Episode 2 – Arpad Szakolczai: «Our rationality is not reasonable!»

What does it mean to be free – in an age of artificial intelligence, total transparency, and the permanent carnival of modern life? Political anthropologist Arpad Szakolczai explores the cultural roots of our understanding of freedom in this conversation with Wolfram Eilenberger – from the Greek ideas of autonomia, autarkia, and eleutheria to the paradoxes of technology and modernity. Szakolczai sees our world in a state of “permanent carnival”: everything becomes spectacle, stage, and simulation of freedom, while we increasingly become slaves to technology. And an economy in which escaping nature is mistaken for being free. Yet true freedom, he argues, does not arise from fleeing nature but from living consciously within it.In his critique of liberalism, Szakolczai traces how markets grew out of medieval fairs, how rationality can turn into unreason, and what charis – the Greek notion of “grace” – can teach us about a more humane future. Szakolczai reminds us: Freedom must be lived, not programmed. Arpad Szakolczai is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University College Cork in Ireland and Michael Hilti Fellow at the St. Gallen Collegium. His work combines political anthropology, sociology, and philosophy, focusing on liminality, charisma, and the crises of modernity. Among his numerous publications are Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels (2017) and Comedy and the Public Sphere: The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena (2013).