RevDem Podcast

With the EU moving forward with the new Digital Services Act, in today’s episode of the RevDem Rule of Law podcast, our assistant editor Alexander Lazović sits down with Moritz Schramm to talk about the connections between digital constitutionalism, the Rule of Law, the role of court-like settlement bodies, and democratic participation in the digital sphere. Moritz is PhD researcher at the DFG Graduate Program 'Dynamische Integrationsordnung (DynamInt)’ at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and recently published an article on The Digital Constitutionalist platform entitled ‘Where is Olive? Or: Lessons from Democratic Theory for Legitimate Platform Governance’.

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Matthew Specter discusses key concepts and tropes in the language of realism; the comparisons across the Atlantic that have defined the realist tradition over the generations; the broad appeal of this manner of thinking despite its notable intellectual weaknesses; and the more normative elements of his critique.

In this conversation with RevDem assistant editor Vilius Kubekas, Sarah Shortall discusses the history of the nouvelle théologie movement in France and brings into focus the political dimension of theology. The thinkers associated with this movement were theological innovators and developed a certain form of counter-politics that challenged both secular and neo-scholastic understandings of the relationship between politics and religion. Shortall argues for the broadening of our understanding of the history of modern political thought, asserting that certain forms of political intervention do not take the state as the primary frame of reference; the case of nouvelle théologie shows that theology must be regarded as a distinctive political language. Sarah Shortall is an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe. She teaches at the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses primarily on modern France, Catholic thought, and the relationship between religion and politics. Her recent book is entitled Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology in Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021).

In this extended conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó published in two parts, Gary Gerstle discusses key questions tackled in his new The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. In Part II, Gerstle discusses opposed moral perspectives and their compatibility with the neoliberal political order; why the neoliberal order used the coercive power of the state to incarcerate millions; and the ways in which we can observe the retreat of neoliberal hegemony today.

In the newest episode of the RevDem Rule of Law podcast, assistant editor Gaurav Mukherjee talks to Nick Barber to discuss democratic backsliding in the UK, the role of courts in protecting democratic procedures, and the state of Parliamentary Sovereignty in the face of Brexit and COVID-19. Nick Barber is Professor of Constitutional Law and Theory at the University of Oxford, and a non-practicing barrister and member of Middle Temple. His published work includes The Constitutional State in 2011, Principles of Constitutionalism in 2018, and The United Kingdom Constitution in 2021. He was founding editor of the UK Constitutional Law Blog, and he was a co-author with Jeff King and Tom Hickman of the blog post that sparked the litigation in Miller.

In this conversation with RevDem guest contributor Máté Rigó, Iván Szelényi discusses his career as a sociologist in Hungary, Australia, and the United States through the theme of social inequality. The conversation addresses his works on leisure time and gender, urban housing under socialism as well as on the wealth of postsocialist oligarchs. Szelényi discusses the role of 1945 and 1989 on social and economic transformations and reflects on the reasons why the study of social inequality was such a sensitive subject prior to 1989. At present “economists are moving aggressively” into the study of inequality, Szelényi concludes, even as social inequality remains the key focus of sociologists. The conversation follows up on Iván Szelényi’s interview with Holly Case conducted in 2017.

On 28 February, in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky officially applied for membership of the EU. On 18 April, it was confirmed that Ukraine had completed the membership questionnaire, with President Zelensky expressing his hopes that Ukraine could become a full candidate state ‘in weeks’.  This interview, conducted by Rule of Law section editor Oliver Garner, considers the feasibility of immediate EU accession for Ukraine with Prof. Dimitry Kochenov, Professor in the CEU Legal Studies Department and Lead Researcher in the Democracy Institute Rule of Law work group. Dimitry has recently argued that immediate accession for Ukraine is feasible under the EU Treaties for Verfassungsblog, and in an article co-authored with Ronald Janse for EU Law Live.

In this extended conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó published in two parts, Gary Gerstle discusses key questions tackled in his new The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Part I covers Gerstle’s interpretation of the longue durée history of liberalism; his encompassing approach to the study of political orders; how the neoliberal order became hegemonic in the US; and why the Soviet Union is crucial to the history of the US. Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research in American History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He is also a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. He has written extensively about immigration, race, and nationality, with a particular focus on how Americans have constituted and reconstituted themselves as a nation and the ways in which immigration and race have disrupted and reinforced that process. He has also studied the history of American political thought, institutions, and conflicts, and maintains a longstanding interest in questions of class and class formation. Gary Gerstle’s best-known books include the co-edited The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (1989), which he has followed up with the co-edited volume Beyond the New Deal Order (2019), Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (2015), American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2017, updated edition) and the co-edited volume A Cultural History of Democracy in the Modern Age (2021). The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era published in April 2022. Part II shall be released next week.

Our editor Robert Nemeth talks to Marius Dragomir and Astrid Söderström, authors of a recent study on the state of state media globally, which covers 546 state media outlets in 151 countries in the world, and it found that government control has reached extremely high levels: nearly 80% of these state-administered media companies lack editorial independence.

In this conversation concerning the recently released volume “Crisis and Renewal in the History of European Political Thought,” co-editors Cesare Cuttica, László Kontler, and Clara Maier discuss how the history of political thought can help us reflect on crisis; how the key concept of crisis has triggered new ways of thinking about politics and new modes of conducting politics; how it is a deeply politicized question what gets to be called a crisis and how such a label makes things doable or permissible which under normal circumstances would not be; and that current crisis should give us the opportunity to go back to the basics of our thinking and how, instead of focusing on the crisis of democracy, we might wish to consider again how democracy leads to or engenders crisis.Cesare Cuttica is Lecturer in British History in the Department of Anglo-American Studies at the University of Paris 8. László Kontler is professor at the Department of History of the Central European University, Pro-Rector for Budapest and KEE, and an affiliate of the Democracy in History research group of the CEU’s Democracy Institute. Clara Maier is a lecturer in political science at Columbia University.