Filosofische beschouwingen

Introduction Hannah Arendt is “popular” (i.e., recurrently appropriated, debated, and taught) across traditions that otherwise disagree about metaphysics, revelation, and the foundations of ethics. That cross-appeal is not accidental. Arendt’s project is architecturally political - concerned with the conditions under which human beings can appear to one another, speak, judge, and act together - yet it is also existential and moral, because it treats responsibility, evil, and the fragility of agency as central philosophical problems. Her work therefore lends itself to two different but compatible receptions: Christian philosophers often find in Arendt a rigorous, non-pious retrieval of theological motifs (creation, new beginning, forgiveness, neighbor-love) that can be translated into political philosophy without collapsing into confessional doctrine - precisely the kind of “publicly intelligible” grammar that political theology and Christian ethics frequently seek. Secular humanist ph...

Introduction The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (1975), authored by Michel Crozier , Samuel P. Huntington , and Joji Watanuki, is best read as a diagnostic and normative intervention into a specific conjuncture: the post-1960s expansion of participation, the multiplication of social claims on the state, stagflation and fiscal stress, and heightened interdependence across the Trilateral space. The report’s animating question is not whether democracy is intrinsically desirable, but whether democratic regimes remain governable under conditions of intensified mass mobilization and policy complexity. Its core thesis is captured in the dilemma it explicitly formulates: “The demands on democratic government grow, while the capacity of democratic government stagnates.” What follows is a (personal) philosophical reconstruction of the report’s arguments and principles, an assessment of its political impact, an identification of its u...

Abstract Benjamin Disraeli’s (1804 - 1881 CE) “ one-nation” conservatism - later also labelled “one-nationism” and, more ambiguously, “Tory democracy” - is best understood as a paternalistic and institutional form of conservative politics oriented toward preventing social fracture under conditions of industrial capitalism and democratic expansion. It combines an organic conception of society, a moralized account of hierarchy and obligation, and a pragmatic willingness to use state power for social reform so as to preserve national cohesion and constitutional institutions. This essay first reconstructs the underlying political and philosophical principles of Disraelian one-nation conservatism using primary texts and historically reliable summaries. It then develops an explicitly interpretive (not predictive) argument about what a “one-nation” orientation could mean for the European Union (EU): a shift toward solidarity-as-stability in economic governance, cohesion-as-legitimacy in terr...

Abstract In this essay I would like to argue that there is a substantive - though non-identity - relation between Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) and Renaissance civic humanism. The relation is best understood on two levels: (i) a conceptual affinity concerning the dignity of public action and the city as a space of human flourishing, and (ii) a genealogical-historiographical link insofar as later twentieth-century debates about “civic humanism” explicitly register Arendt’s reinterpretation of ancient political freedom as action. At the same time, Arendt’s account departs from core civic-humanist motifs - especially virtue-ethical and teleological notions of “the common good” - by foregrounding plurality, natality, and the fragile “space of appearance” rather than the cultivation of a unified civic character. 1. Civic humanism: a Renaissance revival of republican citizenship “Civic humanism” is widely used to denote a variant of republican political thought in which governme...

 Abstract A European Union (EU) that cannot protect itself against external coercion will struggle to secure the material and civic conditions of freedom for its citizens. From a civic republican standpoint - where liberty is understood primarily as non-domination - external vulnerability is not merely a geopolitical inconvenience; it is a structural condition that enables arbitrary interference by other powers in Europe’s public choices. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine-Russia crisis have demonstrated the multidimensional vulnerability of the European Union. This essay develops a philosophically grounded, institutionally explicit proposal for building the political, social, economic, and military foundations of a “European Security Perimeter Doctrine” or “European Anti-Coercion and Collective Defence Posture” (a “European Monroe doctrine” in a non-imperial, republican sense). It argues that the EU already possesses partial legal and policy foundations - mutual assis...