Critical Concepts

---00:00 Intro01:59 Freedom and desire07:10 Spatial freedom14:17 Temporal understanding of freedom18:13 Freedom as experience of fulfilled time---The translation of "Bleibefreiheit" (The Freedom to Stay) has just been published by Polity! Check it out: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-freedom-to-stay--9781509574292---You can watch this episode on YouTube:⁠⁠https://youtu.be/gwaKNn-pG4ACritical Concepts is an independently funded project, and we want to keep all of our content freely accessible. You can support us via Patreon:⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/TheSaneSociety---The feeling of not having enough time is ever-present in our daily lives. We may not have enough time to rest, to care for our families and friends, or even to do our jobs properly. This experience is so widespread that we often accept it as a normal part of everyday life.But what if a lack of time is not only a problem for our health and relationships, but a problem of freedom itself? In this episode of Critical Concepts, philosopher and author Eva von Redecker develops a different way of thinking about freedom. Instead of understanding freedom primarily in spatial terms — as the freedom to move, to go where we want, and to overcome the limits placed in our way — she asks us to take seriously its temporal dimension. Our need for time, and more precisely for fulfilled time, can then be understood as a need for greater freedom. From this perspective, even a seemingly modest demand can become a fundamental demand for freedom: the freedom to stay.Eva von Redecker is a philosopher and freelance author whose work focuses on critical theory, feminism, and critiques of capitalism. Her 2023 book Bleibefreiheit (freedom to stay) develops the idea at the center of this episode: a conception of freedom that is not simply about movement or the absence of restrictions, but about our ability to stay, to sustain our lives over time, and to preserve the social and ecological conditions that make freedom possible.

---00:00 Intro01:35 Human made climate change05:26 Geological Agency14:15 The Anthroposcene35:20 Rethinking History52:16 Outro---The effects of the human-made climate crisis are becoming increasingly visible across the world. Heatwaves are becoming more intense, wildfires are spreading, floods are destroying homes and livelihoods, and extreme weather is affecting millions of people around the world. Extreme heat alone is already linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.But the climate crisis does more than confront us with increasingly severe disasters. It also forces us to rethink our place in the history of the planet.In today's episode, I speak with historian Dipesh Chakrabarty about what exactly makes the current climate crisis human-made, why scientists have begun to describe humanity as a geological force, and what concepts like the Anthropocene can tell us about the historical situation we find ourselves in. And finally, we ask a much broader question: What can the climate crisis teach us about human history, and about the way we understand ourselves as part of life on this planet?You can watch this episode on YouTube:⁠https://youtu.be/07DfWWchFTE⁠Critical Concepts is an independently funded project, and we want to keep all of our content freely accessible. You can support us via Patreon:⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/TheSaneSociety

Freedom is an idea that is strikingly common to the way we speak and think about the world and ourselves. We could even go so far as to claim that much of what we do in our lives is motivated by a drive for freedom. But despite the seemingly evident familiarity of this concept in everyday life and public discourse, it appears to be much more difficult to answer the question of what freedom actually is. Today’s guest, Axel Honneth, is Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and Director of the Institute for Social Research at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He claims that much of the philosophical tradition, as well as many contemporary debates, operate with a limited and deficient conception of freedom that needs to be replaced by what he calls social freedom.You can watch this episode on YouTube:https://youtu.be/07DfWWchFTECritical Concepts is an independently funded project, and we want to keep all of our content freely accessible. You can support us via Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/c/TheSaneSociety

For most people, the existence of markets appears natural. We buy our food through markets, we rent the places we live in through markets, and our work takes place within a labor market. It is often assumed that markets are a sphere of freedom, where different participants come together and exchange goods in ways that benefit everyone involved. But according to today’s guest, Bernard E. Harcourt, this idea of a harmonious and self-regulating market sphere is actually a myth. Harcourt further argues that what we often think of as unregulated market freedom in fact depends on extensive forms of regulation, policing, and coercion outside the market itself.In today’s episode, Harcourt traces the long history of this idea of market freedom and shows how what appears natural today was in fact constructed over centuries.

Despite extreme levels of inequality, poverty, and ecological destruction, capitalism remains the dominant form of organizing social life. Not only that, it seems that each of us is in some way involved in its continuation. We constantly reproduce the world we live in. Through our everyday activities and interactions we keep the existing social order going. But why? And why does it seem so difficult to simply step out of it? Marxist philosopher Søren Mau argues that the answer lies in what he calls “economic power.” When we think of power, we usually imagine forms of domination that involve coercion, violence, or ideological influence. In much of social theory, these appear in institutionalized forms through which social order is maintained and reproduced. Against this background, Mau suggests that power can also operate independently of individual intentions. It can be embedded in the ways social life is organized and operates through the relations and conditions that shape our everyday actions in the first place.