Political Philosophy

Brussels proposes an EU-wide age limit for social media and a ban on profiling feeds for minors

The European Commission's KIDS Act, presented in Strasbourg on 17 September, would bar under-13s from social media, confine 13- and 14-year-olds to parent-managed accounts, switch off profiling-based recommender feeds for everyone under 18 and shift the burden of proof onto platforms. It reopens a question Mill thought he had closed.

Seyla Benhabib awarded the Karl Jaspers Prize for her philosophy and her public voice

Heidelberg University, its Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the city have named Seyla Benhabib the 2026 laureate of the 25,000-euro Karl Jaspers Prize, citing a life's work on justice, rights and migration and a voice raised, in the jury's words, 'against the evil spirit of an age'. The ceremony is on 29 April 2027.

Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt

Beardsley, Hayek and the day meaning slipped its author

On 18 September 1944 the University of Chicago Press published The Road to Serfdom in an edition of 2,000 copies. On 18 September 1985 Monroe Beardsley died. Between them they left two arguments that order and meaning need no single authorising mind — and the same date supplies the objections.

Monroe Beardsley, F. H. Bradley

Karl Popper's demarcation line failed; his open society did not

Thirty-two years after his death, Karl Popper survives in two places: the science classroom, where falsifiability is a slogan the philosophy of science abandoned decades ago, and the political argument, where the open society and the paradox of tolerance are more alive, and more misquoted, than ever.

Karl Popper

AI and the public sphere: who authors the decisions made in your name

The argument about artificial intelligence and democracy is usually run as a question of benefit and harm. The harder question is authorship. Arendt, Habermas, Foucault, Rousseau, Marx and Norbert Wiener each supply a piece of it, and the 2026 research supplies some awkward facts.

Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Norbert Wiener

Compute, chips and the responsibility gap: artificial intelligence as geopolitics

The contest over artificial intelligence is a contest over fabrication capacity, electricity and refined minerals. Hobbes explains why states cannot trust one another about it; Kant explains why the answer was never a world government. Both run out at the same place: a killing with no author.

Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant

Popper, Searle and Hildegard: who vouches for what we claim to know

Karl Popper died on 17 September 1994, John Searle on the same date in 2025, Hildegard of Bingen in 1179. Thirty-nine men signed a constitution in Philadelphia on the day in 1787. Each answered the same question differently: when someone claims to know, who or what stands behind the claim?

John Searle, Karl Popper

The word problem: five political books and the vocabulary of the authoritarian turn

Susan Neiman wants the word 'evil' back. Byung-Chul Han wants 'respect'. Žižek and Butler think the words on offer are traps. Habermas, in a volume finished before his death, denied that anything was lost. The year's other book list, read as one argument.

Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, Susan Neiman

Althusser's theory of ideology has outlived the Marxism it defended

Louis Althusser built the concept of interpellation to protect a scientific reading of 'Capital'. The science was abandoned; the street scene went everywhere. A reckoning with what survives, what does not, and the killing that the profession spent forty years learning how to describe.

Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Louis Althusser