Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

The End of History and the Last Man

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

OF DISSERTATION FROM HOBBES TO HABERMAS: THE ANTI-CULTURAL TURN IN WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT The theme of this dissertation is the anti-cultural turn of Western Political Thought that has emerged out of Enlightenment thinking and was first turned into a comprehensive political idea by Thomas Hobbes. The Hobbesian worldview makes the case that human sociability and ultimately culture are the main drivers of conflict, and that the prescriptions of any political philosophy should aim to replace sociability with individuality. Beginning with an overview of psychological research into the phenomenon of culture I put forward the argument that human beings are by nature social and individualistic, but that they oscillate between their ability to put group-interests before individual interests and vice versa. Culture is the main mechanism that influences which interest we give priority. This mechanism work through emotional attachments that create intuitions about what is morally right and wrong, thereby influencing final behavioral outcomes. The Enlightenment and Thomas Hobbes viewed these emotional attachments as an insufficient or dangerous fundament for social action, leading to a philosophical approach that put rational individualism at the center of its moral matrix, diminishing the importance of the emotional attachments created by culture. These attachments are crucial for the emergence of communities and the ability to engage in collective action. Contrary to the idea of a community formation driven purely by rationality, I propose that it is the emotional part of the human psyche that enables us to create family like bonds based onb culture. In my dissertation I investigate the consequences of this reductionist view on culture, and what it can mean for societies and institutions.

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Ralph Gert Schoellhammer

Papers

From hobbes to habermas: the anti-cultural turn in western political thought