Introducing the Carlsbad Institute
The Founders • September 20, 2025
Since antiquity, Western thought has revolved around the great question of how the whole maintains its integrity despite the disintegration of the parts. The result is a curious romantic irony: through sheer repetition over endless permutations of circumstance, the question itself has assumed a permanence that transcends the specific wholes and parts of which it has been asked and raises it to spheres higher than the ephemeral conditions under which it has been posed. This transcendent yearning that yearns for the transcendent is the great untieable knot holding the sails of Western civilisation aloft, and little here need be added to Whitehead’s well-worn conjecture that “the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”.
The modern research university, pioneered in Germany and today everywhere dominant, operates on the principle of the division of humanistic study into separate disciplines. Its primary mission is, as the name implies, research; understood as the continuous unearthing of new discoveries in ever more niche realms of cultural experience, pausing only to synthesise these with the established body of scholarship. It often goes missing in Kuhn’s classic theory of “paradigms” that the research university and the concept of science that it houses are also paradigms; in fact some of the most successful in the history of epistemic inquiry. Yet ever more there crystallises an understanding that — at least in the humanities — the present-day organisation of knowledge yields only what the economists would call diminishing marginal returns; that the discrete parts of the atomistic university find themselves in a steady disintegration, and the hour ripens for a breakthrough into something… older, yet at the same time new.
The return to a holistic humanism driven by the perennial questions — a venture never fully abandoned among the English-speaking peoples and oft revived in continental Europe — is the mast to which the Carlsbad Institute pins its flag. It is guided by these principles that the Carlsbad Institute strives towards a restoration of the social sciences and the humanities as an integrated whole, to be conducted at all times in a free, open-ended, and value-neutral spirit. By drawing on the deep academic tradition of the nations of Central Europe, the Institute hopes to foster a classical humanistic spirit amongst tomorrow’s generation of thinkers.
Although primarily focused on the cultivation of the sciences, the Institute aims to reach beyond academia towards cooperation and dialogue with the great and the good of the arts, business, and politics. Carlsbad, as a historic spa town in the heart of Europe, whose enduring charm has enticed centuries of the continent’s profoundest thinkers to roam its hills and take in its waters, offers an ideal location for this work. In planting the seeds of a new holistic and interdisciplinary humanism in the fertile soil of Central Europe, and yet still looking to those distant lands in the best mitteleuropean traditions of cosmopolitanism, the Carlsbad Institute strives to lay the deep roots for new theoretical paradigms and intellectual fruits to sprout throughout society, and to unite the levity of speculative thought and the gravity of political decision.
The Carlsbad Institute will pursue its mission through the support of various academic research initiatives, including but not limited to the sponsoring of conferences, colloquia, and lectures, by facilitating and supporting academic publication, through the direct education of students and young professionals, and by making the insights of some of the greatest minds of our time accessible through our free and public online journal, the Carlsbad Considerations, which will publish the innovative work of leading scholars in all fields of social thought in the aim of bringing the cutting edge of contemporary thought to all.
Those interested in the work of the Carlsbad Institute can find further information on carlsbadinstitute.org.
Dr. Martin Hähnel, Director
Christopher Gadsby
Seweryn Górecki
A.W. Taubenberger