Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory最新文献

{"title":"Claus Offe (1940–2025): A Tribute to His Academic Work and His Role as a Political Intellectual","authors":"Tine Stein","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p>It is a gift when scholars are able to live out their powerful inner drive for intensive and creative academic work over the course of a long life. Due to his work as a member of parliament, Alexis de Tocqueville was unable to devote himself entirely to the project of a new political science for the new political world he had seen in the USA, and he also died at the age of only 54. Max Weber is known to have struggled with illness throughout his life and died in the midst of his work on the sociological outline of economy and society at the age of 56 as a result of the Spanish flu, and Theodor W. Adorno, who lived to the age of 66, experienced his life existentially overshadowed by National Socialism, from which he had to flee.</p><p>When Claus Offe returned to Frankfurt's Goethe University, one of his first places of work, for the Adorno Lecture in 2003 and devoted a lengthy study to these three scholars and their views on the USA, entitled “Self-reflection from a distance. Tocqueville, Weber, and Adorno in the United States,” Offe was already over 60 years old and could look back on almost four decades of intensive academic work, work which was to be followed by further productive decades (Offe <span>2004</span>). Claus Offe was able to develop his productive powers over the course of a long life, benefitting from production conditions that facilitated his pursuits: his razor-sharp mind, his powers of observation and judgment, his seemingly inexhaustible energy for reading and writing, his photographic memory for what he had once read, his intellectual curiosity in discussions, and his consistently respectful and friendly interest even in positions he did not share. The result is an oeuvre that is exceptional, if not unique, in the social sciences—above all because of his ability to combine intelligent empirical observations with theoretical analysis and, despite his skepticism about their relationship, ultimately derive concrete options for change from them.</p><p>In the spirit of integrated social science, Claus Offe brought together the often conflicting perspectives of sociology and political science because, for him, this was a natural consequence of the subject matter of both disciplines: the social and political reality of society and its developments, which needed to be analyzed and explained. And what an array of issues he insightfully examined: the structural change of the state in late capitalism, the politicization of interests in democracy, the transformation of gainful employment and the conditions of social security in the welfare state, the transformation of formerly socialist states into capitalist democracies, the socio-moral competencies of citizenship, the legitimacy problems of the European Union and, at the same time, the inevitability of the European Union, the state's ability or inability to solve practical challenges, under the rubric of “state capacity,” and, finally, the analysis of fundamental concepts such as tru","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 2","pages":"155-162"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What About Eco-Populism? A Neglected Historical Tradition","authors":"Federico Tarragoni","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A few years ago, Stéphane Foucart (<span>2010</span>), a science journalist at <i>Le Monde</i>, published a book entitled <i>Le populisme climatique. Claude Allègre et Cie, enquête sur les ennemis de la science</i>. Focusing on the climate skeptics Claude Allègre and Vincent Courtillot, respectively, a renowned geochemist (and former French Minister of Education) and a geophysicist, the book denounced an instrumentalization of geosciences which it described as “climate populism.” Allègre and Courtillot sought to invalidate global warming theories not on the basis of solid scientific arguments but rather using a simplifying rhetoric: hence the use of the term “populism.” By using it as a synonym for demagoguery, the book summed up one of the main problems of what is now widely labeled as “green” or “climate” populism, that is, the relationship to the environment of <i>everything</i> we call, vaguely and indiscriminately, “populism.”</p><p>Alongside the semantic inflation of the term “populism,” it is increasingly difficult to know what exactly it means in terms of environmental agenda. As many studies on the extreme right's political discourse have shown, these parties have a very weak relationship with the environment, either because of their climate skepticism (Lockwood and Lockwood <span>2022</span>) or because their environmental concern is conditional to a productivist agenda, and thus largely opportunistic (Caiani and Lubarda <span>2024</span>). The extreme right's green agenda seems empty enough to raise serious questions about the relevance of a concept that should specifically qualify its environmental philosophy. It is true that in some cases, identity claims are justified by environmental protection. This “climate nationalism” defends nature only for the “homeland citizen” (Forchtner and Kølvraa <span>2015</span>; Koutnik <span>2021</span>; Audikana and Kaufmann <span>2022</span>), while adopting a patriotic stance of “environmental conservation” opposed to climate and energy transition policies (De Nadal <span>2022</span>). But this more ideologically consistent approach to the environment is still marginal on the extreme right, whose attitude to the “green” remains essentially negative, dismissive, or instrumental (Schwörer and Fernández-Garcia <span>2023</span>).</p><p>To increase confusion, this “green populism” can also refer to those who criticize the extreme right's climate skepticism. Like a chameleon, it can change sides by attacking the allegedly demagogic, simplifying and punitive nature of green policies. Thus, the Spanish far right (Vox) has described the left-wing government's plan to give legal personality to the Mar Menor as an “eco-populism” (Fuchs <span>2023</span>). Furthermore, the most influential theories define environmental populism as an antielite style, “including ecological concepts” and going “beyond traditional left-right ideologies” (Fu <span>2025</span>, 2–3). As such, the concept reflects the uses of i","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"62-71"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147563216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deliberating the End of the World: The Rise of the Climate Citizen Assembly and the Transformation of Government","authors":"Amnon Lev","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70036","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"54-61"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147565284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Radical Pluralization: Mobilizing the Multiple Self in Democratic Engagements","authors":"Hans Asenbaum, Taina Meriluoto","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Pluralism is one of the defining features of democracy. This is a position shared by liberal pluralists, who argue for a multiplicity of interests, ideas, and ideologies (Dahl <span>1971</span>); feminist democrats who advocate for a diversity of embodied identities and lived experiences (Mansbridge <span>1999</span>; Phillips <span>1995</span>; Young <span>2000</span>); and agonists, who situate an ethos of pluralization at the heart of a contentious public sphere (Connolly <span>1995</span>). Although coming from different (liberal, phenomenological, and constructivist) ontologies, all of these theories of democratic pluralism run into the same dilemma. Upon observing the emerging pluralism in the colonially nascent United States, Alexis de Tocqueville (<span>2003</span> [1835]) was among the first to note that although diverse interest and identity groups foster democratic pluralism, they at the same time require the submission of members to dominant group identities. Being identified along certain corporeal and cultural markers entails essentialism and confines the freedom to express the multiple self. Iris Marion Young (<span>1989</span>) later termed this phenomenon “the dilemma of difference.”