Unterdrückung durch Beglückung

What is a democracy, and when is it liberal? Is politics legitimate if it corresponds to popular sovereignty or human rights? What can and what should we expect from politics, and what is politics at all? In this book, Ulrich Steinvorth seeks new answers to these pressing questions in the current political climate. Starting from Aldous Huxley's fable "Brave New World," which describes a society where a minority manipulates the majority through technical means to the extent that they perceive their oppression as happiness and accept human rights violations, Steinvorth raises the fundamental question of what politics or the political actually is. He distinguishes the economic model, which is oriented towards the social contract and utility maximization, from the political model, which is not oriented towards utility maximization, as the two most important theoretical propositions in political theory. He critiques the economic model in its presumably strongest form, namely as presented by John Rawls. Rawls demands that politics protect the self-respect of all, which can only be provided by self-governing sub-societies, just as Locke demanded the protection of the self-governing family and economy. The protection of self-governing social spheres is also found as a political goal in Hegel and, in a form that can be expanded and applied to given political tasks, in Max Weber. Steinvorth's book uses Weber's spheres of values, drawing on such diverse authors as Aristotle and Csikszentmihalyi, as the foundation of his political theory.