Dirk Schuck | University of Erfurt (original) (raw)

Books by Dirk Schuck

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliograp... more Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliographische Daten sind im Internet über ‹http://portal.dnb.de› abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-7873-3630-2 ISBN eBook: 978-3-7873-3631-9 www.meiner.de © Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 2019. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Dies gilt auch für Vervielfältigungen, Übertragungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen, soweit es nicht § § 53 und 54 UrhG ausdrücklich gestatten. Satz: 3W+P GmbH, Rimpar. Druck und Bindung: Strauss, Mörlenbach. Werkdruckpapier: alterungsbeständig nach ANSI-Norm resp. DIN-ISO 9706, hergestellt aus 100% chlorfrei gebleichtem Zellstoff. Printed in Germany.

Ich bin stumpf, ich unterwerfe mich meinem Schicksal ohne Widerwillen und ohne Neigung; ich fühle... more Ich bin stumpf, ich unterwerfe mich meinem Schicksal ohne Widerwillen und ohne Neigung; ich fühle, daß die Notwendigkeit mich zwingt, und ich überlasse mich ihr. Ach! Ehrwürdige Mutter, ich empfinde nichts von jener süßen Freude, von jener Melancholie, von jener sanften Unruhe, die ich zuweilen an denen bemerkt habe, die da angelangt waren, wo ich jetzt bin. Ich bin wirklich dumm, ich kann nicht einmal weinen. Man will es, es muß sein; das ist der einzige Gedanke, den ich fassen kann…" Denis Diderot, Die Nonne 3 Einleitung 5

Drafts by Dirk Schuck

In this article, I want to show the crucial role London as a social environment played in the Bur... more In this article, I want to show the crucial role London as a social environment played in the Burke-Wollstonecraft-Debate. For reasons specific to the Protestant-humanist development of early modern England, London at the time is a hot-bed for political radicalism. Starting as a political dispute about the meaning of the French revolution, the Burke-Wollstonecraft-Debate soon developed into a dispute about whether Britain shall move into the direction of a democracy. Burke's argument against democracy is based on his view that the majority of the people easily become a dangerous mob, and therefore, if allowed sovereignty, are rather a threat to liberty than its democratic guarantor. Remarkably, the topic of the mob as being uncontrollable if it is allowed a voice as a whole people is also central to his speeches as an MP in the House of Commons, which are concerned with the social control of the London mob. Wollstonecraft counters Burke's anti-democratic line of argument by claiming that the true mob is the elite, because the mob is everyone who does not contribute to the common good. Seeing the mob as the elite is a strong theme in London popular culture at the time, especially in the works of William Hogarth and John Gay. The problems the City of London had with governing crowds, are exemplarily shown by the decision of city administrators to not punish political dissent with standing in the pillory anymore, because the pillory allowed the mob an active role in the punishment, and therefore, led to the mob taking action in favor of political dissenters, who were put in the pillory, the most famous example of is Daniel Defoe. As the active integration of the mob into city politics failed, punishment moved into the direction of just quietening dissent by imprisonment. However, the democratic theme of giving ordinary people a voice remained strong in London popular culture.

In this draft, I outline a parallel between more pessimist strands in Western early liberal and c... more In this draft, I outline a parallel between more pessimist strands in Western early liberal and classic Confucian thought. Both traditions argue that a despotic rule by fear is virtually self-destructive as a sustainable political order. Likewise, in both traditions the internalization of social virtue is regarded as a means to avoid such moral disintegration.

In his "Second Discourse", Rousseau for the first time uses the concept of "identification" in a ... more In his "Second Discourse", Rousseau for the first time uses the concept of "identification" in a psychological sense. Although this has been noted by several commentators, what has generally been overlooked is that the aim of "identification" in Rousseau is radically different from the later common psychological usage of the term. Rousseau uses "identification" in the sense of rebuildung a connection of men with nature, whereas "identification" later typically refers to a connection between an individual and its social community. This initial turn in the meaning of "identification" can be exemplarily shown in Smith's immanent critique of Rousseau.

