This article aims to offer a systematic account of pathologies of collective attention. It reconstructs attention, salience, and affordance as interlocking notions through which both subjects and collectives become oriented toward the world in specific ways, before turning to ideology, propaganda, and conspiracism as cases of pernicious attentional dysfunction. Drawing on both analytic epistemology and the tradition of critical theory, I argue that these phenomena are distortions in the way groups pay attention and saliences are misvalued. Taking up the notion of social pathology from the tradition of critical theory, the paper reinterprets it as a metaphor for those modes of collective life that obstruct attuned responsiveness to reality and brings it into dialogue with more recent debates on “negative” epistemic properties in (analytic) epistemology.

This essay’s core claim is that EU tech law does not fully understand technology, since it does not account for its diverse negative impacts in the everyday lives of people in European societies. Placing a central focus on EU’s digital regulation, I argue that EU law mostly sees technologies as products that should circulate at an ever-greater rate and volume in the internal market, to the benefit of consumers. This market-driven vision justifies a light-touch risk-based approach that creates a compliance apparatus which does not force tech companies to change unjust or harmful aspects of their business models; instead securing and legitimising them. Using a critical social theory approach, I argue that much of technology’s meaning and impact on the everyday lives of people is missed by EU law’s current depoliticised and technocratic approach to tech regulation. Taking the tech stories of This is Europe as a starting point, I illustrate how EU law systematically neglects the harms caused by technology or through technology to many individuals and communities in their everyday lives. Those affected range far beyond consumers and tech users. They include, for example, delivery platform workers forced into extreme anxiety due to task volume and app surveillance; several minorities systematically targeted by online abuse; or the migrants exposed to tech-mediated degrading treatment in European border facilities. All in all, EU law does not fully see, and therefore, epistemically excludes these lived experiences of tech harm from the regulatory dialogue. This leads me to some concluding reflections centred around a fundamental questioning of EU tech law’s legitimacy. Particularly, I argue that a legal regime that does not recognise and is not responsive to the lived realities of harm of those which it regulates ultimately fails at a deeper, politico-moral level.

In today’s ‘crisis of democracy’, critical theorists defend democratic principles as public intellectuals. Yet, they remain hesitant to ‘conservatively’ defend liberal democratic institutions. This article contributes to a special issue on civil society defences of liberal democracy. It asks under what conditions critical theorists can justifiably intervene to defend existing institutions. The article first discusses arguments in critical theory which suggest that defences of democracy should be based on core democratic principles. It then turns to early critical theorists, demonstrating that their defence of existing institutions does not refer to such strong principles. Subsequently, the possibility of defending existing institutions without appeal to strong normative standards is discussed in dialogue with contemporary critical theory. Finally, the article suggests that critical theorists can defend existing institutions if they avoid strong normative claims and focus instead on institutional matters. Practically, they should forge civil society alliances to defend the potential for abolishment inherent in existing institutions.

Who is recognised within the concept of ‘European Society’, and, more importantly, who or what remains unseen? This article critically examines European Society through a decolonial lens, arguing that EU law is detached from the lived and diverse realities of European Society. Drawing on the work of sociologist Manuela Boatcă, the authors propose a decolonial approach that excavates coloniality of power, knowledge and, especially, belonging within EU law to reimagine European Society. Analysing cases in migration and the rule of law, the article reveals how EU law perpetuates hierarchical structures of inclusion and exclusion, and invisibilises the liminal—often deploying “Western” norms, values, and lifestyles as gatekeeping tools, especially in post-colonial contexts. At the heart of this argument is the necessity to move beyond Eurocentric assumptions of universality, neutrality, and totality in legal scholarship, instead embracing plurality of perspective, creolisation, and reflexivity. The authors contend that European Society should not be treated as a rigid legal construct but rather as a dynamic and inclusive one that amplifies marginalised voices, acknowledges and accounts for the liminal, and critically examines the law’s inherent limitations. Ultimately, the article calls for a radical reimagining of European Society through its decolonisation—one that confronts historical injustices, disrupts entrenched power structures, and steers EU law toward a more just, equitable, accountable and reconstructive future.

Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) has often been criticised for its idealism. I discuss Lukács’s critique of reification in light of these charges, identifying two different idealist vocabularies of (neo-)Kantian and Hegelian origin, respectively. I show that the function of the former is critical: refracting Marx’s analysis of social form through a Kantian form/content distinction allows Lukács to critique capitalism as the domination of form over content. Lukács’s Hegelian leanings are more problematic, however, as they constrain his own insights into the conditioned and contingent character of political practice and history.

Our article sheds light on two enduring debates within the cooperative literature: the degeneration thesis and the spillover thesis. While the degeneration thesis suggests cooperatives are doomed to failure, the spillover thesis suggests otherwise, contending that the experience of democratic control furthers social change beyond the cooperative itself. By turning to critical theory, we are able to bring new insights into these conversations. The early Frankfurt School placed a primacy on the subjectivity of social actors, arguing that capitalism serves to impact the consciousness, rationality, and depth-psychology of subjects, acculturating them to market societies. By exploring this in conjunction with the literature on cooperatives, we are able to add weight to the degeneration thesis and to demand further concessions from advocates of the spillover thesis. Ultimately, the article stresses the lack of importance placed to date on subjectivity within cooperative studies and argues that this needs to be remedied.

We report qualitative findings from a study in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith city with high levels of deprivation. Primary research over 2 years consisted of three focus groups and 18 semi-structured interviews with food insecurity service providers followed by focus groups with 16 White British and Pakistani women in or at risk of food insecurity. We consider food insecurity using Habermas’s distinction between the system and lifeworld. We examine system definitions of the nature of need, approved food choices, the reification of selected skills associated with household management and the imposition of a construct of virtue. While lifeworld truths about food insecurity include understandings of structural causes and recognition that the potential of social solidarity to respond to them exist, they are not engaged with by the system. The gap between system rationalities and the experiential nature of lay knowledge generates individual and collective disempowerment and a corrosive sense of shame.

Enabled by the underpinnings of critical theory, this article discusses research methodology developed with the aim of empowering beneficiaries within Third Sector Organisations, through their participation in organisational evaluation processes. The discussion on methodology in this article occurs at three levels: conceptual, processual, and reflexive. The conceptual level explores ontological and epistemological assumptions that shape the critical approach. At the processual level, research methods are explored, drawing on case studies involving interviews with beneficiaries. In interviewing beneficiaries, Third Sector research becomes a means of representing this group. Finally, the reflexive level explores how findings from the processual level enable praxis through the development of approaches supporting beneficiaries’ participation in organisational evaluation processes. As such, Third Sector research can engage beneficiary participation, in order to promote more effective beneficiary participation organisationally.