 1: Vol 1
... CTs are embedded in the socio-cultural-economic, and political and religious context just described and are, therefore, very appropriate for the groups and individuals who are part of them to try to historically understand the social phenomena alluded to (Popper 1966). In fact, they constitute a social and cultural theory (Bell and Bennion-Nixon 2001); they are a "cultural phenomenon" (Räikkä 2009), cognitive constructions that compete with other forms of cognitive construction such as, for example-as will be seen-magic and religion and common sense and science, particularly the Social Sciences (Hernáiz 2021). ...
... As for the way in which CTs observe History, in a time when its representation is diverse and multiple (Koselleck 2016), it is called into question. Thus, it is devalued in a peculiar way, insofar as CTs constantly look for the history "behind History" (Furedi 2005;Popper 1966). ...
... However, sacred remnants of the old conceptualisation of destiny still survive, since, for CTs, the destiny of individuals is beyond their control, in the hands of paranormal or malicious powers (Adorno 1976;Pickel et al. 2022). This means that there are hidden forces that manage our destiny, behind the curtains or backstage (Pickel et al. 2022) of the world stage (Popper 1966). ...
Here, we will approach Conspiracy Theories (CTs) and, specifically, QAnon following the three traditional sociological fields of research. After an introduction in which we contextualise CDTs socially, culturally, economically and politically and in which we establish a conceptual map of what they mean, on the historical level (1), we will clarify their religious genesis, through the main analogies between them, magic and religion and their practices and rituals, as well as the conversion of conspiratorial agents into social agents of a religious nature. On the analytical side (2), we will deal with the QAnon belief system. Finally (3), from a critical perspective, we will describe the causes and harmful consequences of QAnon, both for religious sentiment itself and for democracy. We will conclude by pointing out that QAnon affects the coherence and stability of religious beliefs and democracy; in fact, it can be seen as libertarian authoritarianism and populism, advocating a sick freedom, the ultimate expression of the modern feeling of individual powerlessness and of a Modernity that has failed to deliver on its promises.
... In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper (1945) empathically observed that "one hears too often the suggestion that some form or other of totalitarianism is inevitable … [But] the future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity." Hence, he defined the open society as one in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, stressing that "if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society … into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure." ...
... It is no coincidence that Plato's philosophy arouses such interest even nowadays, since it contains a huge potential for understanding the world, although the perception of these ideas may be rather ambiguous today. It is enough to remember, for example, Popper (2013) or Taleb (2010), who believes that Platonism in the perception of the world -especially the modern one -can pose a serious threat. ...
The study examines the creative process using the logical and methodological analysis of Plato’s concepts. It presents the modern scientific research related directly or indirectly to his philosophical views (the structural analogy method, the theory of archetypes and fractals and many others). A number of modern studies and concepts, such as the theory of fractals, evolutionary epistemology, the concept of autopoiesis, and others, confirm Plato’s views on the structure of the world and creativity. For this reason, the authors define creativity as the activity of a rational and social subject to produce a qualitatively new thing based on universal patterns of the fractal and archetype nature in accordance with the ideal. This activity needs in creativeness which is the state of love as a creative force arising from social interaction as a desire to create and expand space for life, connecting space inside the subject of creativity and outside it, creating a resonance between the creative self and other persons.
The relationship between varied religious landscape and conspiracy theories has not received specific attention in contemporary scholarship. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the articulation of radical voices, conspiracy theories, and arguments opposing religious plurality. The article focuses on the discursive practices of far-right representatives in debates about religious plurality in Poland. I analyze radical right-wing arguments on YouTube and how users within the Polish context have responded. On the one hand, users in Poland who oppose religious plurality are narrowing their Christian values to traditional Catholicism and propagating conspiracy theories about interreligious dialogue. On the other hand, the people accused of being the founders of great conspiracies are not physically present; only their image is being constructed. Such a conclusion leads to a clearer understanding of Poland’s far-right movements, which shape their identities through religious norms (arguments) and religious chauvinism (context of exclusivism that improves the quality of argumentation) to an imagined “Other.”
