freedom
  • Rethinking the Liberal Tradition
    Lea Ypi 31 October 2025
    A key concept on which our understanding of democracy relies is freedom. Yet freedom has recently also become something of an embarrassment to the global Left, a notion more easily appropriated by the Right, in its defense of individual rights in contrast to shared social norms. I would like to reflect on what a robust idea of freedom for the Left might look like, and why it is necessary to recover it, rather than trying to do away with it. And I want to raise that question in a way that urges us to reflect on both micro-history and macro-history: how world historical events shape and constrain the lives of individuals who happen to be caught up in them, and how existing political institutions try and fail to promote certain moral ideals.
  • Capitalism and Democracy: An Introduction
    Fulvia Giachetti 31 October 2025
    What is liberté? Freedom. What kind of freedom? The freedom to do whatever one wants within the limits of the law. When can one do whatever one wants? When one possesses a million. Does freedom allow everyone to have a million? No, it doesn’t. What is a person without a million? A person without a million is not someone who does whatever they want, but someone to whom others do whatever they want.” Thus wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862, upon returning from his first trip to Europe. In just a few lines, the Russian writer grasped a contradiction that would come to define all modern political thought: the promise of universal freedom versus the reality of a freedom distributed according to wealth. What at the time sounded like a moral provocation now returns as a historical diagnosis of the increasingly worn-out relationship between capitalism and democracy, one that fully embraces the crisis of liberalism and that of freedom.
  • The Islamic State, a Threat for Freedom (and for Islam)
    Adnane Mokrani 9 February 2016
    Is there an “Islamic State”? And can religiosity exist without freedom? No!, claims Islamic theologian Adnane Mokrani from Rome’s PISAI Institute and gives a political and historical explanation of why a secular State represents a real opportunity of religious freedom for Muslims  
  • Poland Says No To Kosher Meat
    Matteo Tacconi 16 September 2013
    A harsh cultural and diplomatic controversy had been ongoing for months between Poland and Israel, caused by the Polish Constitutional Court’s ban on slaughtering animals following the kosher rituals as of January 1. According to the judges, this traditionally Jewish practice is incompatible with the protection of animal rights, and slaughtering must therefore take place when the animal is “stunned” and hence unconscious.
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    Between Diplomacy and Compromise: Promoting Media Freedom in Qatar
    Ernesto Pagano interviews Jan Keulen, Director of the Doha Centre for Media Freedom 25 January 2013
    The Doha Centre for Media Freedom is an organization founded in 2008 with the political and financial support – a 4 million dollar annual budget – of Mozah bint el Misnid, the Emir of Qatar’s powerful wife. Its objective: to assist journalists whose lives are in danger and promote media freedom from the heart of the Persian Gulf. For two years Jan Keulen is at its head. Dutch, class of 1950 and a life spent as a Middle East correspondent for Volkskrant daily newspaper. This is certainly not a simple task because prior to fighting for journalistic and media freedom in the world, Qatar, Al Jazeera’s homeland, finds itself fighting against its own same contradictions: a forty year old press law, a marked attitude of self-censorship by local media and a closure towards freedom of expression by the country’s more conservative fringes. Unsurprisingly, the Doha Centre’s former director, Robert Ménard, founder of Reporters without Borders was accused by the Qatari press of having invited “the Devil in person”, Flemming Rose, director of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that published the infamous satirical cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in 2005, to Doha. Ménard denied this incident in his book Mirages et Cheikhs en Blanc. According to the French journalist this was just a pretext to be rid of an uncomfortable presence for some elements of the country’s ruling class. In 2009, in fact, little more than a year after the Doha Centre’s inauguration, Ménard handed in his resignations
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