The European Union is facing new challenges, which it has to solve for its survival. In fact many of them have deeper roots and are at least partially originating in a misconception of European institutions. The economic crises 2008 accelerated the urgency for their solution. This paper focuses on three problems. First, it claims the necessity for a trans-nationalisation of the debate of social justice. Secondly, it shows that the rigid concept of a state’s sovereignty blocks the possibility to democratise the European institutions. And finally, that predominating Germany can cause the collapse of EU.
In order to understand today’s social and political situation in East-Central Europe, one should examine in particular the consequences of post-socialist transformation. The negative and often very painful effects of the social changes that affected Central and Eastern Europe over the last three decades have not been overcome until today. This makes it all the more important to be better “prepared” philosophically for future social changes. François Jullien comes up with a theoretical solution. In the first part of my paper, taking Jullien’s book The Silent Transformations as a point of departure, I show that many of the problems that still exist in East-Central Europe largely result from placing too much emphasis on the event of the revolution and too little on the transformation experienced by the region’s populations. Such “intellectual blindness” may be seen as a consequence of the dominance of the transitological approach in political and social sciences of the time, which is analyzed towards the end of the first part through (an outline of) Boris Buden’s critique. In the second and third parts, I suggest, pace Jullien, a way towards a moderate, “sober”, but nevertheless creative and productive understanding of the active agent by appealing to the work of Hans-Herbert Kögler and Fabian Heubel.
The paper aims at analysis of 'the dialectic of the Enlightenment thought'. It tries to answer the question, why many positive and constructive ideas used by societies to explain the world, and especially the social reality, often become unchangeable stereotype dogmas. The author draws on 'The Dialectic of the Enlightenment' by T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, trying to apply their principal thesis on the results of contemporary social-philosophical analyses, represented mainly by the writings of N. Fraser and A. Honeth. He also introduces various aspects of civilisation analysis (J. P. Arnason), as in considering social problematic the globalization has to be taken into account as well.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.