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Muslim, ex-Muslim as well as converted Muslim intellectuals are increasingly prominent figures in the West European far-right movement. By analysing their publications and online presence, we observe that concepts utilized by Muslim-background intellectuals popular in the German far right build on two seemingly contradictory tropes of German national identity—rationality and spirituality—and a civilizationism that oscillates between notions of rational liberalism and an illiberalism based on spiritualism. As these intellectuals combine the tropes of German nationhood and European civilisation, the far right builds connections with the growing Muslim demographic in Germany. The movement provides space for a variety of Muslim-background intellectuals: those who embrace a secular-liberal self-description emphasize how rationalism is synonymous with Germanness, while those who embrace a religious self-description critique liberal rationalism as lacking spirit. In so doing, Muslim public intellectuals help the far right to simultaneously spiritualize national reason and rationalize national spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Catholic Enlightenment, long ignored by scholarship, has been brought sharply into focus by numerous recent publications. After surveying some leading features of the Catholic Enlightenment, this essay considers a useful Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe and a study of Enlightenment in the intellectual and social lives of German Benedictines. Some of this research suggests that German historiography shows a Protestant bias which needs to be corrected by greater attention to the Catholic contribution to intellectual and political debates. Biographical studies of Catholic Enlightenment figures raise the question of where to draw the boundary between tradition and Enlightenment, while a wide-ranging and challenging study by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, argues against the secularization thesis by claiming that certain Catholic, Protestant and Jewish figures of the eighteenth century found a tenable compromise between tradition and Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1914 the dispute about scientific value judgments in economics reached its climax. In the 1960s it was followed by the positivist dispute in German sociology. In both controversies one party pretended to provide ethical knowledge and questioned the distinction between what is and what should be. In 1961, at a conference of the German Sociological Association, Karl Popper and Theodor W. Adorno gave lectures on “the Logic of the Social Sciences”. While Popper tried to contribute to methodology, Adorno pleaded for a dialectical philosophy of society. In 1963 Jürgen Habermas criticized Popper’s contribution and Hans Albert made a counterplea. At this time Habermas assumed that critical theory, i.e. neomarxist dialectical theory of society, provided ethical knowledge. Instead of seriously defending this assumption he attacked the self-understanding of the empirical social sciences, in particular the idea of the value freedom of research. Albert showed that Habermas’ criticism of the methodology of Popper’s critical rationalism was completely untenable. So the positivist dispute was not a scientific dispute. Nevertheless Habermas’ version of a critical theory of society was politically immensely influential. It provided the illusion that leftist political programs could be known to be ethically right. In 1981 Habermas admitted that his critical theory was due to ‘confusions in fundamental concepts’. Meanwhile he had proposed a consensus theory of the rightness of norms and his ethics of discourse. Both proved to be untenable as well. Finally Habermas turned to religion and advocated the political influence of religious organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the bureaucratisation of education and rationalisation of society in Germany. Topics discussed include social theory for analysis of social processes, the connection of legitimacy and domination with society and bureaucracy and consequences of human action related to education. Also mentions several extract by Max Weber on bureaucracy and education.

The article discusses psychological aspects of antisemitism in Germany between the two world wars. The author highlights the juxtaposition in German antisemitic thinking of an allegedly excessive Jewish rationalism with alleged German sentimentalism and openness to emotions, focusing in particular on the works of philosopher Ludwig Klages and psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Issues considered include the relationship between philosophy and nationalism, the idea of the soul and of the unconscious, and philosophical debates about the interpretation of the doctrines of National Socialism.

The article examines German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's views on the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. According to the author, Adorno's early work "Dialectic of Enlightenment" strongly criticized Kant and his influence on rationalism and fascism. However, the author also analyzes Adorno's positive assessment of Kant's approaches to areas such as his epistemology, moral philosophy, and aesthetic theory following World War II.

The article presents re-examining of the idea of critical theory by political theorist Nikolas Kompridis. It offers information about Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory that refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. It further mentions Kompridis literary work "Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future" which discuses the limitation of German sociologist Juergen Habermas's proceduralist model of critical theory.

The article discusses theologian Emanuel Hirsch and his relationship with the Nazi party in Germany. According to the author, Hirsch's ambivalence towards the idea of intellectual freedom may have led to his support of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. It is suggested that while he believed strongly in intellectual freedom, he was concerned that without the limits and restraints that Hitler imposed it would lead to unchecked rationalism, secularism, and chaos. Details on Hirsch's attitude towards World War I and the Weimar Republic are presented. Other topics include theologian Søren Kierkegaard, modernity, and Hirsch's attitude towards Jews.

