Prof. Dr. Dr. Hans Joas

CV

Hans Joas received his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in 1979 for a study on George Herbert Mead. The English edition is called G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (mit Press, 1985, 1997). He was professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 1987-90, at the Free University of Berlin 1990-2002, Director of the Max Weber Center in Erfurt 2002-11 and Permanent Fellow at FRIAS 2011-14. He was visiting professor at many universities including University of Toronto, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the New School for Social Research in New York, Duke University, University of Vienna, Uppsala University and University of Gothenburg (Sweden). Since 2000 he has been Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2010, he received the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis (Niklas Luhmann Prize); in 2012, an honorary doctorate in Theology from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; in 2013, an honorary doctorate in Sociology from Uppsala University and the Hans Kilian Award; in 2015, the Max Planck Research Award; in 2017 the Prix Paul Ricoeur and in 2018 the Theological Prize, Salzburg.

Selected Publications

• The Power of the Sacred. An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment (Oxford University Press 2021)

• War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present (Princeton University Press 2013 , with Wolfgang Knöbl)

• The Sacredness of the Person. A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, D.C.: Goegetwown University Press 2013)

• Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures (Cambridge University Press 2009, with Wolfgang Knöbl)

• Im Bannkreis der Freiheit. Religionstheorie nach Hegel und Nietzsche (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2020, English translation forthcoming with Oxford UP 2023)

FRIAS Research Project

A Global Genealogy of Moral Universalism

In this book project I elaborate an alternative to both Max Weber’s narrative of a world historical process of disenchantment and the Hegelian and Marxist teleological philosophies of history; the reasons for the need of such an alternative have been developed in “The Power of The Sacred” and “Im Bannkreis der Freiheit / Under the Spell of Freedom”. The alternative lies in a study of the global history of moral universalism. The crucial theoretical point in this connection is a focus on the interplay of the formation of empires – what I call “political universalism” – and the religious and philosophical forms of an ethos that emphasizes the wellbeing of all human beings and not only of the members of a particular collectivity. Methodologically, I follow the “affirmative genealogy” approach introduced in my book “The Sacredness of the Person” and based on the work of Ernst Troeltsch. Individual chapters deal with the genesis of moral universalism not only in the traditions that influenced Europe, but also in China and India; with the appropriation of moral universalism by empires; the development of an “organic social ethics” in medieval Europe; the connections between absolutism, colonialism, or totalitarianism and the history of human rights; and with three specific constellations of the twentieth century that are particularly instructive for my purposes. The book ends with reflections on controversial political implications of moral universalism.