The return of political economy

The suggestion that the division of the social product is as urgent a problem as its overall growth has led to political economy returning to both history and current politics, argues Charles S. Maier. High time, then, to analyse deprivation, wealth and inequality on a world scale. [more]

Barack Obama's "war on terror"

William E Scheuerman explains why Obama's mediocre humanitarian record in the "war on terror" deserves our critical scrutiny. And how US presidential government's latent monarchist attributes have generated far-reaching policy and legal continuities between Bush and Obama. [more]

Imperial violence and national mobilization

Lutz Raphael advances an interpretative paradigm for European history in the first half of the twentieth century that focuses on Europe's global interdependencies - and will enhance our understanding of the era's world wars, unrestrained violence and ideological confrontation. [more]

Occupy: A populist response to the crisis of inequality

The Occupy movement resembles nineteenth-century American populism in its anger at the avarice of bankers and financiers and in its notions of majoritarian democracy. Where it differs from the old Populists is in its attitude to the state, writes Charles Postel. [more]

The Tea Party and the remaking of Republican conservatism

Tea Party activism combines participatory engagement and political experience with severe misinformation and intolerance of opponents. How can well-educated and intelligent grassroots activists have developed such wildly inaccurate visions of American public policy? [more]

The Green Movement and nonviolent struggle in Iran

Though it had the potential to turn violent, Iran's Green Movement was determined to seek dialogue with the state. In doing so, it put back in the bottle the genie of violence released by the Khomeini revolution thirty years earlier, writes Ramin Jahanbegloo. [more]

Imperial rule and violence

Colonial rule was stable only where it could rely on local cooperation. Frequently, the massive use of violence was the only possibility of demonstrating imperial claims to power. Given the fragility of colonial structures, then, can one speak of "domination"? [more]

Progressive politics for hard times

Responding to Tony Judt's appeal to the lost values of social democracy, Michael Ignatieff makes a case for solidarity amidst recession, while arguing for a politics of individual empowerment over corporate and state-sector self-privileging. [more]

Memory displaced

Re-reading Jean Améry's "Torture"

Jean Améry, writing in 1965, famously called torture "the essence of the Third Reich". Why did Améry, the Holocaust survivor, emphasize torture over the annihilation of the Jews? His choice can be understood in the context of debate on the Algerian war, argues Dan Diner. [more]

The dismembered virgin as pawn of genocide

Kleist's drama "Die Herrmannsschlacht" has generally been read as a national call to arms against the Napoleonic forces. Jan Süselbeck looks instead at the role of women in this "Germanic Jihad", re-reading Kleist's drama in the light of analyses of "asymmetric war". [more]

More justice through more Europe

An interview with Ulrich Beck

While discrepancies between EU member states can be overlooked during win-win periods of growth, recession triggers xenophobic and anti-European reactions in both rich and poor countries. In interview, Ulrich Beck explains how inequality leaves the Union susceptible to decay. [more]

Perpetrators without qualities

On the impact of social-psychological models in Holocaust research

Social-psychological research tends to reproduce the ideal of inherently good, sane and normal human beings. The possibility that subjects have multiple identities and that hybrid states deserve the term "normal" challenges this assumption. [more]

Reform and rationality

With regard to recent publications Tim B. Müller analyses the relationship between the horizon of expectations of modernity and the scientification of the political in the Cold War. [more]

The concentration camp

An international perspective

The concentration camp is still popularly viewed as a distinctly national-socialist phenomenon. Yet the first camps were established well before the Third Reich, writes Richard Overy, and they were by no means confined to Germany. [more]

In search of Europe

An interview with Jacques Delors

"We don't just need firefighters; we need architects too." Jacques Delors, three times President of the European Commission, speaks of "this Europe of values", its triumphs and failures, and his hope that a federal Europe of nation-states will, eventually, become a reality. [more]

Experience, institution and critique in post-industrial society

On François Dubet's sociology

With his studies about suburban youths, the French school system or workplace inequality, Francois Dubet has contributed both to the conceptualization of contemporary social relations and, as a "public sociologist", to political debate in France. Nikola Tietze reviews his work. [more]

Here am I, where are you?