Martha Nussbaum’s approach to ethical and political philosophy — unlike that of certain of her notable contemporaries — is neither ahistorical nor concerned with augmenting or refining the historical record. Rather, its aim is learning what the deepest philosophical minds of the past have proposed as the fairest organisation of society, in terms of a balance between autonomy for individuals and communities, and an equitable distribution of global resources. Whilst she argues fundamentally for cosmopolitanism — hence prioritises the latter — she struggles, in her later work, to accommodate the former within such a global socio-political model. I suggest this is because she presupposes that patriotism is antecedent to, and generative of, a cosmopolitan outlook, when in fact each of these political values is irreducible, and antithetical, to the other. Nussbaum supposes this, I propose, because her work focuses on the conceptual subtleties of intellectual history, which are sadly seldom mirrored in the brutal history of facts.
The author, following Niklas Luhmann, interprets the opposition "individual-society" as one of the pillars to which the ideological content of modern society is anchored. The same can be said about political philosophy: no matter how we understand the term "society" (in terms of collectivism, communalism, or holism), individualism is always understood as something ontologically rooted, as a constitutive factor of political space. Despite the resistance of influential opponents, methodological individualism has not become either a historical relic or a synonym for professional incompetence. Attempts to overcome this resistance led to the realization of a speculative tendency – self-description, which, according to Luhmann, inevitably constitutes itself as an ideology. However, individualism in the Modernity did not manifest itself as a strategy of a particular "-ology", but as a practical, non-contemplative strategy of political philosophy. The author agrees with Peter Koslowski that the question of the nature of the opposition "individual-society" can be answered only hypothetically. After all, this duality appears as: (1) a product of the historical process of individuation; (2) the result of the development of social production, the transition to private property; (3) an initial property of conditio humana. In contrast to other epochs, Modernity was the only one to propose to exclude the will to the common from individual motivations, to monistically present the individual concept of the good as a desire for personal gain.
In their chapter, Teräs, Teräs, and Suoranta critique the current dominant narrative of the digitalization of higher education. They argue that reports and vision papers by powerful international and national organizations such as the OECD not only predict but also build a certain kind of digital future. They call these reports “official document utopias,” and reflect on their discursive truth with past utopian literature. The authors argue that we should use collective utopian methods to imagine genuinely alternative “postdigital” futures, and to this end, they introduce the Method of Empathy-Based Stories. While discussing its history, they also reflect on its potential and limitations through a study with Finnish teacher students, imagining the digitalization of higher education in 2050.
Digital government often addresses how, where, and by whom digital transformation is brought into the complex institutional framed practices of governments and governance of society. However, digital transformation also points at critical demands to address the basic underlying institutional design of governments. The ongoing digital transformation of public welfare institutions opens for a gradual redesign of public institutions. It is important to address core values, such as inclusion, diversity, and literacy, to ensure a reflected transformation and re-design of public institutions. The purpose of this paper is to show how new forms of digital public services may have to be matched with institutional re-design to sustain public values and legitimate governments. We build on Ostrom’s eight design principles for institutional governance of common-pool resources and propose four principles for analyzing potential needs for re-design of institutions. Through a re-analysis of two case studies on automation in Swedish public organizations, we illustrate and discuss the institutional design. Hereby, we identify critical points for further analysis of emerging demands for institutional re-design. The analysis indicates that we must see beyond the organizational changes of digital government reforms and programs. We need to stretch into the institutional and foundational models of the public sector and how to provide equal and resilient welfare in a digital and changing world. We conclude by suggesting an agenda for research on institutional re-design in the digital era.KeywordsDigital governmentinstitutional designwelfare state
Nationalism has been presented on many occasions as an enemy of freedom and liberalism, and it is true that it can be a foe on some occasions. However, Jesús Huerta of Soto wrote an essay on the possibility of liberal nationalism, pointing out the positive characteristics that nationalism can contribute to a free society. In this chapter we want to follow this line of thought centering on two characteristics: first, the nationalist idea itself and, second, the secession principle. Both characteristics are allies in the fight for limiting statism. In the text we affirm that nationalism acts as a brake on the creation of a global state, the big threat to liberty freedom in our times; at the same time that nationalism can limit the state’s internal power. We also point to the function that nationalism can play by exercising the right of secession in order to reduce state expansion and to achieve a future of states smaller in extension and population.KeywordsNationNationalismSecessionSocial cohesionNullification
During the recent global pandemic, social paradigms have reversed, and people have found themselves trapped in fears, uncertainties, and primary needs for relationships. Emerging educational issues stimulate an in-depth examination of the dominant themes in the contemporary curricular context and seek meaningful readings. To clarify, this chapter focuses on a pedagogical reflection, not an exhaustive one, which offers some perspectives and alternatives for literacy from the perspective of liberation and the reappropriation of one's cultural variations and historical roots. The reflective essay refers to a cross-reading of the methodologies used in the non-European contexts, and it is concluded that it is crucial for the educational community to recover and reappropriate the educational and cultural space of life. Through a literacy pedagogy, we are able to recover complex education in a deschooled and deconstructed environment, which is reduced to a few critical symbols and meanings.
