Filosofische beschouwingen

Introduction The transition from Europe’s inherited prosperity model to a renewed prosperity model constitutes an existential litmus test because it asks whether Europe can preserve the moral substance of its post-war social contract under conditions that have rendered that contract materially, geopolitically, and institutionally fragile. The issue is not merely whether Europe can grow faster, innovate more efficiently, or decarbonise more cheaply. The deeper question is whether the European political form can still justify itself: whether it can reconcile market dynamism with social protection, ecological constraint with industrial renewal, and democratic legitimacy with supranational governance. If the transition fails, Europe risks becoming a region of high expectations and declining capacity, where welfare promises outstrip productive foundations and political solidarity fragments into national, regional, and generational resentment. If it succeeds, the European model may demonstra...

Inleiding De economische ondergang van 'Belgique à papa' en van Wallonië (Zuid-België) in de twintigste eeuw was geen louter conjuncturele neergang, maar een structurele regimecrisis: een negentiende-eeuws model van steenkool, staal, binnenlandse industriële bekkens, Franstalige bestuurlijke dominantie en gecentraliseerde besluitvorming verloor zijn economische en politieke draagvlak. De bedreiging voor Vlaanderen (Noord-België) en België in de eenentwintigste eeuw is analoog, maar niet identiek: niet de uitputting van steenkool, maar een fiscale-demografische-productieve klem van vergrijzing, hoge tekorten, zwakke productiviteitsgroei, krappe arbeidsmarkten en verlies aan concurrentiekracht. 1. Belgique à papa als politiek-economisch regime De uitdrukking 'La Belgique à papa' verwijst niet alleen naar nostalgie, maar naar een historisch regime: een unitaire Belgische staat waarin Frans sociaal, cultureel en economisch dominant was, en waarin de centrale instellingen gr...

Introduction The deepest philosophical explanation of much of modern political and cultural life is not simply that “postmodernism rejected truth.” A more precise account is that, from the nineteenth century onward, a series of philosophical revolutions historicized reason, politicized institutions, socialized the subject, and made power central to knowledge, morality, law, and identity . The result was a transition from the Enlightenment image of society as a rational order of free individuals under neutral institutions toward a post-Enlightenment image of society as a field of historically produced identities, hegemonic meanings, exclusions, and conflicts over recognition, memory, and power. This development should not be reduced to one author or one ideology. It is a genealogy: Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Louis Pierre Althusser, Simone de Be...

Introduction A defensible philosophical case for modernism and the Enlightenment need not deny the crimes, exclusions, and ideological distortions committed under the banners of reason, science, civilization, or progress. Such denial would itself be philosophically weak. The stronger defense is fallibilist rather than triumphalist: modernity’s central achievements - objective inquiry, public reason, individual rights, constitutional government, scientific method, and universal moral criticism - are not infallible doctrines but self-correcting instruments. They are precisely the tools by which societies can expose domination, revise error, criticize inherited authority, and expand the circle of moral concern. Postmodernism has performed a genuine service by exposing the ways in which knowledge claims can be entangled with institutions, disciplinary practices, class interests, colonial power, gender hierarchy, and linguistic framing. Jean-François Lyotard’s famous characterization of the...