Loneliness in the era of communication

The Internet has abolished loneliness, or rather got rid of its negative effects to a hitherto unimagined degree, writes Aleida Assmann. Borders between sociability and loneliness are shifting and the pressure of social conformity lessens as computer nerds turn into savvy heroes. [more]

Icons beyond their borders

The German-Jewish intellectual legacy at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Romantic valorization only partly explains the iconic status of German-Jewish intellectuals. Their tactics of critical displacement have attracted them to the post-modernists, whose impact they will probably outlast, writes Steven E. Aschheim. [more]

The "upgrading" of age: A social farce

Old age is increasingly seen as a social resource, the discourse promoting a win-win situation in which society makes use of the elderly while acknowledging their worth. So does this mean that older people are about to witness an improvement in their social status? [more]

"Dear Hannah Arendt..."

Correspondence between Leni Yahil and Hannah Arendt, 1961-1971

When Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem to observe the Eichmann trial in 1961, she befriended Leni Yahil. The two began a correspondence that ended abruptly in 1963, after the publication of Arendt's articles on Eichmann. Their friendship did not withstand the "Arendt controversy". [more]

Rape as the trope of a failed process of coming to terms with the past

As a tropes that stand for two different but equally failed forms of coming to terms with the past, the rapes portrayed in two contemporary German novels serve as keys to understanding the postwar history of Eastern and Western Germany. [more]

Planet Terror

War and civil war in zombie films since 1968

Moving away from the atavistic, "gore" dimension of the zombie film to the role of organized, military violence, Markus Pöhlmnann reads the zombie genre as cultural reflection of global social disorder and the changing character of warfare. [more]

Two tropisms

The crisis of social critique as seen from Paris and Frankfurt

There has long been a two-way influence between Frankfurt School critical theory and Parisian sociology. Nevertheless, specifically Franco-German misunderstandings exist over the nature of social critique and its political role, writes Danny Trom. [more]

Everyday ideology: Life during Stalinism

Postmodernist historians of totalitarian societies underrate the role of ideology at the individual level, preferring a performative reading of subjectivity. This fails to explain why the Soviet and Nazi regimes generated absolute commitment, writes Jochen Hellbeck. [more]

Making the world more livable

City planning as social policy

A comparison of European and Islamic cities shows how in the first half of the twentieth century, the sophistication of planning tools increased in inverse proportion to planners' socio-political utopianism. [more]

Picture puzzle

Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1968

"His role was not that of a spokesman, but rather of a mentor, an influential prompter, later a critic, yet also a sometime activist." Wolfgang Kraushaar on Enzenberger's position as "libero" of the German '68 movement. [more]

The hero, the I and the we

Heroes - and hero-worship - may not be as selfless as we like to think, argues Jan Philipp Reemtsma. "Heroes are people who live out their narcissism to an extent not normally permitted in everyday life. They receive admiration not despite, but because of their narcissism." [more]

"My plight is not unique"

Sexual violence in conflict zones: a roundtable discussion

What conceptions of gender underlie military policy towards sexual violence? Is the form violence takes determined by the type of warfare? And to what extent is sexual violence in wartime different to that in peacetime? A roundtable discussion. [more]

From nation-building to market-building

Georg Simmel's concept of "society as unity of the diversity of forms and degrees of sociality" opens up a non-national perspective on society. What is the structure of the sociality of the EU and what are the social forms that allow for a self-stabilization of this system? [more]

The self-culturalization of the city

Andreas Reckwitz challenges the neoliberal euphoria of "cultural planning" and the exploitation of the "cultural resources" of cities. What is the Other of the creative city? [more]

Victims of violence: Can we demand restraint from the public sphere?

Does press freedom entail an unlimited right to information on the part of the public? Not when that information concerns victims of violent crime, argues Jan Philipp Reemtsma. An interest in crime is not the same thing as an interest in the victims of crime. [more]

What are heroes for?