The Totalitarian Imagination Revisited examines the origins and ends of religion in education at the ‘worldviews’ watershed. It does so against a personal academic life journey which has assessed state religious education in the light of modern autocracy, dictatorship and totalitarianism. Drawing on the specific context of developments in the United Kingdom, the chapter shows this watershed epistemological and linguistic shift—from a subject defined by the study of religious traditions to the designation of that of teaching and learning about ‘worldviews’, a putatively inclusive approach framed in its thinking to incorporate religious and secular outlooks—through an etiology which has its pathogenic roots in a range religiously sceptical, secular epistemologies. This epistemological-philosophical trajectory, with its modern beginnings in the Eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the revolutions of that period, is, it is shown, rooted in an outplaying of a centuries-long, specific historical-political context which has now made itself manifest in contemporary state religious education.
Having predominantly focused on the vertical relation between the state and (groups of) citizens, the literature on political toleration has neglected the practice of toleration in the horizontal relations between citizens and parties. This article remedies this in the context of discussing what practicing toleration implies in responses by civil society actors and pro-democratic parties to populist parties, who have an ambiguous commitment to the principles of liberal democracy. The article develops the basic features of a theory of political toleration covering both ideal and non-ideal circumstances. In continuation of the empirical cases analysed in this special issue, it argues that what can be considered tolerant responses varies with the circumstances and the nature of the political process, and, further, that there is an intermediary conceptual space, a borderland, between toleration and non-toleration, which indicates that toleration and non-toleration are not a matter of a clean dichotomous difference. The justifiability of responses, which are placed in this borderland and even beyond, increases when it becomes clear that populists do not merit toleration.
Social media is a modern person’s digital voice to project and engage with new ideas and mobilise communities—a power shared with extremists. Given the societal risks of unvetted content-moderating algorithms for Extremism , Radicalisation , and Hate speech (ERH) detection, responsible software engineering must understand the who, what, when, where, and why such models are necessary to protect user safety and free expression. Hence, we propose and examine the unique research field of ERH context mining to unify disjoint studies. Specifically, we evaluate the start-to-finish design process from socio-technical definition-building and dataset collection strategies to technical algorithm design and performance. Our 2015-2021 51-study Systematic Literature Review (SLR) provides the first cross-examination of textual, network, and visual approaches to detecting extremist affiliation, hateful content, and radicalisation towards groups and movements. We identify consensus-driven ERH definitions and propose solutions to existing ideological and geographic biases, particularly due to the lack of research in Oceania/Australasia. Our hybridised investigation on Natural Language Processing, Community Detection, and visual-text models demonstrates the dominating performance of textual transformer-based algorithms. We conclude with vital recommendations for ERH context mining researchers and propose an uptake roadmap with guidelines for researchers, industries, and governments to enable a safer cyberspace.
In common vernacular, Utopia usually conjures up imaginations of an impossible place marked by its perfection and happiness. However, this represents but one of the many ways in which utopias can be understood. When studied closer, utopian studies scholars have found it hard to reach a consensus on what a utopia is, and what it is for. Broadly speaking, we can find four different ways of understanding utopia: as a literary text; as a blueprint for society; as a critical reflection of the present; and as a simple pursuit for a better life. Crucially, all these categories speak to the possibility of a different way of life, be it elsewhere in space as with early utopian texts, or elsewhere in time as is most common in contemporary utopias. Utopias which exists elsewhere in time speak most directly to what is possible, as placing them in our own future serves to incite us to work toward them, making changes in the present that might approximate this possible future. This is the aim of most living utopian movements today – from #Occupy Wallstreet to new gene editing technology – which not only presents us with a vision for a possible utopia future, but also tells us how to get there, making the possible increasingly tangible.