In modern continental thought, natural science is widely portrayed as an exclusively instrumental mode of reason. The breadth of this consensus has partly preempted the question of how it came to persuade. The process of persuasion, as it played out in Germany, can be explored by reconstructing the intellectual exchanges among three twentieth-century theorists of science, Heidegger, Habermas, and Werner Heisenberg. Taking an iconic Heisenberg as a kind of limiting case of “the scientist,” Heidegger and Habermas each found themselves driven to place new constraints on their previously more capacious assessments of science, especially its capacity to reflect on its method. Tracing how that happened, through archival and historical contextualization and close readings of their texts, lets us make visible Heidegger and Habermas’s intellectual affinities and argumentative parallels, which derived not only from their shared grounding in earlier reactions against positivism, but also from confrontation with contemporary events. The latter included, for Heidegger, the rise of a technically powerful science exemplified by nuclear physics, and for Habermas, post-World War II controversies over science, technology, and their socially critical possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre- and post-agreement discourses are an integral part of international relations. Yet, they only matter sometimes as an empirical analysis of European judicial discourses shows. State of the art Habermasisan and social psychology approaches on effective arguing cannot sufficiently explain variation in the success of discourses. This requires a fine-grained perspective: Only if actors share yardsticks fitting to the issue at stake, they can commonly assess the quality of arguments and incrementally develop a consensus. If such issue-specific reference standards are absent, actors talk at cross-purposes and dissent prevails. The article empirically illustrates the importance of intersubjective validity for the effectiveness of discourses and tests its central claim against alternative constructivist and rationalist explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory of World War I had a decisive influence on the formation of German nationalism in the years preceding the rise of National Socialism. Analyzing popular German films of the 1920s, this article suggests that despite the significant postwar nation-building process, the bourgeois culture of the Weimar Republic also endeavored to utilize memories of war experiences in order to undermine nationalism and to contemplate an alternative, transnational framework for collective identity. Focusing on two films—Leo Lasko's pseudo-documentary Weltkrieg (1927/28) and Richard Oswald's fictional Dr. Bessels Verwandlung (1927)—the article examines the ways they presented the war as an inevitable outcome of nationalism, implying that rationalism and subjectivity, the fundamental concepts of the Enlightenment, can be obtained only through an alternative, non-nationalist perception of collective identity. The contemporary reactions to these films show that these ideas, although repressed and forgotten after January 1933, were not exceptional to German bourgeois society in the Weimar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If it is to become a more widely used resource at the present time, when the demand is growing for explanations of the predicament of modern western society in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001 and various similar subsequent events around the globe, classical sociology might pay more attention than it usually does to a particular set of early modern developments. These developments, it is argued here, actually created the form of the social that became large-scale modern western society. This new form of the social was and remains distinct from those older forms that were seen to flow from the natural sociality of human beings. Between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th the new form of the social emerged in different parts of Europe, contingently but not entirely accidentally, as a separate domain of relatively safe and free human interaction. It was a consequence - in part intended, in part unintended - of different bids to secure civil peace in times of extreme inter-communal, inter-confessional violence. These bids included, to name just three measures: the development of new forms of public law, especially in Germany; the development of the absolutist state, especially in France; and the separation of private religious conscience from public legal conscience, especially in England. As they were all, in one way or another, steps towards stemming, stopping, and/or preventing the flow of blood caused by religious hatreds, they are here called early modern limiting measures, and the social at the centre of the article is sometimes called the limited social or limited society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an essay on Immanuel Kant's "Prolegomena" which is derived from notes, fully written out and distributed by John Niemayer Findlay in his Boston University on "Great Philosophers" in 1978. The expository is aimed at beginning students of philosophy reading Kant's "Prolegomena" for the first time. In this article, Kant emerges as a relatively unemancipated child of German rationalism, working within the framework of ideas established by Christian Wolff and Wolfgang Baumgarten.

The author looks into Scheler's philosophy of war as stated in his work The Genius of War. In the context of Germany during World War One, Scheler polemicized with various interpretations of the essence and the nature of war, particularly with those that reduce wars to economic or sociological roots, and claimed that the spiritual drive behind the "real" war was only to increase power. The war for him is part of the human nature, but not as a mere struggle for survival but as the struggle for power that maximally exalts, expands and deepens the common and indivisible values of our moral consciousness. The author argues that Scheler's intention is to glorify war, counter to Kant's universalism and rationalism. He is particularly dismissive of Kant's idea of "eternal peace" and all that is linked with cosmopolitanism and pacifism. The author concludes that Scheler's philosophy is self-delusional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are international institutions designed in one way and not another? Using the European security and defence policy (ESDP) as a case study, this article suggests that the social representations dominating the national and organizational world of institution-makers are key to our understanding the shape and content of an emerging institution of international security cooperation. A focus on social representations, which are the product of institutional practices, helps to break the interest/idea dichotomy that underpins most theories of preference formation when they try to explain institutional designs. This article shows that foreign and defence policy-makers from France, Germany and the United Kingdom have shaped ESDP by projecting their respective social representations, notably with regard to the role of the state, the nature of security challenges and the purpose of their organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the expressions of enlightened consciousness in German-speaking world confirm the extent to which the enlightened Zeitgeist found its way into the common round of sociability and domesticity. The period of the Enlightenment in the German-speaking world is commonly reckoned as running from approximately 1720 to some time shortly after 1800. The term 'Aufklärung' is not simply a retrospective nomenclature, but was used at the time as a way of designating principles formulated relative to education and human emancipation. Different authors speak of ' 'Aufklärung' in different contexts. This indicates that the notion of Enlightenment is not simply externally imposed by historians, but reflects the self-consciousness of the age. That individuals of that period, without a clear theoretical programme, should reflect and further promote this Zeitgeist is hardly remarkable. Evidences also suggest the extent to which the higher theoretical purposes are in evidence in people's daily lives, in salons, reading circles, and in common domestic practice. Furthermore, it is clear that this spirit of Enlightenment moves easily, fluidly, almost seamlessly, into the remoter aspects of cultivated social interaction: in gesture, drama, rhetoric, and manners.

