Keine Macht der Moral!

Is politics moral? Not at all, says Norbert Bolz. It may be ideological, a battlefield of conflicting interests - but good and bad are not facts here, but at best a matter of negotiation. In his new essay, the controversial philosopher and media scholar therefore calls for the emancipation of politics from morality, thus placing himself in the tradition of the reason of state from Machiavelli to Max Weber. Bolz criticises the rhetoric of protest movements and NGOs, whose weapon is the emotionalisation and moralisation of political issues and whose contempt is for realpolitik. The politicisation of all areas of life and the accompanying moralisation of all politics leads to the de-differentiation of our social relations. Looking at the (theoretical) history of our Western democracies from Aristotle to Machiavelli and Hobbes to Rousseau and Schmitt, Bolz traces the development of the relationship between politics and morality. The author thus ties in with his essay "The Avant-garde of Fear" and gives his considerations there a theoretical superstructure.