Leviathan

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...

In 2023, Leviathan journal celebrated its 50th anniversary. On this occasion, the first part of the article commemorates the founding and the founding editors of the journal. The founding editorial, which opened the first issue of the journal, is...

Social-ecological transformation has become an important concept in the face of profound planetary crises (loss of biodiversity, climate crisis). Recently, the needs for social scientific transformation research have become more clearly defined. We...

Unchallenged globalization seems to be a notion of the past. Instead of interdependence and integration, processes of deglobalization and decoupling currently capture our attention. We interpret this discursive decline of an idea previously dominant...

After preliminary remarks on the general crisis situation, the review essay discusses the latest literature on the Ukraine war, the geopolitical revival of Carl Schmitt and the short-circuiting from Schmitt to Dugin and Putin.

This article discusses political ideas of solidarity in the refugee solidarity movement in the FRG of the 1980s, which has received little attention so far. On the basis of archival material, three currents are discussed in which the tensions and...

The widely stirring times of the student movement had it's peak in the end of the sixties with a deep delving into the thoughts of Marx and Freud. Out of this movement grew our scientific quarterly Leviathan. The editors didn't want to work inside a...

Focusing on the discourse of sociology the article considers the affective production of the „everyday“ aiming to make prevalent imaginaries of modern critique visible. Analyzing affective politics of normalization (Veralltäglichung)...

Apocalyptic is currently in vogue. In the history of religion, this has always been a diagnosis of the present, but with reference to the salvation that appears behind the doom. With the help of Hans Blumenberg, the function of apocalyptic metaphors...

The essay draws on social philosophy and affect theory to respond to Maser’s and Neckel’s disapproving perspective on safe(r) spaces and awareness. I especially criticize that their interpretation focusses on individual psychology and does not...

Drawing on recent controversies about satire and cancel culture, the article describes humor and comedy as a liminal form of legitimate critique, insofar as their critical potential is often denied by reference to their affective...

The paper asks about the sociological constitution of the practice of criticizing discrimination. Which attributions of meaning and which forms of acting underpin this practice? At the intersection of sociological approaches to rights and...

The study focuses on a group of agents that can influence the quality and development of democracies considerably, but have scarcely been the subject of research. It deals with „participation practitioners“ or „professionals“, i.e....

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the potential of the intrinsic logic of the cities for critical urban research. The perspective of the inherent logic of cities provides a reconstruction of urban everyday certainties (doxa). However,...

Where people live has a fundamental impact on their life chances. Against this background, processes of international migration are at the center of interest in social science and economics. While migration ethics and neoclassical economics are two...

Both in Ukraine and in Russia, the level of national consciousness and pride was at a low level after the breakdown of Communism, but increased strongly in the course of the years meanwhile. The reasons for this, however, were extremely different....