Leviathan

This article examines the effects of intensifying political pressure on Russian academics in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, focusing on how universities have become sites of ideological control and loyalty enforcement. Drawing on two...

Claus Offe (1940–2025) was one of the most important social scientists in the Federal Republic of Germany. In his studies of the capitalist welfare state and liberal democracy, he integrated political science and sociology. This article pays...

In this essay, I argue that money and monetary policy should not be understood as „de-linguistified“ phenomena, but rather as embedded in forms of communication that, following Habermas, can be described as systematically distorted. This view is...

The Trump administration’s January 2025 attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs was initiated and supported by a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College). The ruling prohibited...

How does a society emerge that revolves around capitalist work, and how does it stabilise? The article tackles these questions through Foucault’s largely over-looked lectures from the early 1970s. The constitution of labour power and the concept...

Judging from the discourse of actually existing conservatism in contemporary Germany (and beyond), one would assume that conservatism and capitalism are natural allies and that the ‚Swabian Housewife‘ is the ideal representative of a set of...

The heterogeneity of conservatism poses a scientific challenge. In this essay, the radical nature of the positions taken by the AfD and the Union parties is examined in detail with reference to the work of ideology researcher Michael Freeden,...

This contribution draws on a genealogical perspective to study the two Trump administrations’ policies relating to education. It traces post-war conservative traditions of anti-intellectualism and their interconnections with constructions of race....

Before the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage in Germany in 2015, German labor market economists largely agreed that this ‚social experiment‘ would result in significant job losses. However, accompanying research on the introduction of...

Time and again, the state claims to act rationally in the interest of its citizens. This is particularly evident at the municipal level, where local councils pursue allegedly “rational” objectives that lie beyond the constitutional distribution...

The sectoral basis of the urban-rural conflict today is a contrast between rural industry and the urban service economy. This contrast translates into two different policy modes: a logic of more, which seeks to overcome scarcity problems through...

The article discusses the similarities and differences between the New Right and New Conservatism, focusing primarily on the work of Patrick J. Deneen in the main section. From a history of ideas perspective, Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville...

Why did the Federal Republic of Germany participate in the UN mission in Somalia in 1993? On the basis of files from the Federal Foreign Office that have since been released, the article reconstructs that this decision can be explained less by the...

Christian Democratic parties are generally considered conservative. However, this article demonstrates that throughout its history, Christian democracy has incorporated a variety of conservative ideologies. On the one hand, the movement's self-image...

The assumption of contingency is based on a formal definition of being human that justifies why there can be no ultimate reasons in the political sphere. The difficulty of radical democratic approaches in demarcating from anti-emancipatory movements...

The reply to Lucas von Ramin outlines a form of democratic critique that is not based on normative concepts but rather emphasizes the political constitution of normative orders. For a political theory that focuses on such a democratic critique, as...

This article analyzes how the integration of Indigenous knowledge into a Eurocentric understanding of science reproduces epistemic violence. It uses global climate politics as example. The distinction between Indigenous and scientific knowledge is...

To examine the emancipatory potential of citizenship approaches in relation to urban social movements, I propose the concept of „horizontal citizenship“. For this purpose, I discuss approaches of performative and urban citizenship and question...

The contribution gives an overview of Harrison White’s theory of social structures and discusses it in the context of contemporary sociological theory. White focuses on social constellations on the meso-level. These are conceptualized as networks...