Crises of Rationality 2025 - 2026

Is it reasonable to maintain industrial production that destroys the foundations of human life on the planet for centuries to come? Does it become more reasonable when these industries provide jobs whose loss not only leaves many people immediately in need of social security checks, but also reduces the tax revenues of the state, from which aid is paid? Is it reasonable to respond to social crises with fascist policies that do not solve the crises but promise to alleviate one’s hardships at the expense of others? Does it become more reasonable if one actually benefits from it?
The answer to all these questions seems obvious. Yet, social and political forces are on the rise that act as if all this were rational. They are taking on the legacy of the liberal welfare state, which was itself shaped by a nation-state framework and the racialized idea of a national community. However, these states at the end of the 20th century had at least claimed to commit themselves to the idea of human dignity and the value of self-determination.
Neoliberalism has hollowed out the social-democratic welfare state model in terms of both content and substance. The utopian attraction for the model has faded and it is mobilizing fewer and fewer voters and less and less social support. Inclusive liberalism is in free fall and the idea of a shared future for global humanity seems conceivable only as a warring dystopia in an ever-collapsing climate.
According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, this situation can be understood as a profound crisis of Enlightenment’s legacy. The logic of the welfare state, liberalism, and progress is being supplanted by regressive approaches that oscillate between covert authoritarianism and overt fascism. Reason, which was invoked on the basis of the Enlightenment, is being replaced by affective politics. Disruption and the desire for destruction are supplanting the call for improvement and participation.
Under such conditions, there is a danger of succumbing to an overly idyllic image of the past and falling into overly clear-cut oppositions. From the perspective of critical theory, it must be noted that the liberal welfare state model cannot simply be set up as the epitome of reason against an irrational authoritarian or fascist form of rule. Such a contrast would mean, on the one hand, reducing the concept of reason to a specific form of rationality and, on the other hand, overlooking the fact that the fundamental irrationality of the liberal welfare state model promotes, if not causes, a shift toward authoritarian-fascist irrationality.
The false antithesis of the individual and society, the omnipresence of competitive relationships that pit children and teenagers against each other, the inability to question individual desires, preferences and goals, and the reproduction of racist exclusion and marginalization—both internally and at the transnational level—are eroding solidarity in the liberal welfare state. As a result, protection from the capitalist impositions seems possible only through membership in an authoritarian, cohesive community of struggle and plunder in times of crisis.
The crisis of rationality in the liberal capitalist welfare state—according to our fundamental hypothesis—is an expression of a deeper social unreason. A social context that understands itself only as the emergence of individual interests and is formed by the belief that it can detach itself from global power relations is thus not only unreasonable. Within such a social context, the rational pursuit of interests by individuals, groups, and classes regularly turns into irrationality. It seems to those involved that the transition to irrationality is brought about solely by the conflict between the calculations and interests they pursue for themselves. Their individual rational calculations are not embedded in any reasonable social context and cannot consider transnational dependencies.
A deeper understanding of irrationality therefore arises when social reason is not reduced to the successful coordination of particular interests. Rather, reason means reflecting on the conditions under which people organize their coexistence, resolve conflicts, and tackle existing challenges with the aim of doing so for good and comprehensible reasons. The crisis of rationality, on the other hand, reveals itself in the interplay of instrumental rationalities, which itself remains irrational because liberalism fails to establish a reasonable overall context. In such an unreasonable social state, different forms of instrumental rationality repeatedly collide, none of which can claim overarching validity on its own. When ecological imperatives clash with economic ones, and at the same time claims to freedom and social inequality must also be taken into account, it does not help to weigh the individual claims against each other.
The failure of instrumental rationalities to work together can already be observed in market processes, where the economy as a whole is dependent on chance in a way that would be intolerable in any individual business or family household. The intuitive attempt to counter this with comprehensive planning has proven to be much more complex in practice than it initially appeared. The endeavor to organize the production of society as a whole along the lines of the postal service has failed. Economies are extremely more complex in themselves. Moreover, the question arises as to which principles should form the grounds for planning: Should as much labor time as possible be saved? Should as few resources as possible be consumed? Should as much social wealth as possible be created, or should as much as possible be ensured that everyone is well provided for? Should the main concern be to support social power relations? Or is the main concern to preserve and improve natural living conditions?
Which questions emerge as key issues in social planning, which ones impose themselves, which ones are chosen and which ones are rejected, says a lot about the social conditions and practices that prevail in a society. At the same time, it also reveals the sources of unreason when entire dimensions of social life are not taken into account at all or not adequately.
Therefore, the consequence cannot be to completely abandon the claim associated with the promise of rationality. Precisely because irrationality is currently being celebrated as a sign of superiority, the question arises as to how the promise of overarching reason can be saved without betraying the necessary criticism of a rationality that has been reduced to means-end relationships or inflates individual aspects of human existence into an inadmissible generality.
The crisis of rationality can be a starting point for this. The manifestation of its irrationality can call dominant patterns of rationality into question and lead to the development of alternatives. Such dissonances make adjustments likely, if not inevitable. However, historical processes do not follow the guidelines of reason. In addition to human suffering and goals, factors such as institutionalized relationships, infrastructures of (re)production, and natural processes also play a role as independent forces. All too often, reason falls by the wayside in this interplay. Not every crisis ends in progress: instead of solving problems, possible solutions or processes that could lead to solutions in the first place are blocked. Time and again, problems are simply shifted from one area to the next. This process can best be described as regression, at the worst culminating in war and violence—a terrible but not necessarily cathartic climax.
Exploitation, oppression, discrimination, and the loss of livelihoods create the need to break out of established norms. They make it impossible for many people to align their actions with prevailing forms of rationality. However, the question is whether the counter-communities that are formed in order to exist at all, are a departure into new, more solidarity-based and freer practices, or whether they prove to be even harsher forms of domination. Answering such questions means, on the one hand, dealing with concrete experiences of counter-communality. But it also means gaining a better understanding of how crises work, what gets blocked in them, and what forces are at work within them. It is important to understand how the blockages that manifest themselves in crises shift and multiply, and how appropriate solutions to problems fail to materialize.
A better understanding of crises, their potential for change, but also their blocking mechanisms requires that the conceptual tools for understanding crises be reviewed and sharpened. However, this abstract conceptual work cannot be separated from the examination of the multifaceted crisis complex of the present. While some are once again singing the swan song of the West and its culture in light of the crisis of the liberal welfare state, others are arguing about whether the authoritarian-populist currents of the present can rightly be described as fascism.
Terminological debates have their own appeal—and they are often linked to strategic decisions about how and with whom social conflicts are to be fought. However, the question of the modes and conditions of existence of the rational, its forms, crises, and shifts into the irrational offers an opportunity to re-evaluate the strategic field at stake in contemporary social struggles. The hope is to arrive at new answers to the pressing challenges posed by the irrationality of the present.