Heroes, writes Christian Schneider, mark the boundaries of human behaviour. And without boundaries, there is no scale and no purpose. [more]

Feelings of community

On Jürgen Habermas's concept of collective identity

For Jürgen Habermas, one of the key tasks for a modern society is to establish a "reasonable identity". But there is a blind spot in Habermas's theory, writes Jens Hacke. It fails to recognize the importance of non-rational, emotional identification for the formation of a collective identity. [more]

"The personality cult must be ended now!"

Paint-bombs at Tiananmen Square

The outcome of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in June 1989 is well known. Less so is the fate of the three young men who threw paint bombs at the portrait of Mao Tse-tung adorning the gate to the Forbidden City. Wolfgang Kraushaar chronicles the events of twenty years ago. [more]

"Chile Si, Junta No!"

Political protests at the 1974 FIFA World Cup

Chile's participation in the 1974 FIFA World Cup in Germany provided an opportunity for leftwing groups to make their opposition to the Chilean government junta visible to an international public. A chapter from the "Protest Chronicle". [more]

Hannah Arendt and the student movement

Notes on the correspondence between Hans-Jürgen Benedict and Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt's evaluation of the student movement was "multivalent", writes Wolfgang Kraushaar in the introduction to a telling correspondence. Arendt appeared to be "torn between the progressive impulses and the off-putting tendencies of the '68 rebellion". [more]

Nation and world society

The nation remains the accepted form of political organization in the "world society". Nevertheless, nations are "post-sovereign" in that they admit that the nation constitutes "neither a group nor a community", nor "classes that form themselves as such". [more]

Corruption as metaphor

Facts, perceptions, interpretive patterns

Corruption has increasingly become an issue for political agendas and public debates. Yet a comparative study of perceptions of corruption in Germany and Romania suggests that value judgments are involved, writes Dirk Tänzler. [more]

"The trauma must remain inaccessible to memory"

Part III

In the final part of Harald Weilnböck's essay on poststructuralist borrowing of the concept of psycho-trauma, the author draws some troubling conclusions from Dr Goodheart's excursus into poststructuralist trauma theory. Could an interest in ensuring that "the trauma remains inaccessible to memory" be affiliated to institutional structures of power, control, and exclusion? [more]

"The trauma must remain inaccessible to memory"

Part II

In the second part of Harald Weilnböck's essay on poststructuralist borrowing of the concept of psycho-trauma, Dr Goodheart is confronted with an example of "trauma-therapy bashing" and the notion of "loyalty towards the dead". Feeling vaguely threatened, he begins to wonder whether the humanities' approach to trauma is more than just innocuous nonsense. [more]

"The trauma must remain inaccessible to memory"

Part I

In a long and thought-provoking essay, Harald Weilnböck examines poststructuralist borrowing of the concept of pyscho-trauma and finds it distorts the clinical understanding of the term. In part one, the fictional Dr Goodheart puzzles over the assertion that "trauma must remain inaccessible to memory" and analyzes a "hermeneutical assault" on Hitchcock's "Marnie". [more]

Branded but not a slave

On the work of Varlam Shalamov

Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales is the stylistic counterpart to Solzhenitsyn's cosmetic account of the Gulag. Michail Ryklin defends the existential authenticity of what Solzhenitsyn criticized as a fiction "without the expression of authorial subjectivity". [more]

In view of the occasion

A war that began with a lie and must end in disaster

In Iraq, like in Vietnam, the US military is in thrall to ideological warriors in civilian dress; and in Iraq, like in Vietnam, morale has disintegrated among troops fighting a war without fronts. Bernd Greiner examines the US military's unwillingness to learn from its mistakes. [more]

On the role of the media in asymmetric conflicts

Focusing on military history and media studies

"The act of violence is always an act of communication", writes Thorsten Loch. Both sides in today's "asymmetric" conflicts make use of global channels of information: the stronger side tries to legitimate wars while the weaker side attempts to use the international press to beat the west at its own game. [more]