This paper assumes two opposing notions of self-liberation in early liberal thought: the one is a... more This paper assumes two opposing notions of self-liberation in early liberal thought: the one is a philosophical doctrine of enlightened self-love, and the other a counter-enlightenment approach to liberate individual desire.

Many contemporaries, even of those who adored reading The Spirit of the Laws like Johann Gottfrie... more Many contemporaries, even of those who adored reading The Spirit of the Laws like Johann Gottfried Herder, took the book to need to be read like a general reference work about the political history of human societies as such. Indeed, one can use it in an encyclopedic way, by searching for specific recurrent topics in chapter-titles like inheritance laws in different types of societies, or domestic slavery, meaning primarily the situation of married women, of whose rights Montesquieu is an early modern advocate. In the French historical tradition, Montesquieu is often seen as a founding father of historical comparative sociology, which in a certain sense makes it understandable that his magnum opus tends to unravel a little. However, in this article, I want to suggest an alternative reading of The Spirit of the Laws. As Montesquieu claims himself repeatedly in the first three books, I want to understand The Spirit of the Laws primarily as a history of government. My specific claim is that in this history of government, one can identify two opposing poles as how to govern humans: either by self-denial, or by self-empowerment.

My main thesis in regard to the historical debate about the US-constitution is that on both sides... more My main thesis in regard to the historical debate about the US-constitution is that on both sides of the debate, what comes to be seen as the most potent force to undermine the constitution, can be understood as (what today is mostly called) populism. The Federalists, as well as the Anti-Federalists, build their argument against the background of perceiving an imminent threat to republican liberty from within the political realm. This threat, in Early Modern republican debate, is called the tyranny of the majority. In political philosophy, it derives from Aristotle’s concept of tyrannical democracy. A tyrannical democracy is a democracy that, willingly, destabilizes its own institutional arrangement, resolving into tyranny. For this to happen, a majority of the population must abandon democratic values. Both, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, see this scenario as the most dangerous threat to their envisaged republican order. They disagree, however, on how to build up that order, and how to secure it against the imminent threat of populism.

Colloquium Papers by Dirk Schuck

Talk in Berlin in April 2018 about Mary Wollstonecraft's reaction to Edmund Burke's view on the F... more Talk in Berlin in April 2018 about Mary Wollstonecraft's reaction to Edmund Burke's view on the French revolution with special regard to their underlying conflict about democracy

Vortrag in Leipzig im Mai 2017 über Bernard Stieglers Begriff der Psychomacht der Globalisierung ... more Vortrag in Leipzig im Mai 2017 über Bernard Stieglers Begriff der Psychomacht der Globalisierung im Verhältnis zu Montesquieus Vorstellung des Geists der Gesetze

Editions by Dirk Schuck

Bringing together perspectives from the fields of religious studies, history, philosophy, history... more Bringing together perspectives from the fields of religious studies, history, philosophy, history of law, economics, and sociology, this volume analyzes practices of relating to landed property in Europe and North America as a means of both centering and destabilizing property claims. How is space conceived and constituted via historical and religious claims to landed property? How is dispossession enacted and theorized in changing property orders? Engaging postcolonial critiques of landed property, this volume’s twelve contributions provide much-needed contextualization of ways in which the histories of divine property, empire, settler-colonialism, slavery, and Indigenous disappropriation inform contemporary practices of landed property. This book will contribute significantly to bridging theory and practice in critiques of contemporary property orders in Europe and North America, providing methodological inspiration for grounding theoretical discussions in nuanced understanding of the past.

