Apropos Gegenwart #4

Liberalism has fallen into disrepute. It is often seen as no more than an elite attitude, as the exclusive culture of the beneficiaries of globalisation. How could this happen? Has liberalism always been something propagated by arrogant, hypocritical moralisers? Jan-Werner Müller, professor of political thought at the University of Princeton, shows how and why these ideas – surprisingly – gained acceptance after the end of the Cold War. In his award-winning book "Fear and Freedom", Jan-Werner Müller calls for a revival of the ideal of political freedom. He calls for a new, different kind of liberalism based on the idea of a life without fear and dependencies, which allows anti-discrimination policies to be redefined as social security, instead of playing them off against one another again and again to no avail.

In German

This series is brought to you by the RD Foundation Vienna – for a strong civil society deeply rooted in human rights.

Isolde Charim

Isolde Charim was born in Vienna and studied philosophy in Vienna and Berlin. For many years she was a lecturer at the Faculty for Philosophy at the University of Vienna with a focus on theory of ideology. She works as a freelance journalist and writes regular op-eds for taz daily newspaper and FALTER weekly magazine. Publications (selection): Lebensmodell Diaspora. Über moderne Nomaden (Diaspora as a Way of Life. On Modern Nomads) (co-editor together with Gertraud Auer. transcript, Bielefeld 2012). In early 2018 Zsolnay Verlag published her work Ich und die Anderen. Wie die neue Pluralisierung uns alle verändert (I and the Others. How the New Pluralisation Changes Us All), for which she received the Philosophical Book Prize in 2018. That same year, a new edition of Der Althusser Effekt. Entwurf einer Ideologietheorie (The Althusser Effect. Attempt at a Theory of Ideology) was published by Passagen Verlag with a preface by Chantal Mouffe.
Since 2007 Charim has been a scientific curator at the Bruno Kreisky Forum. In 2016 she presented the Radio Ö1 summer lecture Ich und die Anderen. Philosophische Betrachtungen über das Leben in einer pluralisierten Gesellschaft (ORF CD), and since 2017 she has been curating the series Politics and Emotion (Radiokulturhaus and Ö1). As of the 2019-20 season, each month Isolde Charim and Sasha Marianna Salzmann take it in turns to host the Apropos Gegenwart talks at the Kasino.

Each month, the Viennese philosopher Isolde Charim and the Berlin author Sasha Marianna Salzmann take it in turns to hold an engaging conversation with a prestigious guest from the world of literature, journalism or philosophy. What’s the idea? Straight talking on current social issues.