Holographic wars

On the "real time" of the object

The absence of images of contemporary war is not the result of censorship, rather that "war" in a certain sense no longer exists. "Predator" questions the status of the images that war must fall back on in order to remain "war". [more]

Richard Rorty

An obituary

Richard Rorty can be placed alongside Hume, Montaigne, and Wittgenstein in a tradition of dissident philosophy, writes Jan Philipp Reemtsma. All wanted to put an end to the traditional philosophical discussion, but have become, in one way or another, part of the philosophical establishment. [more]

Democracy and philosophy

Moral insight "is a matter of imagining a better future, and observing the results of attempts to bring that future into existence". In "Kritika&Kontext", Richard Rorty (1931-2007) outlines the anti-foundationalist premise of his philosophy. [more]

Feminism and the ethics of reconciliation

The failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to do justice to women rape victims was not a simple oversight but is constitutive of the symbolic order dominating the political landscape of "liberal democracies". [more]

Fascism

A definition by way of orientation

An increase in the use of a "generic" definition of fascism has seen the term being conflated with communism, even when those to whom it is applied clearly rejected such an association. [more]

Elements of a grammar of massacre

Intention is a misleading concept when defining genocide. An alternative model is needed "at whose centre lies the imaginary, which forms and reforms the social body according to the measurements of its fears". [more]

Biopolitics, ethnic cleansing, and the sovereignty of the people

A sketch

Racism as biopolitical selection criterion is a defining feature of modern mass murder. [more]

Israel's secular myth

The Holocaust after its secularization

After the Eichmann trial in 1961, the Holocaust no longer meant the European Jews' failure to defend themselves but the most recent chapter in the historical struggle against adversity. The Six Day War brought a new sense of vulnerability and cemented the Holocaust as a secular myth for the entire Israeli society. [more]

Zinedine Zidane or games of belonging

Zinedine Zidane is a figurehead around which young Muslims in France and Germany form a sense of community. The footballer's style of play is a direct expression of the immigrant experience; even the head-butt had an instructive value. [more]

The rhythm of society

The Algerian experience as basis for Pierre Bourdieu's sociology

"The modern economy lives solely with an eye to the future. The past is something to be overcome and destroyed, the present is interesting only as the starting point of the future." [more]

In Algeria: Apprenticeship in a sociological laboratory

Pierre Bourdieu in conversation with Franz Schultheis

"I was lucky enough to witness problems of metaphysical consequence pose themselves in concrete life." Pierre Bourdieu describes how his period in Algeria informed his understanding of concepts such as work, leisure, and career. [more]

Consider the form!

Political scientist Tom Lampert in conversation with Heinz Bude and Thomas Medicus

Tom Lampert on his book One Life, eight biographies based on archive material from Nazi Germany that resist clear-cut moral and formal distinction-making. [more]

"Zu Gast bei Freunden"

How the Federal Republic of Germany learned to take sport seriously

Haunted by memories of 1936, West Germany had tried to keep politics out of sport throughout the 1950s. In 1972, however, the ideologically motivated sporting policy of the GDR prompted a return to the use of the Olympic Games for national self-projection. [more]

The vague country (Jeron al-Homos)

Here the sun is sometimes dark from all the light

The extreme location of Jeron al-Homos, situated between an Israeli army checkpoint and the "fence" around Bethlehem, lays bare the function of borders and the mechanisms of power. [more]

Bodies on the market

Mercenaries, organ trading, and a history of body history

An examination of the commodification of the body in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including slave trading and the use of mercenaries, provides a framework for a history of the body in the contemporary context of private military enterprise and organ trading. [more]

Civil society and the state monopoly on the use of force

On the interconnection of violence and civility

Civil society is often the result of state-sanctioned violence in the past. This suggests that some hard decisions must be faced regarding the stabilization of conflict-ridden regions. [more]