Deutsche Neuausgabe von John Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Mit biographischer und ge... more Deutsche Neuausgabe von John Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Mit biographischer und gesellschaftsgeschichtlicher Einleitung. https://meiner.de/gedanken-uber-erziehung.html

Reviews by Dirk Schuck

Zeitschrift für philosophische Literatur, 2020

Review of Dirk Quadflieg, Vom Geist der Sache: zur Kritik der Verdinglichung (in German). https:/... more Review of Dirk Quadflieg, Vom Geist der Sache: zur Kritik der Verdinglichung (in German). https://zfphl.org/article/view/36184

Conference Papers by Dirk Schuck

Presentation at VIU Conference on Republicanism, Venice, May 4th, 2019

Vortrag auf der Konferenz des Minerva-Instituts Tel Aviv und des Van-Leer-Instituts Jerusalem: Tr... more Vortrag auf der Konferenz des Minerva-Instituts Tel Aviv und des Van-Leer-Instituts Jerusalem: Truth and Atrocities in the Age of Journalism: International Karl Kraus Symposium, November 2011, Tel Aviv.

In my talk, I want to approach the phenomena of self-chosen aloneness, or conscious social isolat... more In my talk, I want to approach the phenomena of self-chosen aloneness, or conscious social isolation from a specific angle. I want to ask in how far this phenomena can serve as a social indicator of a societal order being in jeopardy. A classic viewpoint on this-a viewpoint which, remarkably, exists in ancient Western and Eastern thought-claims an interdependence of widespread aloneness, or self-chosen social isolation, and the social decay of a virtuous order. According to this line of reasoning, if a society's moral order is in decline, this society tends to disintegrate, and people tend to isolate themselves from each other. I want to, however, give a slight dialectical twist to this argument. My claim is that one can also imagine a society in which people deliberately choose aloneness or isolate themselves from others because the moral pressure put on them is too high. For this, one needs to take into account a difference between "ideology" and "reality."

Peer-Reviewed Articles by Dirk Schuck

Philosophy and Global Affairs, 2024

This article is concerned with the normative power of cultural values within Chinese-European rel... more This article is concerned with the normative power of cultural values within Chinese-European relations. It proposes that dialogue between European and Chinese stakeholders within educational, cultural, sociological, and philosophical institutions is of the utmost importance in paving a possible way for overcoming the current political crisis. European engagement with Chinese thought in early modernity and the recent reception of early Western liberalism in China both show that there is potential for a non-exclusionary assessment of the "other" in both political cultures. European policy should be aware of its historic potential for critical engagement with Chinese political history.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2024

A central aim of the original Bologna Declaration in 1999 was to give the opportunity of advancem... more A central aim of the original Bologna Declaration in 1999 was to give the opportunity of advancement in education to every European citizen. According to the Declaration, this goal is worth achieving not simply in order to provide better-qualified workers within the European Union, rather, the aim of higher education within the European Union is understood in a holistic sense as a prerequisite for the composition of a well-functioning European civil society. How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? In this article, we propose that the core capability at stake is that of empathy which, for this reason, should be central to programmes of European higher education. Empathy is not regarded as just a property of specific individuals but as an attribute which must be ascribed to specific forms of civil intercourse. Therefore, what is needed in European higher education is the provision of a social environment for students which allows for civil-cultivation, and for processes of self-cultivation. Self-cultivation, as described here, means more than a refinement of manners; rather, it refers to the development of a civil mode for approaching others: a mode that is sensitive and self-aware at the same time, and which can be regarded as arising out of a shared European heritage interconnecting rhetoric and sociability.

The Adam Smith Review, 2023

There is a difference in the social thought of David Hume and Adam Smith regarding their notion o... more There is a difference in the social thought of David Hume and Adam Smith regarding their notion of compassion. While Hume bases social morality in the ability to sympathize with a concrete other, that is first-order-compassion, Smith is sceptical that these immediate kinds of sympathetic affection can be an adequate basis for social justice. He therefore develops his model of the impartial spectator as a social super-ego that should govern our moral sentiments. The impartial spectator then allows for second-order-compassion, which is a compassion of a higher order that only allows fellow-feeling with those who really deserve it. Although this Smithian notion of second-order-compassion comes out of a strong critique of the sentimentalist idea of subjectivity, it partly dismisses the importance of first-order-compassion for social stability. (For citation, please refer to the published version which is identical in text but has different page numbers: 10.4324/9781003359395-7).

