Refugee Crisis and European Shame

On fences and fronts

If we had to describe the European Union’s response to the current refugee crisis with a single word, that word would be “chaos.” If we could use two words, the second word would be “shame,” necessary to refer to what European leaders and technocrats should feel upon reading the statement ...

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Refugee Crisis and European Shame

The End of Europe

The process of European unification is undergoing a deep crisis, certainly the deepest since it started at the beginning of the 1950s. In less than a year, the EU faced two major tests—first the Greek quarrel, then the refugee crisis -- that revealed its true face: a mixture of impotence, ...

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The End of Europe

The Republicans’ Trump Problem

The Republican Party has a problem. At the time I am writing (March 24, 2016), Donald Trump enjoys a clear lead in the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination. With nearly 60% (739) of the 1,237 delegates required for the nomination, more than both of his remaining opponents, Ted ...

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The Republicans’ Trump Problem

2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Rahel Jaeggi

How should we conceive of social change and moral progress? How do they come about? How are the two phenomena related to each other and how can they be evaluated—as change for the better? These are questions which have repeatedly preoccupied contemporary philosophical discussion and which seem to be indispensable for a critical ...
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2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Vision and Reality in Bernie’s Revolution

“And the children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.” (Edward Lear, 1945) A certain classic exposition on moral political thought holds that men acquire control and certainty about their world and their own existence through justice, and that humans’ knowledge of the world is inseparable from their own ...
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Vision and Reality in Bernie’s Revolution