Lars Rensmann – författare

Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global--and globalizing--sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways.Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, two of the most influential political philosophers and theorists of the twentieth century, were contemporaries with similar interests, backgrounds, and a shared experience of exile. Yet until now, no book has brought them together. In this first comparative study of their work, leading scholars discuss divergences, disclose surprising affinities, and find common ground between the two thinkers. This pioneering work recovers the relevance of Arendt and Adorno for contemporary political theory and philosophy and lays the foundation for a critical understanding of political modernity: from universalistic claims for political freedom to the abyss of genocidal politics.

Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, two of the most influential political philosophers and theorists of the twentieth century, were contemporaries with similar interests, backgrounds, and a shared experience of exile. Yet until now, no book has brought them together. In this first comparative study of their work, leading scholars discuss divergences, disclose surprising affinities, and find common ground between the two thinkers. This pioneering work recovers the relevance of Arendt and Adorno for contemporary political theory and philosophy and lays the foundation for a critical understanding of political modernity: from universalistic claims for political freedom to the abyss of genocidal politics.

Die Studie hat das Ziel, die qualitative politische Kulturforschung zum Problem des Antisemitismus und zu politischen Mobilisierungschancen von Judenfeindlichkeit in der demokratischen Gesellschaft neu zu fundieren. Vor dem Hintergrund multifaktorieller Modelle werden Parameter und Deutungsmuster entworfen, mit denen die politischen und diskursiven Gelegenheitsstrukturen antisemitischer Mobilisierungsversuche und 'Judenbilder' in der bundesrepublikanischen Demokratie empirisch erforscht werden. Die Untersuchung des Antisemitismus als ideologischem und politisch-psychologischem Bindemittel in der extremen Rechten wie in der radikalen Linken sowie die Analyse offentlich-politischer Diskursprozesse der letzten Jahre zeigen, dass sich das politisch-kulturelle Bedingungsgefuge im Zeitalter rapider Modernisierung und Globalisierung verandert und sich die politische Opportunitat antisemitischer Vorurteile erhoht hat.

Democratic polities continue to be faced with politics of resentment. Along with resurgent counter-cosmopolitanism and anti-immigrant prejudice, various political agents have mobilized old and modernized antisemitism in European democracies. The first comparative study of its kind, this book rigorously examines the contemporary relevance of antisemitism and other politicized resentments in the context of the European Union and beyond. Presenting new approaches and state-of-the-art research by leading authorities in the field, the volume combines comparative work and political theorizing with ten single country studies using qualitative and quantitative data from Eastern and Western Europe. The result is a new and sober set of arguments and findings, demonstrating that antisemitism and counter-cosmopolitan resentment are still all too present human rights challenges in today’s cosmopolitan Europe.

The first systematic analysis of the Frankfurt School's research and theorizing on modern antisemitism.Although the Frankfurt School represents one of the most influential intellectual traditions of the twentieth century, its multifaceted work on modern antisemitism has so far largely been neglected. The Politics of Unreason fills this gap, providing the first systematic study of the Frankfurt School's philosophical, psychological, political, and social research and theorizing on the problem of antisemitism. Examining the full range of these critical theorists' contributions, from major studies and prominent essays to seemingly marginal pieces and aphorisms, Lars Rensmann reconstructs how the Frankfurt School, faced with the catastrophe of the genocide against the European Jews, explains forms and causes of anti-Jewish politics of hate. The book also pays special attention to research on coded and "secondary" antisemitism after the Holocaust, and how resentments are politically mobilized under conditions of democracy. By revisiting and rereading the Frankfurt School's original work, this book challenges several misperceptions about critical theory's research, making the case that it provides an important source to better understand the social origins and politics of antisemitism, racism, and hate speech in the modern world.