The dynamic differentiation of various social spheres in modernity has not been matched by any similarly dynamic development of new forms of trust which would help to maintain the connection between the impersonal/ systemic forms and the personal ones. Instead, we face today an increasing gap between the forms of trust related to the proliferating ‘abstract systems’ and the personal forms of trust. It is, above all, in this context that the topic of friendship became reintroduced into theoretical debates in (...) search for a model of human relationships which might bridge this gap. It is argued that such transformation of friendship into a ‘radical utopia’ is only the latest phase in the long series of historical transformations it has undergone in the context of changing social articulation of the relation between privacy and publicness. (shrink)

" ... the political situation into which Poland has been brought is a thoroughly revolutionary one, and it leaves Poland with no other choice but to be revolutionary or perish.".

One of the many themes to which Agnes Heller's philosophy returns again and again is the theme of the home of the moderns. Although not necessarily her central philosophical theme, nonetheless, it opens onto the existential and multi-dimensional nature of the human condition in modernity, which her work permanently addresses.