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Brazil's Supreme Federal Court issued a note of condolence on Alexy's death — an unusual gesture towards a German academic. The interesting part of the story lies elsewhere: Brazilian lawyers have spent years debating something they call 'balancing, Brazilian style', and they do not mean it as praise.
For forty years she has pressed one thesis: people cannot agree on fundamental values, and this is no defect. Democracy's job, for Mouffe, is not to bring everyone round to a single view but to turn the enemy into an adversary. Empty the political stage and the passions remain — someone else fills it.
To read Cicero merely as a 'great orator' is to miss the intellectual fight he was actually in. Long treated as the man who carried Greek philosophy into Latin, he is now read as a thinker of independent weight. His question is still open: does a republic survive on good institutions, or on good citizens?
Philosophy's centre of gravity is moving. Set the past week's calls for papers, new books, prizes and journal articles side by side and the picture is clear enough: the discipline has eight live fronts, and nearly all of them run back to the same three questions.
Look at the year's leading books together and a pattern emerges. Pollan maps consciousness; Véliz argues that prediction is an instrument of power rather than of knowledge; and Lepore puts a name to whatever is displacing the nation-state: the Artificial State.
On the opening panel of the PEN World Voices Festival, Judith Butler declined to speak about the loss of democracy: what we are mourning, she said, is a possibility that was never realised. The sentence condenses thirty years of philosophy in which identity, recognition and living together are three names for one problem.
Judith Butler
A study in Philosophy & Technology argues that contemporary visions of the digital future push democratic politics systematically aside — and sometimes propose an openly post-democratic future. The source is not a conspiracy but a contradiction inside modernity itself: autonomy set against automation.
Edward Coke died on 3 September 1634; Oliver Cromwell on 3 September 1658. One wrote that the king stands under the law; the other executed the king and failed to build a lasting order in his place. Two deaths on the same date hold the founding question of modern political philosophy from both ends.
J. G. A. Pocock changed the rules for the history of political thought. He asked not what philosophers thought but which language let them think it. His notion of 'political languages' shows that what a text can say is settled in advance — and it applies to today's arguments too.
