Marietta Auer, “Aporien moderner Entscheidungsfreiheit: Liberales Paradoxon und digital konditioniertes Subjekt” / “Aporias of Modern Freedom of Choice: Liberal paradox and the Digitally Conditioned Subject”
Thursday, 20 June 2024, 19:15 CET
Senatssaal of Humboldt University
Unter den Linden 6
10117 Berlin
GERMANY
With Michael Kämper-van den Boogaart
Sponsored by:
The Mosse Foundation
Institut für deutsche Literatur
Humboldt University
Mosse Lectures
Lecture Overview: The lecture sheds light on the drama of collective decision-making in the liberal democracies of the West from two perspectives. On the one hand, it has been increasingly apparent for some time that consensus on common values and interests can no longer be reached on fundamental questions of coexistence. This is not a new phenomenon, but rather the classic »liberal paradox«: liberal democracies have no overriding decision-making rule to establish a consensus on the subject of political consensus. It is therefore no coincidence that problems such as »How much freedom for the enemies of freedom?« characterize public discourse. On the other hand, it is precisely these fundamental decision-making problems of liberal democracies that are experiencing a fatal self-reinforcement in the echo chambers of the Internet. Today, collective decision-making processes no longer suffer only from the incommensurability of individual self-designs, but rather from the digital conditioning of public discourse, which can no longer fulfill its function as a forum of collective rationality. Digitally conditioned subjects contribute to undermining the institutions of liberal society and increasing the explosive force of the liberal paradox.
Marietta Auer: Legal scholar, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory; from 2013-2020 Professor of Civil Law and Philosophy of Law at Justus Liebig University Giessen; Auer was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation in 2022; her work and research focuses on private law and the multidisciplinary foundations of law, the sociological and philosophical history of ideas of private law, the theory of private law and the legal doctrine of civil law; her most recent publication is the volume »Zum Erkenntnisziel der Rechtstheorie«.