Formulated as a common conceptual ground for all democracies, Popper's notion of the open society sprang from the mid-20th century context that demonstrated democracy's vulnerability to hijacking through its own electoral mechanisms. Popper's concept may accordingly be considered as a resource for combatting the populist appeal to majority decision and its threat of diminishing individual and minority rights. I examine the affirmative and critical aspects of such a consideration. On the affirmative side, the open-society concept allows room for both majority decision and the rights of individuals and minorities, as well as for particular group identities and class demands, showing that they may all cooperate to facilitate the growth of liberty, knowledge and the quality of life. Democratic institutions are justified from the grounds of this concept. Populism's equation of democracy with majority decision is, thus, incompatible with democracy's essence: decision by majority exists to cater to the vision that justifies that mode of decision making itself and cannot stay legitimate if it scuttles that vision. The more critical interpretation focuses on a detail of the open society's projected development. Popper tasks democracy's institutions with assuring conditions for progress through the expansion of knowledge. Popper expects the same process to modify the civic sphere's scope and content, as political bodies will be increasingly exposed to the expanding insights of scholarship and science. This anticipation involves grading the agents engaged in these two respective spheres, as well as looking forward to the ascendancy of one of them. Accordingly, the open-society concept might validate claims that, when seeking to confine the scope of majority decision through an emphasis on rights and law, constitutionalist and liberal approaches to democracy are subtly elitist.
I present a theory of creative and destructive value state referring to abstract art. Value is a probabilistic state held as a mixture of its expectation and information forces that coexist in a give-and-take relationship. Expectations are driven by the disclosure of novel information about the value state of various events of desire. Each bit of accumulated information contributes to the improvement of perception up to a threshold level, beyond which begin conscious states. The desire to disclose a value state triggers a triadic system of evaluation which uses concepts, observables and approaches. While the triadic valuation mechanisms can be used to assess various commodities, the scope of this work is limited to the case of artworks, in particular abstract paintings. I assume that art value is basically mediated by the interplay between these value state mechanisms of creation and destruction. Expectations in artwork develop attraction by challenging its contemplator to evaluate (predict) its meaning. Once the relevant information, corresponding to its creative expectations, is acquired (and conditioned), emotional states of indifference, disinterest and desensitization develop.
It is argued that Gellner, in effect, combined Popper’s conception of philosophy and sociology with social anthropology to form a deductive discipline that often sat uneasily with the still inductive, relativist presumptions of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, it was a markedly fruitful way to explore his preoccupation with the emergence of modernity in global, comparative settings. In the second part of the chapter, I explore this contention in more detail looking at his work in Morocco, and his enthusiastic embrace of segmentary lineage theory, drawing additionally on work that I have conducted amongst the Anatolia Alevi Turkish community.KeywordsGellnerSocial anthropologyPhilosophyModernitySocial sciencesIslamSecularismSegmentary lineage theoryMoroccoTurkeyAlevisPopperDeductivismFalsification
This chapter addresses one of the most difficult issues in Hegelian work: the treatment this author makes of the concept of individuality or individual. In this chapter he argues that a more detailed revision of some sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit allows to account for interesting systematic virtualities shown by Hegel’s treatment of this question. In order to achieve this, he suggests a detailed reading of the section “True Spirit,” whose meaning has not been sufficiently explained by the commentators. It will turn out that Hegel’s text seems to include a conception of “practical identity” constitution enriched by elements that contemporary views, such as Korsgaard’s, tend to neglect, v.gr. the role of the elements we could call “natural” in such constitution. In fact, practical identity cannot be determined in a void, but from within a situated position in which occur, for example, variables such as the type of body I am, the place and moment where I was born, etc. In this context, other interesting virtualities that the Hegelian treatment has and that are not so clearly found in contemporary discussions will also emerge.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate that even if Popper’s and Patočka’s interpretations of Plato originate in philosophical and intellectual traditions that have nothing or very little to do with each other, they share a common target, that is, modern biopower, which culminated in twentieth-century totalitarianism. If we examine Popper’s and Patočka’s interpretations of Plato from a biopolitical angle, it is possible to view them in a new light, that is, as two different, even opposing, intellectual and philosophical approaches to the very same tragic events that European culture and politics experienced in the twentieth century. Despite the radically divergent results of their readings, Popper and Patočka share a starting point, that is, the effort to outline a genealogy of European cultural and intellectual history in the light of Plato. The first section of this article explains why and to what extent Popper’s and Patočka’s interpretations can be considered genealogical readings. The second section elaborates on their different approaches to the relationship between justice and power in Plato. The third section concentrates on the relationship between Plato and twentieth-century biopower.