Focuses on the politics of spirit between German philosophers Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Assessment of the implicit conflict of Adorno with Benjamin; Argument that Adorno's thinking falls between the anti and post-Marxist Leftist thoughts, between enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, between rationality and progress; Orientation of the central idea of the dialectic of enlightenment not only towards the counter-revolution and the holistic rationalism but also against the counter-enlightenment of the Left.

The German Sonderweg in constitutional matters was the repression of popular sovereignty. The Staatswillenspositivismus ("statuary positivism") of the German constitutional theory from Laband to Jellinek never developed any idea of a parliamentarism that rules all state power. The Weimar discussion and mentality was deeply shadowed by the old priority of the will of the state over the will of the people. Even the legal positivism that now made the case for the new democratic constitution, was deeply influenced by elitist ideas of parliamentarism and distrust against the people. Only Hans Kelsen and some leftist disciples of Carl Schmitt consequently took the radically democratic track of input-legitimation. But this position, that once was the basic idea of French and American constitutionalism in the 18th Century, was in Weimar a hopeless minority, and it seems to become marginal again in the times of postnational legal regimes which are fixed to output-legitimation only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the question of whether there is a growing process of rationalization underlying drug policy and drug treatment, in the sense of the “McDonaldization” thesis established by Ritzer (2000). Taking Germany as an example, there is some evidence that endeavors to achieve enhanced efficiency may actually lead to a lack of rationality. Here we explore the historical background of this McDonaldization process as it relates to drug policy and treatment in Germany. Is it possible to escape from the “irrationality of rationality,” that is, the intense efforts directed at efficiency in drug treatment? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a history of German sociology. The 1961 Tagung der deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (Conference of the German Society of Sociology) in Tübingen, Germany became the venue for the popular sociological and philosophical debate known as the Positivist Dispute between Critical Rationalists and the Frankfurt school.

This paper explores the origins of the terms ‘ethnography’, ‘ethnology’, ‘Volkskunde’. ‘Völkerkunde’, and ‘NaturvöIker’. These ‘ethnos-terms’, which stress human cultural diversity over the fundamental units of mankind were coined by a group of mutually known scholars in the late 18th-century Germany. This paper argues that they came out of the special German brand of Enlightenment rather than from Preromanticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis of this paper is that fourteenth century German mystics administered psychotherapy to fourteenth century German merchants, thereby aiding the efforts of the merchants to rationalize commerce and society. The argument runs that the merchants' emphasis on economic rationalism violated traditional values of the Church and of medieval society in general. Since the Church an d the associated social order were perceived as controlling every man's chances for salvation, the merchants felt anxious and guilty about their rationalist tendencies, and were therefore tempted to dilute them. Another solution, however, was to continue the rationalism but to seek therapy for the anxiety and guilt that it evoked. Mystic-monks were among those who provided such therapy. Analyses and speculations are offered regarding the symbolism that goaded the therapy forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the fully developed "rationalistic" and "irrationalistic" thought and action patterns in the German culture. "Rationalism" and "irrationalism" are vague terms themselves. They are used here to designate a set of psychologically related thought and action patterns. Thus certain "advanced" modes of thought and behavior may be called "rationalistic," while "archaic" modes of thought and action may be called "irrationalistic." In German culture, fully developed "rationalistic" and "irrationalistic" thought and action patterns were rather strikingly found side by side. Positive science," "objectivity," "sober realism" was highly valued. In German scientific discussion, one often-encountered high preoccupation with the terms employed, the methods of investigation to be applied, etc. There was a tendency to be elaborate on definitions, which were very frequently regarded as true or false rather than convenient or inconvenient. One factor contributing to the "anti-logical" aspect of German "irrationalism" is the pervasive presence of "unresolved contradictions" in widespread German character structures.

The article reports on a March 2010 conference at the Interdisciplinary Center for Research of the European Enlightenment held in Halle an der Saale, Germany. The meeting was titled "Enlightenment and Esoterism - Paths Into the Modern," and it focused on such topics as the integration of Enlightenment rationality with esotericist currents and occult sciences.