</p><p>In this article, we offer a way forward by introducing the concept of <i>radical pluralization</i>. We follow the trend of an ever more sensitive understanding of pluralism through democratic theory from the liberal pluralism of interests to the feminist pluralism of identities and finally the agonistic de- and reconstruction of group identities. This trend of pluralization, however, comes to a halt at the level of the individual democratic subject. Where theories of democratic pluralism fall short, then, is in their understanding and appreciation of the plurality <i>within</i> the subject. As early as 1986, democratic theorist Jon Elster published an edited volume on <i>The Multiple Self</i>, which proposes making sense of the subject as composed of multiple, competing parts: reasons, emotions, desires, and affects, with subjects fulfilling diverse social roles in diverse contexts and growing and changing over time (Elster <span>1986</span>). More recently, Hubert Hermans (<span>2020</span>) proposes an <i>Inner Democracy</i> of multiple competing and cooperating aspects within ourselves. If we take this analysis seriously, democratic pluralism needs to acknowledge and, indeed, set free this inner multiplicity. This is what we call radical pluralization. As a practice, radical pluralism takes the form of the deliberate display of the plurality of the self for political aims. For democratic theory, this means extending the value of plurality to the internal configuration of the democratic subject and finding ways to cherish and sustain living this inner multiplicity.</p><p>As our review assembling liberal, feminist, multicultural, and agonistic democratic theory demonstrates, our understanding of democracy is expansive. Instead of defining d","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"130-141"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147567769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"No Justice, No Peace: The Ethics of Violent Protests","authors":"William E. Scheuerman","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70027","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"144-145"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147568085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between Deliberation and Interpretation: Social Movements’ Democratic Rationalities in Legal Discourse","authors":"Diego Alonso Ramírez Pérez","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Scholarship on democratization often reduces social movements’ legal engagement to deliberative rationality, obscuring how transformation operates through distinct yet complementary procedural logics. This article argues that movements democratize law through <i>dual-track engagement</i>: Political deliberation universalizes moral demands via communicative rationality, whereas legal interpretation determines indeterminate norms through self-reflective juridical reasoning. These processes generate rights through formal procedures that transform constitutional meanings irreducible to deliberative consensus alone. Democratic legitimacy thus derives not from institutional success but from juridification—maintaining three conditions that enable complementary navigation: <i>communicative translation</i> preserving deliberative genesis throughout legal formalization; <i>functional differentiation</i> sustaining both rationalities’ autonomous character; and <i>identity preservation</i> preventing organizational absorption into system logic. Chile's student movement (2011–2022) validates this framework through paradigmatic contrast: The same actors successfully constitutionalized education as a social right (2011–2016) when navigating dual rationalities as an organized movement yet failed catastrophically in constitutionalizing comprehensive social rights (2019–2022) despite wielding maximum institutional power—holding the presidency, ministries, and the Constitutional Convention. Progressive institutionalization colonized operational capacity, transforming navigational practices through instrumental rationality that supplanted communicative foundations. Citizens rejected the resulting progressive constitution by 62%, despite its substantive embodiment of the movement's historical demands. This analysis advances democratic theory by operationalizing the conditions distinguishing juridification from colonization, revealing that movements’ transformative capacity depends not on institutional access or progressive ambitions, but on specific organizational configurations that preserve communicative rationality through complementary procedures.</p>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"115-129"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147564512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interstitial Dynamism in the Open Society","authors":"Otto Lehto,&nbsp;Kaveh Pourvand","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"91-102"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147570238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imagination in Critical Theory: Utopia, Ideology, Aesthetics","authors":"Markus Gante","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70009","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the role of imagination in critical theory, addressing its conceptual ambiguity and its synthesis of three distinct but interrelated strands. The first, rooted in Freud's theory, sees imagination as wish-fulfillment—necessarily unreal yet foundational to utopian thought. The second strand addresses the ideological corruption of imagination, a concern central to early critical theory's sociological inquiries. The third draws from Kant's influential view of imagination as a mediator between sensibility and understanding, linking it to aesthetic forms of liberation. The article argues that the ideological erosion of imagination manifests less as its corruption than as a diminishment of imaginative capacity itself, positioning imagination as inherently resilient but weakened under certain social conditions. Section 2 traces this view to Freud's influence and its adoption in Marcuse's early work. Section 3 examines ideological dimensions more closely, using <i>the authoritarian personality</i> as a primary reference. Section 4 discusses the aesthetic imagination as a counterforce that amplifies the capacity for envisioning better futures. In Section 5, the article outlines the strengths of this integrative approach: It brings together diverse conceptual strands and reinterprets ideology as a continuum rather than a strict binary. Yet, a central concern remains—the conception of imagination as inherently incorruptible, grounded in Freud's notion of it as a “nature reserve” within the human psyche, resistant to external reality's pressures. The article concludes by proposing a defense of this position.</p>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"25-34"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The World After Gaza: A History","authors":"A. Dirk Moses","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"142-143"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147568061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Climate Anxiety as a Form of Sanity: Erich Fromm in the Age of Climate Crisis","authors":"Rudy Leal McCormack","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"44-53"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147570224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}