Not being able to stop

Richard Nixon's Vietnam policy as a paradigm for the Cold War

Why do heads of state insist on deciding conflicts through force, against the counsel of their advisors? What lies behind their unwillingness to use exit options? An analysis of the Nixon administration's conduct in Vietnam yields insights. [more]

Neighbourly relations as a resource for violence

Neighbourhoods' potential for violence can be instrumentalized by politics, be it in surveillance regimes or ethnic-national movements. A popular comic strip delivers an insight into the tensions inherent in neighbourly relations. [more]

On the dark side of history

Carlo Ginzburg talks to Trygve Riiser Gundersen

"I consider literary modernism first of all as an attempt to discover new forms of truthfulness. In that respect it is highly relevant to me as an historian." On the problems of relativism and the duty of the historian. [more]

What does genocide actually mean?

Thoughts on a problematic concept

Genocide as defined by international justice polarizes victims and perpetrators. In Rwanda, crimes were committed by Tutsis and Hutus; yet only the former are deemed victims. Does the legal definition of genocide play into the hands of power? [more]

Aligning the social

Comments on an ongoing debate

Demonized as "social bureaucracy" or used as a bulwark against global capitalism: what the modern welfare state is lacking is intellectual defence. Two recent studies fill the gap. [more]

Violence and participation

Civil society in the age of bellicosity

In nineteenth-century nation-states, social participation and organization was intimately linked to an aggressive war machinery. Any analysis of civil society must take account of this history of bellicosity. [more]

Displacement as an issue of German self-understanding

How the postwar West German state, in making the displacement of sections of the population integral to its self-definition, effectively tabooed the subject. [more]

New anti-Semitism?

Change and continuity in anti-Jewish attitudes

Klaus Holz on the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the fundamental questions it raises towards Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Zionism. [more]

The rationality of unreasonableness

Don Quijote from a psychoanalytical view

Psychoanalysts and poets alike have to restore order to a person's inner chaos and look for sense where common sense reaches its boundaries. Léon Wurmser portrays Don Quijote, the paradigm of a person in conflict, as emblematic for psychoanalysis. [more]

"Shut up or piss off!"

Neighborhoods in the Basque Provinces

The Basque conflict exemplifies the case of an ethnic conflict turned into a purely political one, where an artificially created "ethnic" divide serves specific political interests. [more]

The high noon of the welfare state

As the state is abandoning its former function of securing social cohesion, new forms of social vulnerability are emerging. [more]

Protest-chronicle

24 - 30 August 1973: "The 'gastarbeiter', the new German proletariat, revolted."

Turkish workers' protest in the Ford-factory: the first multicultural strike in Germany. [more]

Discords in the French laicity

The ban on religious symbols in French schools reveals a crisis of the laicity. [more]

Integration through attraction

Mass consumerism as cultural relationship to the world

Has mass consumerism become the ultimate integrative social tool? [more]

"Border talk," hybridity, and performativity

Cultural theory and identity in the spaces between difference

Friedman argues in this essay for a more transgressive, open understanding of the notion of hybridity within contemporary American cultural studies. [more]

International Criminal Jurisdiction

Guarantee of greater security and peace or political shadow-boxing?

Gerd Hankel on the history of the International Criminal Court. Why does the US not acknowledge the court and what are its prospects and limitations? [more]

Adorno's America

A closer look at Adorno's ambivalent relationship to his second home, America. [more]

Suicide bombings: A literature review

On the sociological, political and economical dimensions of suicide bombings. [more]

Human resources and human capital

A critique of biopolitical economics

How much are we worth and how big is the income the state generates from us? Ulrich Bröckling deals with ideas of human accountancy. [more]

Sociology as a profession

Homage to Pierre Bourdieu

On the four dimensions of social space. [more]

About the notion "Handlungsspielräume"

How would you decide? Jan Philipp Reemtsma looks at "options for action" in borderline situations. [more]

Taking Bourdieu into the field

An interview with Loïc Wacquant

On Wacquant's collaboration with Pierre Bourdieu. [more]

