Submissions

If you would like to publish your own texts, essays, reviews, or other literary or scholarly pieces with us, write to our editorial address at aevummagazine@gmail.com or use the form below.

Issue 4: Liberalism and the good life

Do liberals need an idea of the good life? The charge against the supposedly "neutral liberals" is a continuity in the history of ideas, one that has made its way from Carl Schmitt into the postliberal theory of the present. Through the Australian philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, the question of the need for a liberal "way of life" is back within liberal debate itself. That liberalism lives on more than a liberal order is, in light of the Böckenförde dictum — the "preconditions of the free state that it cannot itself guarantee" — hardly a new insight. Liberalism lives on liberals and their liberal convictions. Yet what may sound abstractly plausible (or not) confronts liberalism with concrete problems: How can a good liberal life be determined, and how can a liberal culture be created — bottom up or top down? Is the worldwide return of rigid identities, worldviews, and cultures, which profit from a changed (digital) public sphere, merely the consequence of a cultural void among liberals, or of a changed lifeworld? Can the liberals' "Cultural Turn" succeed without itself becoming part of the "illiberal backlash"? Is there a human need for meaning or transcendence, and must the liberal be able to serve it? What becomes clear in all this: it takes an updated vocabulary to do intellectual justice to the new age.

For issue 4, we are looking for texts that test a new liberal vocabulary in answering the following questions:

• Should the liberal, as a liberal, remain neutral? Or should — perhaps must — he or she offer a vision of the good life?
• Which intellectuals deserve to be rediscovered? Who are genuine role models for a liberal good life? What is the liberal element in their good life?
• What are the preconditions of the free state that it cannot itself guarantee? How does a liberal culture arise, or vanish?
• Pieces that lay open interesting and relevant roots of the liberal (anti-)philosophy of the good life: from Mill and Humboldt to Albert Camus, John Rawls, and Richard Rorty.
• Cultural texts and arguments that, with Alexandre Lefebvre, follow the trail of "liberalism as a way of life", ideally with a feuilletonistic touch.
• How does one think as a liberal? How does one think as an illiberal? Is there still such a thing as a liberal way of life?
• Critical perspectives that situate liberalism and the relation between the sexes in the field of tension between the manosphere and queer feminism.
• Is liberalism an anachronistic model in a post-literary society?
• And concrete political proposals for how a liberal culture can be addressed politically in an age of individual differentiation.

We welcome essays and reviews, as well as suggestions for interviews and translations. We would gladly assign reviews of the following books: The Mattering Instinct (Rebecca Goldstein) and Liberalism as a Way of Life (Alexandre Lefebvre).

Describe your thesis and idea for the piece in 150–200 words, and tell us a bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, what your background is. Please by 19 July 2026.

You are also welcome to send us ideas, concepts, or drafts in advance, to discuss them with the editorial team.

If you already know individual members of the editorial team, you are of course welcome to write directly to them. Editorial accompaniment and review will in any case be done by one or several members of the ævum editorial team.

We are open to a wide range of formats and perspectives, and want to encourage new topics, styles, and approaches in connection with liberalism.

Particularly welcome are pieces that move beyond the traditional bounds of liberal thinking, or that bring current questions into a new light through historical, cultural, or theoretical context.

And especially warmly invited are those who have not yet published anywhere. With ævum, we want to offer your ideas a stage.

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