Leviathan

Since President Trump took office in 2025, US science has been under financial and political pressure: Billions in research funding cut, academic freedom, DEI programs and international mobility and collaborations curtailed. Universities are seen as...

The aim of this article is to analyze the difficulty of implementing government digitalization projects. While the agreement mechanisms known from other cross-cutting issues work for digitalization legislation and the joint initiatives to promote...

Emotions are increasingly central to public debates about science, where they become the subjects of reflexive deliberation. Drawing on case studies, we examine how emotions feature in these debates. Our analysis highlights the social and epistemic...

What happens when cars are deprived of the space they’ve long occupied as a given? How stable is car dominance in Germany, and can real-world labs disrupt it? This study draws on the MLP model to explore these questions. Using Berlin’s...

The article uncovers media-produced knowledge about the coronavirus vaccination in Germany. The analysis of articles from both opinion-leading media and selected blogs shows, among other things, an interdependent radicalisation on the fringes, but...

Theories of radical democracy are characterized by a comprehensive understanding of contingency through a critique of norms and norm-based rule. However, it is discussed whether the abolition of oppressive conditions and the idea of...

The democratic dimension of the German debt brake remains largely undiscussed in the public debate – although its introduction, according to the argument of this article, represents significant economic partisanship of the constitution. It can be...

Explaining climate policy delay cannot be done by focusing only on what causes the limited effectiveness of public critique. The boundaries of what can be articulated in terms of critique matter, too. Often, these boundaries are attributed to the...

While physical violence is still rare in German conflicts about ecological transformation, violence talk is highly prevalent. This article analyzes the discursive construction of violence and non-violence in ecological conflicts and examines its...

The article deals with the question of how contemporary societies adjust to climate change in terms of time. Using the example of the constitutional approach to climate change, two contrasting concepts of time – risk and catastrophe – are...

In response to the accusation of a normativity deficit, representatives of radical democratic theory argue for a concept of freedom that, understood as a democratic opening logic, is intended to offer a normative reference point. However, it is an...

Socio-ecological conflicts are differentiated into conflicts of interests, of justice, of values and environmental conflicts. They result from conflicting and changing constellations in the societal areas of technology, economy, politics and...

Germany has been discussing its relation to the People’s Republic of China and its party rule for a while. Based on the German government’s China strategy, we ask for a framework of analysis and evaluation. We criticize the failure to recognize...

The development of modern communication technologies not only allows information to be spread more quickly, but also addresses and mobilizes people for a wide variety of projects. Techniques, according to an early thesis of Walther Benjamin, thus...

Metaphors of maternity have always determined the perception of nature and the environment. This article analyzes mother-nature tropes in pop music. It aims on highlighting hidden, un-negotiated aspects of today’s environmental conflicts by...

Non-fungible tokens have been known as a new commodity of the digital economy since 2021 at the latest. In this article, I argue that the NFT market reproduces hierarchical power structures instead of democratization. On the other hand, I explain in...

In many democracies, the Corona policy involved a strengthening of the executive. This suggests a link to Rosanvallon’s thesis of a creeping presidentialization of democratic regimes and his concept of permanent democracy. The article takes up...

How is it that ecofeminism, a school of thought that has long been regarded as the epitome of a problematic essentialism, is currently enjoying renewed popularity? This article addresses this question by comparing the theoretical positions of Maria...

In the 20th century money creation became possible for nation states, but increasingly also for commercial banks. The consequences are socioeconomic misinformation and a concentration of power that undermine principles of a market-based democracy....

Postcolonial criticism radicalizes earlier accusations of North-South inequality by not only criticizing economic, social and political polarization, but also making sociology itself the object of scrutiny. How can we respond to the associated...

Repressive desublimation is a key element of the Fordist form of governance for Marcuse: an institutionalized liberation of drives that serves social control. In my article, I develop a new concept of repressive desublimation to analyze the...