In the last decade, the European Union (EU), a bulwark of the liberal international order, has been subject to a high degree of turmoil resulting from various processes and crises and has witnessed the rise of national populism, of which Brexit was the main exponent. The leadership of the order was also impacted by the changes in the foreign policy of the United States of America (USA) effected by the Trump Administration. The USA, the United Kingdom (UK), and the EU are the leaders of the liberal zone of peace and if national populism structurally affects them the liberal international order could be seriously challenged. Among the various instances of national populism, Brexit remains a significant challenge to the EU and might greatly impact the liberal international order. By adopting an interpretivist methodology anchored in hermeneutics and in the methodological approach of emergent causation, this article seeks to understand how Brexit, as an internal challenge to the order, and the rise of China and other revisionist powers, as an external one, might influence the future of the liberal international order and great power competition. I argue that the news of the order’s death is greatly exaggerated, and that depending on British, German, and US variables, Brexit and the rise of China can either challenge or reinforce the liberal international order. Nevertheless, liberalism has a resilience no other political perspective has due to its innate ability for criticism and adaptation to change. Considering that the current liberal international order is a USA-led order, I argue that these are the two main variables concerning how Brexit might influence the liberal international order and how the order’s leading powers will adapt their strategies and foreign policies towards China and other revisionist powers.
The relevance of the study is due to the need to clarify the semantic core of the sociocultural frontier Tertius Romae. The theoretical construct Tertius Romae by Mark Cicero has undergone semantic transformations throughout history. It acquires various meanings of political and geographical ambitions, including the ideas of "Moscow is the Third Rome" and "Third Reich", the connotations of Christian sacral and eschatological expectations, the form of the core of the idea of national sovereignty, world domination, the global economy and, finally, the global virtual world.
The purpose of the study is to determine the historical stages of the evolution of the socio-cultural frontier Tertius Romae.
Apart from the time time when the construct Tertius Romae appeared in the work of Cicero, we also distinguish three global stages of its evolution: sacred (5th – 16th centuries), secular (16th – 20th centuries) and virtual (starting from the 21st century).
If during a long sacred stage, the control centers form the semantic core of the Tertius Romae frontier, then at the subsequent stages they actively exploit it. The concept of a socio-cultural frontier in the new digital reality acquires the meaning of the moving boundaries of a technologically backward periphery, dependent on a more developed metropolis, providing communication services, regulating information content and ensuring information security. The theoretical construct, once tied to a territory and a certain form of government, is now acquiring the meaning of virtual power, and socio-cultural frontier is more due to the quality of communication and the power of the final equipment.
The chapter places the recourse to the concept of drive in the accounts of practical subjectivity in Fichte into the historical and systematic context of Platonic and Kantian thinking about the psycho-politics of self-rule. Part 1 presents Plato’s comparison of the soul’s set-up and manner of operation to a team of horses of opposed character that are driven by a seriously challenged charioteer. Part 2 first addresses Kant’s account of the irrational and rational modes of practical subjectivity and then traces Reinhold’s and Fichte’s appropriation of the concept of drive for detailing the dynamic structure and functionality of the mind’s multiple and competing drives, including the “selfish” and “unselfish drive” in Reinhold and the “natural,” “pure” and “ethical drive” in Fichte.
In this chapter, the authors analyze the artifacts in which students explore the idea of living together as a peaceful interaction between people and mutual enrichment of their difference based on basic rights and freedoms as well as mutual respect. In the CLLP, living together is approached as celebration of diversity intertwined with solidarity, equality, and human rights. The analysis reveals that students often approach living together from their own point of view, but are able to see others’ perspectives. The chapter discusses how learning about solidarity requires sensitivity for difference and thus lessons on the subject need to be planned carefully to ensure inclusive cultural practices and respect for diversity and difference.
This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno’s 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research programme I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they are less concerned with the development of critical consciousness as a focus of this project. In this way, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, particularly in its formative stages, revolves around a set of problems relatively inaccessible to critical rationalism and critical theory, since it is centrally concerned with identifying and cultivating the possibility of critique in society. In closing, I gesture to the importance of political education in Mannheim’s early work, suggesting that a return to these experimental texts will yield resources for political thought today.