Post-memory, received history, and the return of the Auschwitz code

The Holocaust has been transfixed into a "code" of instantly recognizable pictures and texts. These fixed memories make it almost impossible to go beyond their discursive reign, argues Ronit Lentin. [more]

How Capitalism went Senile

Is capitalism losing its progressive dimension, turning destructive instead? Michael Hardt and Samir Amin, two of the main critics of today's capitalism, talk about the future of the system, the movements resisting it and the alternatives they propose. [more]

The Scar of Ulysses

The Wounds of the Modern and the Crisis of the Eyewitness

How can history be described adequately? Is there any space for individual psychic entities after 20th century's war trauma? Christian Schneider starts his survey with Ulysses' experiences of violence and ends with Sebastian Haffner's memories. [more]

The Limits of the Anti-Globalisation Movement

The anti-globalisation movement is so variegated that a decisive profile would be difficult to define. Wolfgang Kraushaar writes that one can, however, find one definitive aspect: its limits. [more]

Spatial relations as a major dimension of global inequalities

In the light of economic globalization and the emergence of transnational social spaces, the nation state no longer serves as a sufficient framework for studying inequality, argues Anja Weiß. [more]

A History of the Anti-Globalisation Protests

A historical background to the globalisation protests: from the first G7 meeting in Rambouillet, 1975, to the G8 in Genoa, July 2001. [more]

The Shift from a Civilian to a Wartime Society

The long-term impact on American society of Pearl Harbor is substantial, writes Bernd Greiner. The changes are grounded more in economics than in ideology. [more]

The Sociology of Islam

Georg Stauth's Islamische Kultur und moderne Gesellschaft does not deal with the principles of Islam or the goals and acts of fundamentalist Islamic groups and networks. Instead, it focuses on the ways and forms in which the modern ideas of Islam spread and circulate. Stauth's essays, says Nikola Tietze in a review written before the attacks of September 11^th, make it possible to reflect on the social consequences of a politicised Islam. [more]

Blood, Sperm and Tears

Sexual Violence in War

The societal condemnation of sexual crimes as a war-time practice is slowly growing as the victims raise the courage to speak out. [more]

Muslim Experiences

Identities between tradition and emancipation

After extensive interviews with young Muslim men, Nicola Tietze finds that their social reality is quite another from the conventional expectation of behaviour guided by religious tradition. [more]

The Search for Normality Lost

Helmut Kohl and Hans Magnus Enzensberger as two representative success-stories of postwar West Germany - one a critic, one the epitome of bourgeois "normality". On the meaning, importance and development of an "average" in West Germany. [more]

The Order of the Shapeless

The social and political construction of racism in French society

In order to analyse racism in French society, one needs to let go of the idea of a "societal crisis", Lapeyronnie writes. He says that first the social interaction that goes hand in hand with racism needs to be understood as a given societal structure. [more]

The Invisible Third Man

... [more]

The Phantom of a Homogenous Society in the German Border Regions

An Introduction in Interviews

.... [more]

Smashing Guitars

Gustav Metzger, the Concept of the auto-desctructive Work of Art and its Consequences for Rock Music

.... [more]

The Racist Albatross

Social Science, Jörg Haider and Widerstand

Racism is an inescapable part of our history, of our present and of ourselves. Only when we realise this can we also understand the role of racism in the world-system, and only then are we able to interpret the successes of the populists and the extreme right – as well as the resistance that these successes have triggered. [more]

You'll never walk alone

American war crimes in Vietnam

The reaction of politicians, the press and the army towards pictures of war crimes from Vietnam bear startling parallels to the impact of the Abu Ghraib prison pictures from Iraq. [more]

Ethnic Awakenings

... [more]

Jeder könnte, aber nicht alle können

Konturen des unternehmerischen Selbst

Vom Siegeszug des selbstständigen Unternehmertyps in der Ära des neo-liberalen Kapitalismus. [more]