AKADEMIE FORUM: CARLOS FRAENKEL

Rational persuasion is powerless against deeply rooted irrationality. Only violent social transformation—the destruction of a corrupt system and its replacement with a virtuous one—can save humanity from injustice. This conviction fueled modern revolutionary movements from Robespierre to the Red Army Faction. Unlike Plato and his revolutionary heirs, liberal societies distrust claims of the “true” good life and instead invoke pluralism.

Yet, despite unprecedented freedom and unparalleled prosperity, most people today clearly do not lead happy and successful lives. Instead, they stagger from crisis to crisis—war, climate change, exploitation, political radicalization—without shared standards for what is desirable.

This lecture poses an uncomfortable question: Does liberalism, by refusing to seriously engage with the good life, bear some responsibility for the current state of the world? Drawing on Socrates and Plato, it argues that the real alternative to Socratic prodding and Platonic coercion is not silence, but a radical democratization of philosophical judgment—a form of education that empowers people to discuss values without allowing disagreements to become domination and politics to become war.

Carlos Fraenkel is the James McGill Professor of Philosophy and Religion at McGill University in Montreal and will direct the Einstein Forum in Potsdam this year. Previously, he was Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

His published works include *Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy*, *Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World*, and the forthcoming *Radical Ancients: Philosophy as Experiments in Living*. In his work, he understands philosophy as a practical and critical activity, exploring how it can shape individual lives, public culture, and democratic societies.

His essays have appeared in publications such as the *London Review of Books*, the *Times Literary Supplement*, *The New York Times*, the *Boston Review*, *Dissent*, *Liberties*, and others. At McGill University, he teaches the popular undergraduate course "The Good Life," which explores philosophical approaches to the question of how people should live.


In English

With a musical contribution from students of the Barenboim-Said Academy