Politics, Society, and Values

Politics, Society, and Values

Autumn 2025

The first part of the course, grounded in the history of philosophy, explores how the concept of ideology emerged, evolved, and was contested in European thought from the French Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century. Through close readings of philosophical, political, and literary texts, we trace shifting efforts to ground truth in reason, history, or individuality—while also examining persistent anxieties about illusion, abstraction, and self-deception. From Enlightenment optimism to Marxist materialism, existential despair, and fin-de-siècle skepticism, we consider how thinkers across the turbulent nineteenth century grappled with the possibility, and the peril, of lifting the veils (in George Eliot's phrase) that shape human consciousness and political life.

The second part focuses on “political realism” as a denomination for a family of approaches to political philosophy. Apart from referring to positions in the area of international relations, the term “realism” has been increasingly used to characterize different schools of thought critical of the liberal view of politics in general. In this case, it is associated to a reconsideration of the relation between normative principles and facts, and to the reevaluation of the relation between political theory and morality. After an examination of Bernard Williams’ and Raymond Geuss’ contributions to realism in political philosophy, we turn to authors representing the so-called “left-Nietzschean” and agonistic views of the political, such as William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe.

The third part of the course centers on the information borne infrastructure, the information market ruled the by attention economy and the democratic ramifications of this complex. Public space has always been considered a pillar of liberal democracy. Nowadays, public space is not so much a physical venue as it is an information borne infrastructure on private hands – on private hands. Were you to ask Kant, Rosseau, Montesquieu and the rest of the thinkers of the Enlightenment whether public space should be on private hands, they would answer with a sounding no and deem such an idea an oxymoron. In many ways this is situation of the 21^st century with social platforms taking over the function of public space. What are the consequences for liberal democracy and how does this development feed into what has recently been labelled techno-feudalism, which is as remote from liberal democracy as one could possibly get. Yours truly Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and the rest of the tech-bros.