The Great Questions of our Times and the Future of the Liberal Order

What are the great questions of our time?  What does the future of the liberal order hold?

In September the Dahrendorf Forum brought together a diverse group of social scientists in a series of online panel discussions to unpack the questions they think are timely and relevant in uncertain times. We posed and explored these questions in the spirit of sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf who wrote that intellectuals “have the duty to doubt everything that is obvious, to make relative all authority, to ask all those questions that no one else dares to ask.”

The contributions by the individual speakers are also part of a collection of online articles which are published by the online, peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary journal Global Perspectives.

For details on the planned sessions and to watch the videos please see here.

For accessing the special collection of online articles please see here. The introduction by Dahrendorf Co-Director Helmut Anheier can be found here:

Helmut K. Anheier: The Great Questions of Our Time and the Future of the Liberal Order

Research papers include:

Iain Begg: Responses to the COVID-19 Economic Crisis: Challenges for Global Governance

Howard Davies: The $19,000 Question: How Will the Economic Consequences of the Coronavirus Pandemic Affect the Financial System?

Linda Yueh: Can We Rebuild the Economic Consensus?

Jan Zielonka: The politics of pandemics.

The opinions expressed in this blog contribution are entirely those of the author and do not represent the positions of the Dahrendorf Forum or its hosts Hertie School and London School of Economics or its funder Stiftung Mercator.