Blog Posts by Dirk Schuck

Kritisches Denken im Plural (Blog)

Antwort auf Philipp Sarasin, ob und wie sich die aktuelle Covid19-Pandemie mit Foucaultschen Denk... more Antwort auf Philipp Sarasin, ob und wie sich die aktuelle Covid19-Pandemie mit Foucaultschen Denkfiguren verstehen lässt. https://krit.hypotheses.org/1061

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliograp... more Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliographische Daten sind im Internet über ‹http://portal.dnb.de› abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-7873-3630-2 ISBN eBook: 978-3-7873-3631-9 www.meiner.de © Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 2019. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Dies gilt auch für Vervielfältigungen, Übertragungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen, soweit es nicht § § 53 und 54 UrhG ausdrücklich gestatten. Satz: 3W+P GmbH, Rimpar. Druck und Bindung: Strauss, Mörlenbach. Werkdruckpapier: alterungsbeständig nach ANSI-Norm resp. DIN-ISO 9706, hergestellt aus 100% chlorfrei gebleichtem Zellstoff. Printed in Germany.

Ich bin stumpf, ich unterwerfe mich meinem Schicksal ohne Widerwillen und ohne Neigung; ich fühle... more Ich bin stumpf, ich unterwerfe mich meinem Schicksal ohne Widerwillen und ohne Neigung; ich fühle, daß die Notwendigkeit mich zwingt, und ich überlasse mich ihr. Ach! Ehrwürdige Mutter, ich empfinde nichts von jener süßen Freude, von jener Melancholie, von jener sanften Unruhe, die ich zuweilen an denen bemerkt habe, die da angelangt waren, wo ich jetzt bin. Ich bin wirklich dumm, ich kann nicht einmal weinen. Man will es, es muß sein; das ist der einzige Gedanke, den ich fassen kann…" Denis Diderot, Die Nonne 3 Einleitung 5

In this article, I want to show the crucial role London as a social environment played in the Bur... more In this article, I want to show the crucial role London as a social environment played in the Burke-Wollstonecraft-Debate. For reasons specific to the Protestant-humanist development of early modern England, London at the time is a hot-bed for political radicalism. Starting as a political dispute about the meaning of the French revolution, the Burke-Wollstonecraft-Debate soon developed into a dispute about whether Britain shall move into the direction of a democracy. Burke's argument against democracy is based on his view that the majority of the people easily become a dangerous mob, and therefore, if allowed sovereignty, are rather a threat to liberty than its democratic guarantor. Remarkably, the topic of the mob as being uncontrollable if it is allowed a voice as a whole people is also central to his speeches as an MP in the House of Commons, which are concerned with the social control of the London mob. Wollstonecraft counters Burke's anti-democratic line of argument by claiming that the true mob is the elite, because the mob is everyone who does not contribute to the common good. Seeing the mob as the elite is a strong theme in London popular culture at the time, especially in the works of William Hogarth and John Gay. The problems the City of London had with governing crowds, are exemplarily shown by the decision of city administrators to not punish political dissent with standing in the pillory anymore, because the pillory allowed the mob an active role in the punishment, and therefore, led to the mob taking action in favor of political dissenters, who were put in the pillory, the most famous example of is Daniel Defoe. As the active integration of the mob into city politics failed, punishment moved into the direction of just quietening dissent by imprisonment. However, the democratic theme of giving ordinary people a voice remained strong in London popular culture.

In this draft, I outline a parallel between more pessimist strands in Western early liberal and c... more In this draft, I outline a parallel between more pessimist strands in Western early liberal and classic Confucian thought. Both traditions argue that a despotic rule by fear is virtually self-destructive as a sustainable political order. Likewise, in both traditions the internalization of social virtue is regarded as a means to avoid such moral disintegration.

