A sociodicy is a structured attempt to justify the social order in spite of its manifold injustices. Its conceptual lineage can be traced back to the notion of theodicy, or the justification of God despite the existence of evil and suffering, a...
René Girard (1923-2015) was a synthetic theorist with a singular idée fixe, a grand pattern that he could not help but see inscribed and repeated everywhere in human culture. The key elements of Girard’s philosophical anthropology are mimetic desire, mimetic...
Benedict Anderson’s seminal work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism from 1983 is one of the most important accounts of the historical rise and development of nationalism. Its basic insight and argument is that...
Iris Marion Young is one of the most important feminist philosophers of last decade of the 20th century and of the early 21st century. Her contributions within feminist political philosophy are wide ranging, although she is best known for her work on feminist...
The term autopoiesis (self-creation) is a neologism coined in 1972 by Varela and Maturana, Chilean cellular biologists and systems theorists, to describe the capacity of living cells to reproduce and organise themselves. The term was picked up and deployed by Niklas...
The Marxian concept of alienation (Entäußerung) or estrangement (Entfremdung) is one of the most discussed notions in the history of modern social and political theory. There is a long history of the term before Marx, from the giusnaturalistic and...
