Schwierigkeiten mit der kritischen Geographie

Abstract

Abstract. This paper takes Foucault's and Sloterdijk's reception of the Greek cynics as an intellectual resource to critically examine critical geography's moralizing high ground. I analyse how, in 1983, Foucault and Sloterdijk paint the cynical impulse as a political practice of provocative truth-telling against the moral high-grounds of the dogmatic left of the 1970s: For Foucault and Sloterdijk, the cynics are anti-dogmatic, anti-theoretical and anti-scholastic. I will argue, however, that the cynical impulse is itself in danger of speaking from the moral high ground of anti-critique, a disposition that needs the anti-dote of skepticism.

The open society and its life chances – from Karl Popper via Ralf Dahrendorf to a human geography of options and ligatures

“…Karl Popper's early work, The Open Society and its Enemies, is updated to this day in philosophy, sociology, political science, pedagogy, and others, but it remains largely (nationally and internationally) without a large resonance in human geography. The discursive dominance of poststructuralist and neo-Marxist approaches with their high normative components has become too great in recent years (on the state of German human geography in particular: Korf, 2019Korf, , 2021. The same is true for the work of Popper's student Ralf Dahrendorf, whose contributions to role and conflict theory, the concept of life chances, and political sociology have found great resonance nationally and internationally, not only in sociology (Dahrendorf, 1959, 1972, for classification: Leonardi, 2014; Kühne and Leonardi, 2020), but also in human geography.…”