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This book presents a new intellectual history of neoliberalism through the exploration of the sovereign consumer. Invented by neoliberal thinkers in the interwar period, this figure has been crucial to the construction and legimitization of neoliberal ideology and politics. Analysis of the sovereign consumer across time and space demonstrates how neoliberals have linked the figure both to the idea of democracy as a method of choice, and also to a re-invention of the market as the democratic forumpar excellence. Moreover, Olsen contemplates how the sovereign consumer has served tomarketize politics and functioned as a major driver in a wide-ranging transformation in political thinking, subjecting traditional political values to the narrow pursuit of economic growth. A politically timely project, The Sovereign Consumerwill have a wide appeal in academic circles, especially for those interested in consumer and welfare studies, and in political, economic and cultural thought in the twentieth century.

Jan Eike Dunkhase, ed., Reinhart Koselleck/Carl Schmitt: Der Briefwechsel 1953–1983 [Reinhart Koselleck/Carl Schmitt: The correspondence 1953–1983] (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019), 459 pp.
Sebastian Huhnholz, Von Carl Schmitt zu Hannah Arendt? Heidelberger Entstehungsspuren und bundesrepublikanische Liberalisierungsschichten von Reinhart Kosellecks "Kritik und Krise" [From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt? On the Heidelbergian genesis and the West German liberalization layers of Reinhart Koselleck's "Kritik und Krise"] (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2019), 172 pp.

This article traces the rise of neoliberalism in Denmark to the so-called crisis of thewelfare state in the early 1970s, where a new liberal offensive was launched withinthe ranks of Venstre – The Liberal Party of Denmark. The article shows how newliberal ideas were launched by a generation of politicians who all connected the crisis of the welfare state to a growing public sector, which they regarded as inefficientand undemocratic. In the attempt to counter the crisis in question, they did not aimto abolish the welfare state but to reduce its size and change its content. The aimwas first of all to create competition in the public sector. In this process, the liberalpoliticians launched new ideas concerning decentralization, free choice in the public sector, and economic growth, which formed the pillars of the new liberalism thatwas developed within Venstre in the 1970s.

This chapter describes the advent of welfare state criticism as elite criticism in the Danish political debate. It focuses on three of the most prolific contemporary critics of the welfare state: founder of the libertarian populist party Fremskridtspartiet, Mogens Glistrup; Marxist and economist Jørgen Dich; and Bertel Haarder, member of the Danish Liberal Party. The chapter highlights how welfare state criticism as elite criticism came about in processes of conceptual circulation and transformation, which, at times, eluded individual intentions and control but nonetheless signified an ideational convergence. While many politicians, scholars, and intellectuals from different ideological camps voiced welfare state criticism as elite criticism, some played more crucial role than others in framing debate on crisis of the welfare state. Welfare state criticism as elite criticism was constructed in processes of circulation through which social commentators picked up, appropriated, and transformed rhetorical styles and political concepts to fit several highly diverse political agendas.

This article examines the role of the consumer in the writings on regulation launched by the Chicago school from the 1930s to the 1980s. It shows how Chicago school scholars used the concept of the consumer to shape and justify their calls for deregulation, as they continually claimed to offer market solutions that protect and benefit the consumer. The focus is on how the scholars at issue executed a shift from choice to welfare in their consumer concept as they began more decisively to embrace deregulation in the postwar period. From initially having described consumers as individual agents, capable of ensuring democracy and freedom in modern society by expressing their choices on a partly regulated market, they began to portray consumers as a coherent, homogeneous and predictable mass, acting on a deregulated market and serving merely as a tool of so-called consumer welfare, understood as economic efficiency and aggregate wealth.

Defence date: 2 May 2009 ; Examining Board: Prof. Martin van Gelderen, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Sebastian Conrad, European University Institute; Prof. Lucian Hölscher, Ruhr-Universität Bochum; Prof. Willibald Steinmetz, Universität Bielefeld ; First made available online 18 March 2019 ; This study examines the work of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006). Its aim is to provide an inter-textual and contextual interpretation of Koselleck's scholarly production. While a variety of articles, reviews, opinion-pieces and obituaries offer valuable insights into his work, there is as yet no monographic study examining Koselleck's oeuvre in a comprehensive manner. The present investigation addresses this lacuna. Instead of highlighting one aspect of his historical writing on behalf of others (and presenting Koselleck simply under one label, e.g. as a 'conceptual historian', a 'social historian', a 'historian of memory' or as a 'theoretician of history', as other commentators have done), it draws a full thematic, theoretical and biographical - or instead intellectual - profile that takes into account Koselleck's entire scholarly production and the intellectual and social contexts in which it emerged. The study not only reinterprets known and uncovers unknown aspects of his work; it also offers a new overall interpretation of Koselleck's entire scholarly production. It describes a set of recurrent motifs and discursive features in Koselleck's texts that reveal the contours of a unifying pattern and a common objective in his varied and multi-faceted body of work.

Artiklen placerer den fremtrædende tyske historiker Reinhart Koselleck imellem Schmitt og Heidegger. Med udgangspunkt i et brev fra Koselleck til Schmitt fra 1953 fortæller Olsen den spændende historie om Kosellecks historieteoretiske udvikling i en dialog med egne krigs- og tabserfa¬ringer, Tysklands situation i efterkrigstiden klemt mellem Vest og Øst samt fra hans inspiration (og senere kritik) af Schmitts teori og politik.

The third way is central to the market turn that has taken place across the Western world since the 1970s. In this article, we explore the origins of the third way in Denmark, focusing on economist and Social Democratic dissident Jørn Henrik Petersen. We show how Petersen from the late 1970s onwards imported a new economic perspective on politics in the form of public choice theories into Danish debates about the welfare state, which contributed to making the third way possible as a cross-ideological project by allowing politicians of different colours to criticize, defend and reform the welfare state.

What is to be learned from the chaotic downfall of the Weimar Republic and the erosion of European liberal statehood in the interwar period vis-a-vis the ongoing Europeancrisis? This book analyses and explains the recurrent emergence of crises in European societies. It asks how previous crises can inform our understanding of the present crisis. The particular perspective advanced is that these crises not only are economic and social crises, but must also be understood as crises of public power, order and authority. In other words, it argues that substantial challenges to the functional and normative setup of democracy and the rule of law were central to the emergence and the unfolding of these crises.The book draws on and adds to the rich â crises literatureâ developed within the critical theory tradition to outline a conceptual framework for understanding what societal crises are.
The central idea is that societal crises represent a discrepancy between the unfolding of social processes and the institutional frameworks that have been established to normatively stabilize such processes. The crises at issue emerged in periods characterized by strong social, economic and technological transformations as well as situations of political upheaval. As such, the crises represented moments where the existing functional and normative grid of society, as embodied in notions of public order and authority, were
severely challenged and in many instances undermined. Seen in this perspective, the book reconstructs how crises unfolded, how they were experienced, and what kind of responses the specific crises in question provoked.