In his "Second Discourse", Rousseau for the first time uses the concept of "identification" in a ... more In his "Second Discourse", Rousseau for the first time uses the concept of "identification" in a psychological sense. Although this has been noted by several commentators, what has generally been overlooked is that the aim of "identification" in Rousseau is radically different from the later common psychological usage of the term. Rousseau uses "identification" in the sense of rebuildung a connection of men with nature, whereas "identification" later typically refers to a connection between an individual and its social community. This initial turn in the meaning of "identification" can be exemplarily shown in Smith's immanent critique of Rousseau.

This paper assumes two opposing notions of self-liberation in early liberal thought: the one is a... more This paper assumes two opposing notions of self-liberation in early liberal thought: the one is a philosophical doctrine of enlightened self-love, and the other a counter-enlightenment approach to liberate individual desire.

Many contemporaries, even of those who adored reading The Spirit of the Laws like Johann Gottfrie... more Many contemporaries, even of those who adored reading The Spirit of the Laws like Johann Gottfried Herder, took the book to need to be read like a general reference work about the political history of human societies as such. Indeed, one can use it in an encyclopedic way, by searching for specific recurrent topics in chapter-titles like inheritance laws in different types of societies, or domestic slavery, meaning primarily the situation of married women, of whose rights Montesquieu is an early modern advocate. In the French historical tradition, Montesquieu is often seen as a founding father of historical comparative sociology, which in a certain sense makes it understandable that his magnum opus tends to unravel a little. However, in this article, I want to suggest an alternative reading of The Spirit of the Laws. As Montesquieu claims himself repeatedly in the first three books, I want to understand The Spirit of the Laws primarily as a history of government. My specific claim is that in this history of government, one can identify two opposing poles as how to govern humans: either by self-denial, or by self-empowerment.

My main thesis in regard to the historical debate about the US-constitution is that on both sides... more My main thesis in regard to the historical debate about the US-constitution is that on both sides of the debate, what comes to be seen as the most potent force to undermine the constitution, can be understood as (what today is mostly called) populism. The Federalists, as well as the Anti-Federalists, build their argument against the background of perceiving an imminent threat to republican liberty from within the political realm. This threat, in Early Modern republican debate, is called the tyranny of the majority. In political philosophy, it derives from Aristotle’s concept of tyrannical democracy. A tyrannical democracy is a democracy that, willingly, destabilizes its own institutional arrangement, resolving into tyranny. For this to happen, a majority of the population must abandon democratic values. Both, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, see this scenario as the most dangerous threat to their envisaged republican order. They disagree, however, on how to build up that order, and how to secure it against the imminent threat of populism.

Talk in Berlin in April 2018 about Mary Wollstonecraft's reaction to Edmund Burke's view on the F... more Talk in Berlin in April 2018 about Mary Wollstonecraft's reaction to Edmund Burke's view on the French revolution with special regard to their underlying conflict about democracy

Vortrag in Leipzig im Mai 2017 über Bernard Stieglers Begriff der Psychomacht der Globalisierung ... more Vortrag in Leipzig im Mai 2017 über Bernard Stieglers Begriff der Psychomacht der Globalisierung im Verhältnis zu Montesquieus Vorstellung des Geists der Gesetze

Bringing together perspectives from the fields of religious studies, history, philosophy, history... more Bringing together perspectives from the fields of religious studies, history, philosophy, history of law, economics, and sociology, this volume analyzes practices of relating to landed property in Europe and North America as a means of both centering and destabilizing property claims. How is space conceived and constituted via historical and religious claims to landed property? How is dispossession enacted and theorized in changing property orders? Engaging postcolonial critiques of landed property, this volume’s twelve contributions provide much-needed contextualization of ways in which the histories of divine property, empire, settler-colonialism, slavery, and Indigenous disappropriation inform contemporary practices of landed property. This book will contribute significantly to bridging theory and practice in critiques of contemporary property orders in Europe and North America, providing methodological inspiration for grounding theoretical discussions in nuanced understanding of the past.

