Featured Topics: Autumn 2025 Non-Fiction

Societies are – like hearts, economies, and ecosystems – complex dynamic systems. They cannot be entirely controlled and directed. Even well-informed interventions can trigger unpredictable and deleterious effects. For this reason, it can be difficult to imagine how a system can be escaped or fundamentally altered. For example, how should we understand the systematic interaction between broad...

What is the meaning of life? People have been asking themselves this question for millennia, and yet, in scholarly circles, it is a query that has garnered a questionable reputation: it’s too difficult and subjective, they say, too arbitrary and unserious, but more than anything else: it’s impossible to answer. In this book, at once comprehensive and accessible, philosopher Michael Zichy shows...

The division of powers is typically viewed as a principle that formalises and restricts the existing political rule through law. Christoph Möllers opposes this ultimately pre-democratic viewpoint with a concept that foregrounds the political, democracy-facilitating significance of the division of sovereign rule into three separate powers. Focussing on the central aspect of the democratic...

Though the Habsburg Empire fell apart as a state in 1918, it lives on through its music. This book explores why the Habsburg Monarchy was so productive in all spheres of culture. It was above all an empire of music, producing much of the canon of what we now call “classical” music. At the time though, this music was not old and staid but a radically new and exciting phenomenon. The Sound of...

Since the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, conspiracy theories have become an emblem of our times. As our world becomes more complex, an increasing number of people seem to be susceptible to their explanatory promises. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has turned an entire social network into a machine for circulating conspiratorial narratives. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the most powerful...

Three hundred German men determine the economic fate of the continent. Walther Rathenau wrote this sentence at the beginning of the 20th century in reference to the intricately interwoven network of...

The good has two opposites: the bad and the evil. Badness is that which deviates from its inner measure, while evil is that which negates and resists goodness. Evil is not the deviation from a measure but enmity toward the measure, counter-measure. It is to the good not as black is to white, but as non-being is to being. This opposition – the contradictory opposition – does not occur in nature....

Contemporary debates around »polarisation« are characterised by a central contradiction. While an increasing number of people are worried about an intensification of divisions in society, surveys show that the opinions of the populace are actually not diverging.

After focussing his attention on »alternative facts« in his most recent book, sociologist Nils C. Kumkar now turns his...

For thousands of German school students, rapper Ben Salomo is the first Jew they have met in their lives. For years now, the Berlin-based artist has been touring schools right throughout Germany. Every year, he holds around 150 talks in auditoriums and classrooms on trropics such as: What are Jews? What is anti-Semitism? How was it possible for the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 to occur? And...

The teacher who can’t give marks for encouragement, the doctor who treats screens instead of patients, the football referee whose judgment is squeezed out by VAR: imperceptibly, the character of...

A few years ago, hundreds of thousands of people were hitting the streets in support of ambitious climate targets. Today, the main protesters are groups who are disadvantaged by these policies: farmers, commuters, property owners. The project of an ecological transformation seems to have run out of steam.

Philipp Staab views this as the result of a profound systemic crisis. The...

Before he was re-elected, Donald Trump promised to do away with the guardrails of liberal democracy. And he was not elected despite this promise, but because of it. In their bestseller Offended Freedom, Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey showed how libertarianism and authoritarianism could meld together. Two years later, reality confirmed their sociological diagnosis in the most...