After having dealt with the characterization of life-chance liberalism in alternative world views and the different principal attitudes to arrangements of space, or Landscape 1, in the previous chapter, we will now deal with the processes of maximizing liberty through the process of modernization, and the various factors restricting liberty in the context of bureaucratization, increase of complexity of communication technologies and their moralization. In doing so, we will address the question of how to deal with contingencies.
Terms such as ‘liberalism’, ‘neoliberal’, ‘left’, ‘conservative’, ‘right’, ‘socialist’, ‘communism’ and ‘neoconservatism’ are often with stigmatizing intent in public discussions, but also in scientific discourses. In order not to follow this form of (quite misleading) use of terms, we will turn to definition in this chapter. First, we will briefly deal with the image of liberalism currently generated by the mainstream of spatial science (and beyond). Second, we will differentiate primarily between ‘classical liberalism’ and the image of ourselves, following Dahrendorf’s theory on the so-called life-chances (or in short, life-chances liberalism). The third contextualization takes place in relation to conservatism as well as, in the broadest sense, the socialist systems of ideas. Finally, the spatial and landscape-related implications of the world views will be outlined.
Following the presence of Hegel’s philosophy in Iran from the nineteenth century to the present, this study discusses various interpretations and appropriations of Hegelian philosophy by Iranian activists, intellectuals, and academics in their quest for understanding and realizing modernity in Iran. The controversies around modernity, democratization, Islam, nationalism, and the role of Hegel’s ideas and philosophy in the writings of liberal modernists, communist activists, religious intellectuals, academic scholars, and secular nationalist theoreticians will be discussed. The objective is to provide a general, as well as a detailed, perspective on the prominent, original, as well as understudied role Hegel has played in the intellectual history of Iran in its specific Islamic theologico-political predicament.
Deacon presents a fascinating model that adds to explanations of the origins of life from physical matter. Deacon’s paper owes much to the work of Howard Pattee, who saw semiotic relations in informational terms, and Deacon binds his model to criticism of current information concepts in biology which he sees as semantically inadequate. In this commentary I first outline the broader project from Pattee, and then I present a cybernetic perspective on information. My claim is that this view of information is already present within biology and provides what Deacon seeks.
The extent of Africa’s developmental challenges conspicuously manifests themselves in the poor living standards of most of its people. Poverty, low literacy and life expectancy rate, hunger and poor sanitary environment are some of the features that characterize life in a region widely acclaimed as most backward in the world today. How best should states in the kind of situation most of Africa has found itself react? What areas of life deserve or require the involvement of the state, and to what extent? In this work, I seek to examine the relevance and implications of Karl Popper’s idea of negative utilitarianism. Popper’s position, in summary, is that a state at best ought to pursue piecemeal, the task of managing its people in a way that protects them from exposure to harm, rather than seek to make them happy. I argue that Popper’s position hangs between minimalism and welfarism, thinly disposed to the latter in its objective but privileging the former in its method. This approach, which I refer to as minimal welfarism. My view is that minimal welfarism is incapable of addressing most of the challenges facing contemporary African states. Alternatively, I make a case for greater governmental involvement in improving the living standards of the people and for the development of other dimensions of state.
Karl Popper is famous for favoring an open society, one in which the individual is treated as an end in himself and social arrangements are subjected to critical evaluation, which he defends largely by appeal to a Kantian ethic of respecting the dignity of rational beings. In this essay, I consider for the first time what the implications of a characteristically African ethic, instead prescribing respect for our capacity to relate communally, are for how the state should operate in an open society. I argue that while an Afro-communal moral foundation does not prescribe a closed society, it supports an open society politics of a sort different from the one that Popper specifies. For Popper, the state in an open society should improve social arrangements albeit without seeking to promote a particular conception of the good life, should protect rights that merely serve the function of facilitating individual choice, and should employ majoritarian democracy to be able to avoid unwelcome rulers and policies. On all three counts, I show that a relational ethic typical of the African philosophical tradition entails different, intuitively attractive approaches to politics.
Popper was also a critic of the idea that it was possible – or necessary – to give a positive response to the problem of induction. He was also a critic of many probabilistic theories of induction. He suggested that instead of seeking for a positive way of resolving the problem of induction – or, more generally, of trying to justify our claims that our ideas were true – we should, instead be concerned to make our claims open to criticism. All this, and its strengths and weaknesses, have been much discussed. But it seems to me that not enough attention has been paid to what is distinctive about Popper’s work – and to the question of how it addresses our various problem-situations today.