Deutsche Neuausgabe von John Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Mit biographischer und ge... more Deutsche Neuausgabe von John Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Mit biographischer und gesellschaftsgeschichtlicher Einleitung. https://meiner.de/gedanken-uber-erziehung.html

Zeitschrift für philosophische Literatur, 2020

Review of Dirk Quadflieg, Vom Geist der Sache: zur Kritik der Verdinglichung (in German). https:/... more Review of Dirk Quadflieg, Vom Geist der Sache: zur Kritik der Verdinglichung (in German). https://zfphl.org/article/view/36184

Presentation at VIU Conference on Republicanism, Venice, May 4th, 2019

Vortrag auf der Konferenz des Minerva-Instituts Tel Aviv und des Van-Leer-Instituts Jerusalem: Tr... more Vortrag auf der Konferenz des Minerva-Instituts Tel Aviv und des Van-Leer-Instituts Jerusalem: Truth and Atrocities in the Age of Journalism: International Karl Kraus Symposium, November 2011, Tel Aviv.

In my talk, I want to approach the phenomena of self-chosen aloneness, or conscious social isolat... more In my talk, I want to approach the phenomena of self-chosen aloneness, or conscious social isolation from a specific angle. I want to ask in how far this phenomena can serve as a social indicator of a societal order being in jeopardy. A classic viewpoint on this-a viewpoint which, remarkably, exists in ancient Western and Eastern thought-claims an interdependence of widespread aloneness, or self-chosen social isolation, and the social decay of a virtuous order. According to this line of reasoning, if a society's moral order is in decline, this society tends to disintegrate, and people tend to isolate themselves from each other. I want to, however, give a slight dialectical twist to this argument. My claim is that one can also imagine a society in which people deliberately choose aloneness or isolate themselves from others because the moral pressure put on them is too high. For this, one needs to take into account a difference between "ideology" and "reality."

Philosophy and Global Affairs, 2024

This article is concerned with the normative power of cultural values within Chinese-European rel... more This article is concerned with the normative power of cultural values within Chinese-European relations. It proposes that dialogue between European and Chinese stakeholders within educational, cultural, sociological, and philosophical institutions is of the utmost importance in paving a possible way for overcoming the current political crisis. European engagement with Chinese thought in early modernity and the recent reception of early Western liberalism in China both show that there is potential for a non-exclusionary assessment of the "other" in both political cultures. European policy should be aware of its historic potential for critical engagement with Chinese political history.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2024

A central aim of the original Bologna Declaration in 1999 was to give the opportunity of advancem... more A central aim of the original Bologna Declaration in 1999 was to give the opportunity of advancement in education to every European citizen. According to the Declaration, this goal is worth achieving not simply in order to provide better-qualified workers within the European Union, rather, the aim of higher education within the European Union is understood in a holistic sense as a prerequisite for the composition of a well-functioning European civil society. How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? In this article, we propose that the core capability at stake is that of empathy which, for this reason, should be central to programmes of European higher education. Empathy is not regarded as just a property of specific individuals but as an attribute which must be ascribed to specific forms of civil intercourse. Therefore, what is needed in European higher education is the provision of a social environment for students which allows for civil-cultivation, and for processes of self-cultivation. Self-cultivation, as described here, means more than a refinement of manners; rather, it refers to the development of a civil mode for approaching others: a mode that is sensitive and self-aware at the same time, and which can be regarded as arising out of a shared European heritage interconnecting rhetoric and sociability.

The Adam Smith Review, 2023

There is a difference in the social thought of David Hume and Adam Smith regarding their notion o... more There is a difference in the social thought of David Hume and Adam Smith regarding their notion of compassion. While Hume bases social morality in the ability to sympathize with a concrete other, that is first-order-compassion, Smith is sceptical that these immediate kinds of sympathetic affection can be an adequate basis for social justice. He therefore develops his model of the impartial spectator as a social super-ego that should govern our moral sentiments. The impartial spectator then allows for second-order-compassion, which is a compassion of a higher order that only allows fellow-feeling with those who really deserve it. Although this Smithian notion of second-order-compassion comes out of a strong critique of the sentimentalist idea of subjectivity, it partly dismisses the importance of first-order-compassion for social stability. (For citation, please refer to the published version which is identical in text but has different page numbers: 10.4324/9781003359395-7).

