The concept of ‘post-truth’ has existed for a while, but after the Oxford dictionary named it ‘word of the year’ in 2016, it has permeated public and academic debates. Since then, it has become synonymous with the populist threat to the liberal-democratic order. The concept points to the impression that we are entering an age of decay in which the achievements of modernity—objectivity, science, rationality, and democracy—are being gradually replaced by emotionality, agnotology, irrat

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Somehow it has been known all along: economic and social inequality is growing. But somehow this too had to be written down in black and white in detail, including perhaps a number of good reasons for its lawlike quality and future resilience. This was the achievement of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, highlighted by its notorious basic formula ‘r>g’. As it turned out the formula tried in a contentious way to put the inequality threat into a nutshell. Not to be mislead by a c

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According to the classics of social theory—Durkheim, Weber, Parsons—social order cannot be based on individual utility seeking and external power, but requires ‘normative integration’. Even for large parts of the social sciences today it seems to be almost self-evident that social norms are the very ‘cement of society’ (Elster). The underlying assumption is that essential building blocks of social order in the form of individual cooperation, collective action and political governance

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Three years after its foundation, in 1981, this journal presented a contribution by Richard Rorty in German translation, which was republished as ‘Philosophy in America Today’ in another journal the same year and included in Rorty’s first article selection Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). A lively debate on the article and Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) ensued and drew a lengthy ‘Reply to six critics’ from Rorty. These diversified and historically symptomatic re

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