Politics & Society

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It is telling that Marx once more occupies an important and positive place in Habermas’s story. Once harshly criticized in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, by Also a History of Philosophy Marx is promoted to being the Enlightenment figure par excellence, the thinker who singularly restored reason’s vital critical, even revolutionary, power. One saw glimpses of Habermas […]

Det är inte bara den faktiska inkomstutvecklingen som gjort att de ekonomiska klyftorna i Sverige ökat, även skattesystemet och skattepolitiken har bidragit till utvecklingen. När skatterna har sänkts mer för dem med högre inkomster har de fått en starkare inkomstutveckling efter skatt jämfört med grupper som inte fått del av skattesänkningarna. Skattesatsen har sjunkit betydligt […]

Beneath the civic ideal of taxation as a collective, equitable endeavour lies an entrenched hypocrisy: the architecture of modern tax codes serves not the public good but the consolidation of private wealth. The progressivity of income tax is hollowed out at the uppermost tiers, where income is largely derived from capital — taxed at preferential […]

. It would indeed have been far better if the Trump loyalist Mark Rutte — instead of devoutly praising someone who persistently undermines the alliance — had told his genocidal maniac, ‘daddy,’ one or two home truths …

I sin biografi om Habermas skriver Felsch att han under den intervju han gjorde med Habermas bara några få år före hans bortgång blev undervisad om ”det dystra scenariot om Västs successiva nedgång” (2024:186) och att han nu såg allt det som han hade stått för under hela sitt liv gå förlorat. Och Felsch fortsätter: […]

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As Habermas sees it, then, the issue between him and Foucault concerns their respective stances vis-a-vis modernity. Habermas locates his own stance in the tradition of dialectical social criticism that runs from Marx to the Frankfurt school. This tradition analyzes modernization as a two-sided historical process and insists that although Enlightenment rationality dissolved premodern forms […]

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Foucault writes as though he were oblivious to the existence of the whole body of Weberian social theory with its careful distinctions between such notions as authority, force, violence, domination, and legitimation. Phenomena that are capable of being distinguished through such concepts are simply lumped together under his catchall concept of power. As a consequence, […]