Lukas Meisner

Lukas Meisner’s current research focuses mainly on two subjects, (1) on the role of 1989/90/91 for today’s conjuncture of anticommunism, neoliberalism and neofascism, and (2) on the reconceptualisation of the Frankfurt School take on ‘false needs’ in its relevance for a democratisation of the socio-ecological transformation. Meisner is fellow at the SFB Structural Change of Property (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) and the Institute for Critical Theory Berlin (InkriT); from 2025 onwards, he will be the editor of Das Argument. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften. In 2023, he completed his PhD in Philosophy between the Università Ca’ Foscari (Venice), the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Erfurt) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). Also, he holds a Master’s degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London (Sociology Department) and a Bachelor in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from Freie Universität Berlin. Recent books by Meisner include Capitalist Nihilism and the Murder of Art (Aporia, 2020), co-authored with Eef Veldkamp; Medienkritik ist links. Warum wir eine medienkritische Linke brauchen (Das Neue Berlin, 2023); and Critical Marxist Theory. Political Autonomy and the Radicalising Project of Modernity (Palgrave, 2025). Meisner’s novella Wrackmente, published in 2024 by Kopf & Kragen Literaturverlag, deals in a more artistic manner with the multi-crisis of climates in the ‘synecdoche’ of Venice.

Research Interests

Critical Theory, Marxisms and World-Systems Analysis
Theory and history of capitalism and its others from early modernity to the postmodern
Materialist ideology-critique and ecological approaches to economic democracy
Entangled methodologies of the human and social sciences in polit-epistemological context

Selected Publications

Meisner, Lukas (2024) Revolution für das Leben, aber wie? Die neueste Linke und ihre Forderung nach politischer Autonomie, in Pfaff, Tino (Hg.) (2024) Vergesellschaftung und die sozialökologische Frage, München: oekom, pp. 223-234.
Meisner, Lukas (2024) Für eine Dialektik von Marx und Marxismus: Den Postmarxismus widerlegen, in Jahrbuch für marxistische Gesellschaftstheorie, 3, pp. 173-180.
Meisner, Lukas (2023) Liquid Reification. A conceptual update in Lukács’ Spirit, in Jahrbuch der internationalen Lukács-Gesellschaft, 19, pp. 113-126.
Meisner, Lukas (2023) Wir müssen mehr leisten – für die Erhaltung unserer Lebensgrundlagen, in Wirtschaftswoche, online and printed, 28/1/2023.
Meisner, Lukas (2022) Beyond capitalism as religion: Disenchanting modernization for a radicalized project of modernity, in Platypus Review, 145, online, Open Access.
Meisner, Lukas (2022) Objective Alienation. No essentialism, nowhere, in Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, 6:3, pp. 95-134.