Knowledge has been at the forefront of social theory, a core concern being to comprehend what counts as valued knowledge and whose knowledge is deemed important. This chapter is organised around three main areas: debates over knowledge and objectivity, including the work of Karl Mannheim and the positivist debate of the 1960s; critical offshoots of the debate over objectivity and science, including the social construction of knowledge, situated knowledge and indigenous knowledge; and the politics of academic knowledge, consisting of three parts—knowledge and the curriculum, knowledge and academic gatekeeping, and knowledge and intellectuals.
The article shows that in the modern era, digital technologies penetrate all areas of material and spiritual culture, helping to preserve the cultural heritage for future generations. The prospects for the use of digital technologies in culture are very wide. This is primarily museum activity and digitization of cultural heritage, where the prospects for the use of digital technologies are mainly related to the phenomenon of information preservation. The problems that arise in this regard are demonstrated.
Historical experience shows that the welfare state is what holds democracy and the market economy together. Neither a welfare state that is too small nor one that is too large can fulfill this connective function. A “stability pact” between citizens and the state is needed: 1. A welfare state to provide citizens security even in their old age. 2. In order to preserve appropriate incentives, the retirement system has to be a form of “saving” (forced saving) for old age. 3. In addition, most citizens also undertake voluntary saving. 4. The state provides for monetary stability. 5. The state uses itsfiscal policy to promote high employment. A modern understanding of personal freedom includes the security provided by a welfare state of appropriate dimensions. It follows that in the twenty-first century, a large part of the wealth of citizens consists of net claims on the state.
Epistocratic systems of government have received renewed attention, and considerable opposition, in recent political philosophy. Although they vary significantly in form, epistocracies generally reject universal suffrage. But can they maintain the advantages of universal suffrage despite rejecting it? This paper develops an argument for a significant instrumental advantage of universal suffrage: that governments must take into account the interests of all of those enfranchised in their policy decisions or else risk losing power. This is called ‘the Interests Argument’. One problem for the Interests Argument is that governments are not entirely responsive to voter interests, partly because voters do not always know what is in their interests. I will show how this epistemic claim can be used to support certain forms of epistocracy, but deny that it undermines the Interests Argument. I then consider whether we can identify forms of epistocracy that preserve the benefits of the Interests Argument whilst overcoming the epistemic limitations of democracy. I propose six forms of epistocracy, and argue that two are able to maintain these benefits, hence providing an evaluation of the relative strengths of these epistocracies with respect to one of the most valuable instrumental benefits of universal suffrage. Whilst epistocracy lacks many of the advantages of democracy, this paper shows that some forms fare better than others.
Eric Voegelin’s intellectual project has typically been described as involved in the rehabilitation of classical political philosophy and in the diagnosis of Gnostic tendencies in modernity. In his work, however, he repeatedly points to the late-medieval/early modern concept of toleration as a necessary addition to the Platonic-Aristotelian legacy he was concerned with retrieving. This article explores Voegelin’s understanding of toleration, and especially its Bodinian origins. As the article demonstrates, his understanding of toleration is deeply intertwined with a Bodinian understanding of religion, and as such it may be more difficult to integrate with other elements of Voegelin’s thought than he himself believed.
During the Cold War, the place of knowledge, planning, and social science expertise in modern societies emerged as the focus of a momentous debate. The debate, often carried out under the rubric of the “knowledge society,” was directly linked to a fundamental question: whether the capitalist “West” or the socialist “East” was best prepared to provide their citizens with economic prosperity and well-being. The debate raised questions about the nature of the social sciences themselves, about the scope and character of their knowledge, and about their roles in public affairs and society. This chapter examines how the Cold War confrontation shaped this debate, showing how the views put forward by major figures including Daniel Bell, members of the “New Left” (e.g. Alain Touraine, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas), and prominent (neo)liberals (e.g. Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper) continue to shape the social and political imaginations today.
