Explore every episode of the podcast Critical Concepts

00:00 Intro

01:05 Wealth is highly unequal today

03:41 The creation of ownership

08:58 Coding Capital

16:29 The masters of the code

19:21 Capital in a global economy

32:39 Financialization

37:00 Outro

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You can watch this episode on YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/mCTsZtrCSIQ⁠

TheSaneSociety is independent and self-funded. If you want to help us continue producing Critical Concepts, you can support our work on Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/TheSaneSociety

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Why are some people able to accumulate enormous amounts of wealth? A common answer is that they worked harder. They had better ideas. Or they took greater risks. But Katharina Pistor argues that this leaves out something important: the law. We usually think of the law as a set of rules that applies equally to everyone. But the law also determines who can own something. Who can protect their wealth. And whose claims come first when things go wrong.

In this episode of Critical Concepts, Pistor explains how ordinary legal tools can turn assets into capital. She shows why some people benefit much more from these tools than others — and how private lawyers can use different legal systems to create and protect wealth.

This leads to a bigger question: What role does the law itself play in creating economic inequality?

Katharina Pistor is Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and the author of The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. The book develops many of the ideas explored in this episode, showing how assets are legally “coded” to create and protect private wealth.📚 Read Katharina Pistor:The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

---Critical Concepts brings leading scholars directly to you to explain the ideas we need to understand contemporary society.

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00:00 Intro

01:59 Freedom and desire

07:10 Spatial freedom

14:17 Temporal understanding of freedom

18:13 Freedom as experience of fulfilled time

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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

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You can watch this episode on YouTube:

⁠⁠https://youtu.be/gwaKNn-pG4A

Critical 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

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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.

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00:00 Intro

01:35 Human made climate change

05:26 Geological Agency

14:15 The Anthroposcene

35:20 Rethinking History

52:16 Outro

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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/07DfWWchFTE⁠

Critical 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/07DfWWchFTE

Critical 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.

Across the world, authoritarian and fascist movements are gaining popularity. These movements often claim that external forces are trying to take away something they must defend against a specific enemy. Within these narratives, a particular notion of ownership emerges. Today’s guest, Eva von Redecker, calls this form of ownership “phantom possession.” She argues that to understand authoritarian and fascist movements, we need to understand this concept.

The concept of alienation has a long tradition. Karl Marx famously introduced the concept during the rise of industrial capitalism to criticize the working conditions of industrial workers. Yet some might argue that alienation belongs to the 19th century and has little relevance for understanding contemporary society.

Today’s guest, ⁠Rahel Jaeggi⁠, disagrees and believes that the idea of alienation is more relevant than ever before. In her book of the same name, she revitalizes the concept and calls it “a relation of relationlessness,” in which social subjects are not capable of appropriating the social relations within which they live. Thats not it though. Jaeggi believes that to understand the new rise of fascist and authoritarian parties and leaders in Europe and the United States understanding alienation is crucial.

When we are born into a particular society, we quickly learn its norms and practices. As we internalize these patterns, we also begin to reproduce them in our everyday actions. Through this repetition, it becomes tempting to see these social arrangements as natural or inevitable.

Today’s guest, MIT-professor Sally Haslanger, challenges this assumption. In her work, she examines the many ways in which social subjects participate in reproducing the very structures that shape them, and why these patterns can be so difficult to break. At the same time, she argues that understanding how social structures are reproduced can also reveal how they might be transformed.

Prisons are a central institution of modern society, yet their legitimacy is rarely questioned. Many people assume they prevent crime and justly punish wrongdoing. But what if these assumptions are mistaken?

Today’s guest, Tommie Shelby, is the Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Caldwell Titcomb Professor in the ⁠Department of African and African American Studies ⁠and the ⁠Department of Philosophy⁠ at Harvard University. He argues that prisons fail to deliver what we expect from them and challenges the very idea that they are justified.