Kritisches Denken im Plural (Blog)

Antwort auf Philipp Sarasin, ob und wie sich die aktuelle Covid19-Pandemie mit Foucaultschen Denk... more Antwort auf Philipp Sarasin, ob und wie sich die aktuelle Covid19-Pandemie mit Foucaultschen Denkfiguren verstehen lässt. https://krit.hypotheses.org/1061

Zerrbilder. Zum Wirken und Fortwirken nationalsozialistischer Mentalität, 2024

Dieser Artikel leistet einen Beitrag zur politischen Genealogie von Sittlichkeitsempfindungen: Er... more Dieser Artikel leistet einen Beitrag zur politischen Genealogie von Sittlichkeitsempfindungen: Er verdeutlicht zunächst, dass auch die bürgerliche Moralphilosophie das Gefühl einer bewussten Verweigerung des Mitgefühls gegenüber Einzelnen kennt, und zeigt diese moralphilosophische Figuration als eine sozialpsychologische Vorstufe nationalsozialistisch-eliminatorischer Moralitätsvorstellungen. Dabei vertritt der Artikel die These, dass die psychosoziale Identifikation mit einer derart verstandenen Sittengemeinschaft die intrapsychische Voraussetzung zur Eliminationsbereitschaft im Namen des »Volkskörpers« bildet.

Relating to Landed Property. Campus: Frankfurt am Main/New York, 2024

This article is concerned with Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. I... more This article is concerned with Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. In the late eighteenth century, Crèvecoeur formulates a colonial agrarian utopia, which is built on the idea that landed property owned by individual settlers is the sole basis for individual economic subsistence and political freedom alike. By analyzing Crèvecoeur's flawed critique of slavery, it shows how a legitimation of settler colonialism in the name of early modern republicanism and a specific critique of feudal domination went hand in hand in the early modern European mindset. Crèvecoeur's at the time immensely popular book is analyzed not as an early plea for American democracy, but rather as a melancholic critique of an emerging commercialization of the social in the name of agrarian romanticism.

The Sociological Heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment (ed. Tamás Demeter). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024

My argument in this essay will be that, even if we do not accept Hegel’s metaphysical claim that ... more My argument in this essay will be that, even if we do not accept Hegel’s metaphysical claim that human history must be read as a manifestation of the human spirit becoming aware of itself, we still need to recognize the creative power by which the human mind can narrate its own history as an essential part of a philosophy of history which seeks human emancipation. This telos is the Enlightenment’s shared pathos, and today we are in urgent need of such a narrative once again. This might help to explain the ongoing fascination with the Scottish Enlightenment’s historical speculations regarding the economic, political and social forces which drive human progress.

Geschichte und Gegenwart der Erziehungsphilosophie, 2023

Ohne Zweifel hat Lockes Erziehungslehre einen historischen Bruch mit vorherigen adligen Führungsi... more Ohne Zweifel hat Lockes Erziehungslehre einen historischen Bruch mit vorherigen adligen Führungsidealen eingeleitet. Dies lässt sich allein schon daran ablesen, dass sie im 19. Jahrhundert von Herbart und anderen umstandslos als bürgerliche Erziehungstheorie gelesen werden konnte. Diese Lesart übergeht so aber die Zäsur, die sie bedeutete und die darin zu sehen ist, dass die Führungsfigur des Lockeschen ‚Gentleman‘ sensibler Natur ist, d. h., durch und mit der ‚Geselligkeit‘ regiert. Zweifellos war auch der Höfling (courtier) kultiviert, doch bei Locke wird die Befähigung zur Einfühlung in andere – Empathie – nicht nur zum eigentlichen Geheimnis der Erziehungsmethode, sondern auch des gesellschaftlichen Fortkommens des ‚Gentleman‘ an sich. (Bitte für Zitate auf die veröffentlichte Fassung zurückgreifen: 10.1007/978-3-662-67561-8_3).

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Jun 13, 2024