At THE NEW INSTITUTE we gather thinkers across disciplines and sectors to engage the challenges of our time. Our mission is to nourish transformation through interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral collaboration. Our residential fellowship program hosts up to 30 fellows in Hamburg, Germany. In addition, we organize events and workshops and collaborate with other institutions. The Institute is committed to incubating new ideas, expanding the influence of work already done, and making a tangible difference through its work.  

Since 2022, we have framed our activities in terms of the global discourse on a New Enlightenment. The goal has been to identify strategies for re-coupling sectors (for instance, economics and ethics) that are systematically uncoupled. In the first instance, this requires the creation of distinctive research formats. It is not enough to apply diagnostic insights from academia to so-called “practice”; these sectors must be participants from the beginning in order to adequately reshape the problem space within which academic work proceeds. In this way, we intend to generate innovative, realistic ideas for positive social change.

In 2023–2024 we implemented a new model of collaborative research. Through open calls we identified program chairs who applied to lead concrete projects within at least one of our three research areas:

• The Human Condition in the 21st Century
• The Future of Democracy
• Socio-Economic Transformation
  

The idea behind these research areas is to connect approaches towards positive socio-economic transformation and democratic practice in light of contemporary knowledge of the human condition provided by the humanities and social sciences. It is this philosophical level that explores the complex meanings of being human that are all too often missing in concrete proposals for social change.

We selected program chairs in a competitive process through which they had a chance to engage with each other in co-designing an ideal academic year. This enabled content integration across the work done at the Institute. Together with our program chairs, we published fellowship calls that allowed us to search for three to five fellows per program whose work contributed to the overall aims, questions, and formats laid out by each program chair.

This led to the creation of five programs:

1. Depolarizing Public Debates (chaired by Prof. Dr. Michael Brüggemann)
2. Reclaiming Common Wealth (chaired by Prof. Dr. Isabel Feichtner)
3. Black Feminism and the Polycrisis (chaired by Minna Salami)
4. Governing the Planetary Commons (chaired by Prof. Dr. Dr. Louis Kotzé)
5. Conceptions of Human Flourishing (chaired by Prof. Dr. Andrej Zwitter)
   

You can read more about each program below in the report.

It is worth emphasizing here that the conceptual arc in 2023–2024 focused on how we can address the crises of the universal by finding novel conceptions of the commons, for instance, by looking at commoning practices. We focused on diverse conditions of human flourishing, how we can draw on the intersectional methods of Black feminism to deal with the polycrisis, how to depolarize public debates, and how to democratically govern the planetary commons.

Each program, and the work of each fellow, contributed to remapping the landscape of how we can achieve common ground, shift solution spaces, critique the very concept of humanity, and reimagine it in concrete contexts.

We are proud to report more than 50 academic publications by our fellows and academic staff as well as more than 100 public appearances at conferences, talks, panels, and in interviews and on podcasts. We hosted and co-hosted a total of 86 events, both on site and at external locations, as well as online. For a selection of our publications and events, please see sections 2 and 3.

In addition to the collaborative programs, we continue to host individual fellows who work across programs. In the academic year 2023–2024, the Institute invited 15 fellows to work both within and across our research areas, while they pursue their individual publications and other projects. Thanks to the commitment and creativity of our community of fellows, in 2023–2024 a vibrant institutional life unfolded through weekly meetings, lunch talks, workshops, and a series of events in addition to our weekly format where both our fellows and invited external guests presented their work.

In addition to our primary output – the work of our fellows – THE NEW INSTITUTE published the first issue of the new, a series that continues our discussion paper format (see section 5).

In 2023–2024, we continued working with our partners die zeit and the Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung to award the Helmut-Schmidt-Zukunftspreis (Helmut Schmidt Future Prize) to a person whose work promotes democracy and the common good. In 2024, we awarded the third Helmut-Schmidt-Zukunftspreis to Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation. The prize was presented at a public ceremony on May 15, 2024 at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater.
In 2023–2024, THE NEW INSTITUTE formed its board of trustees. Together with chairman Erck Rickmers, our trustees Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Sabine Kunst (Joachim Herz Foundation) and Prof. Dr. Burkhard Schwenker (Former Chairman and CEO of Roland Berger) shape the Institute’s mission. Our international advisory board also started its work in 2023–2024, with members Prof. David Kennedy (Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School), Prof. Dr. Rahel Jaeggi (Director of the Centre for Social Critique at Humboldt University Berlin), and Daniel Kehlmann (novelist and playwright).

As always, we are particularly grateful to Erck Rickmers, founder of THE NEW INSTITUTE and the chairman of the board of trustees, for his generous financial and intellectual support of the Institute. Thanks to his close cooperation we were able to further develop the trans-sectoral dimension of our endeavor and to steer our research activities towards concrete visions for positive social change.

We hope you enjoy reading this report, which will inform you about the fellows, their work and output, and the activities of the Institute.

Prof. Dr. Markus Gabriel and Dr. Anna Katsman