In this essay I propose a new measure of social welfare. It captures the intuitive idea that quantity , quality , and equality of individual welfare all matter for social welfare. More precisely, it satisfies six conditions: Equivalence , Dominance , Quality , Strict Monotonicity , Equality and Asymmetry . These state that (i) populations equivalent in individual welfare are equal in social welfare; (ii) a population that dominates another in individual welfare is better; (iii) a population that has a higher average welfare than another population is better, other things being equal; (iv) the addition of a well-faring individual makes a population better, whereas the addition of an ill-faring individual makes a population worse; (v) a population that has a higher degree of equality than another population is better, other things being equal; and (vi) individual illfare matters more for social welfare than individual welfare. By satisfying the six conditions, the measure improves on previously proposed measures, such as the utilitarian Total and Average measures, as well as different kinds of Prioritarian measures.
In 2015, the Government of China enacted Environmental Public-Interest Litigation (EPiL) as an amendment to its revised Environmental Protection Law. This policy granted civil organizations standing in court to represent public interests applied to environmental values. Based on a review of EPiL developments since 2015 and a case study focused on soil pollution litigation pursued by a leading environmental non-governmental organization (NGO), this paper analyzes the contemporary dynamics of Chinese environmental governance and strategies through which NGOs are leveraging EPiL to advance policy change. Through critical engagement with the concepts of experimentalist governance, this paper highlights the complex pathways through which empowerment of civil society organizations produced policy shifts. Rather than focusing on information and learning derived from purposive experimentation, this study highlights how entrance of new actors introduced practical knowledge and new values that catalyzed an array of changes in governance arrangements. While the metaphor of experimentation suggests a system that is well understood and subject to controls, we identify substantial indeterminacy and openness in governance.
Various societal and academic actors argue that conspiracy theories should be debunked by insisting on the truthfulness of real “facts” provided by established epistemic institutions. But are academic scholars the appropriate actors to correct people’s beliefs and is that the right and most productive thing to do? Drawing on years of ethnographic research experiences in the Dutch conspiracy milieu, I explain in this paper why debunking conspiracy theories is not possible (can scholars actually know the real truth?), not professional (is taking sides in truth wars what we should do?), and not productive (providing more “correct” information won’t work as knowledge acceptance is not just a cognitive/epistemic issue). Instead of reinstalling the modernist legitimation narrative of science, I argue in this paper for an alternative that is both epistemologically stronger and sociologically more effective. Building from research and experiments with epistemic democracy in the field of science and technology studies, I propose to have “deliberative citizen knowledge platforms”, instead of elite experts groups alone, asses the quality of public information. Such societally representative bodies should enjoy more legitimacy and epistemic diversity to better deal with conspiracy theories and the broader societal conflicts over truth and knowledge they represent.
I argue that there are liberal reasons to reject what I call “Global Individualism”, which is the conjunction of two views strongly associated with liberalism: moral individualism and social individualism. According to the first view, all moral properties are reducible to individual moral properties. The second holds that the social world is composed only of individual agents. My argument has the following structure: after suggesting that Global Individualism does not misrepresent liberalism, I draw on some recent insights in social ontology to show that it is inconsistent with the satisfaction of an important liberal principle related to the protection of individual rights over time. As I hold, to solve this problem we need to accept group agents acting as moral agents, which in turn commits us to the weaker notion of normative individualism (a view that is consistent with the existence of some group moral properties). I conclude with the suggestion that even this solution is costly for liberalism, for the conjunction of group moral agency and normative individualism makes the latter unstable and compels liberals to a much less individualistic stance than expected.
Durch den Trend zu neuen und innovativen Organisationsformen entstehen nicht-hierarchische selbststeuernde Organisationen. Sie zielen darauf ab, anpassungsfähiger und flexibler zu sein, um auf schnell verändernde Marktbedingungen reagieren zu können. Ihre Kernprinzipien wie Selbstorganisation und nicht-hierarchische Strukturen stehen dabei im Widerspruch zu der Behauptung, dass alle Organisationen ausnahmslos hierarchisch sind. Die vorliegende Fallstudie untersucht das Paradoxon fortbestehender Hierarchien in nicht-hierarchischen Organisationen, in dem eine soziokratische Organisation analysiert wird. Die Ergebnisse der qualitativen Interviews befassen sich sowohl mit informellen als auch mit formalen Hierarchien, die in selbststeuernden Organisationen existieren. Darüber hinaus diskutiert die Studie die Einflüsse soziokratischer Prinzipien, der Organisationskultur und der Persönlichkeit auf die Entstehung informeller Hierarchien und liefert praktische Implikationen für selbststeuernde Organisationen.
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