Focus: The Continuing Relevance of Beauvoir
 | 2023 (45) Issue 2 A plea for Beauvoir’s timeliness today has to assert itself in a field that has become confusing, both in terms of gender relations in Western societies and in the face of the diversity of feminisms. With regard to the real role of women, among many people there is an apologetic understanding that gender equality may not have been achieved but ‘is well on its way’ or ‘improvements have been made.’ Aggressive demonstrations against male supremacy, still remembered by some from the 1960s |
Focus: Democracy under Polarization
 | 2023 (45) Issue 1 According to a conflict-conscious conception of democracy, polarization is part of its essence. According to this ‘agonistic’ conception of democracy, polarization means that the political positions of values and interests can never merge consensually into one another but remain in opposition in order to struggle persistently and continuously for political power within a democratic framework. The ‘polarization’ currently in dispute as a new threat to democracy, on the other hand, is mean |
Focus: Ukraine and Political Realism
 | 2022 (44) Issue 2 It is an issue of debate as to which side did more to breathe new life into political realism within the menu of international relations theories: whether or not Putin’s war has been effective against Ukraine, or John Mearsheimer’s accusation that, since 2014 at the latest, ‘the West’ would be responsible for a war. Certainly, the Russian invasion in terms of its style, propaganda and accompanying drama looks as though its initiators tried to enact the most straightforward, brutal and si |
Focus: The Social Bases of Political Theory
 | 2022 (44) Issue 1 |
Focus: Post-truth and Democracy
 | 2021 (43) Issue 2 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 |
Focus: Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology
 | 2021 (43) Issue 1 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 |