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[...] culture is no longer just an exception, a kind of fragile superstructure rising above the 'real' economic infrastructure, but, more and more, a central ingredient of our mainstream 'real' economy. More than a decade ago, Jeremy Rifkin designated this new stage in our economy 'cultural capital…

[...] what happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for, say, racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to draw the conclusion that emancipatory politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic procedures of legitimization. No, people quite often do not know what they wa…

[...] The usual Left-liberal critique of the EU--it's basically OK, just with something of a 'democratic deficit'--betrays the same naivety as the critics of ex-Communist countries who basically supported them while complaining about the lack of democracy. In both cases, however, these friendly cri…

With regard to the refugees, our proper aim should be to try and reconstruct global society on such a basis that desperate refugees will no be forced to wander around. Utopian as it my appear, this large-scale solution is the only realist one, and the display of altruistic virtues ultimately preven…

[...] Think about daily life in Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon ... where are the outpourings of international solidarity in the face of constant atrocities perpetrated there? We should remember now that we live in a kind of glasshouse, in which terrorist violence for the most part exist…