Sensus Communis is an annual forum for the faculty of judgement, for deliberation and a plural public sphere. A place where perspectives from business, academia, politics, culture and the public sphere come together to generate ideas and solutions in the face of a fragmenting society and the fundamental challenges of our time. Rooted in the intellectual history of Europe and of the wider world.
The liberal, secularised state lives on preconditions that it cannot itself guarantee. That is the great gamble it has taken for the sake of freedom.
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Recht, Staat, Freiheit, p. 112 f. (our translation)Three pillars that together form one institution: the Annual Forum with its eight formats, the podcast and the Papers.
The annual forum brings together voices from business, academia, politics, culture and the public sphere to clarify the conditions under which public reason can succeed in an increasingly polarised and plural society.
Annual ForumA podcast on judgement, the public sphere and democracy. The format combines philosophical depth with public accessibility — from economic, aesthetic, political and social perspectives.
The Art of JudgementThe publication series brings together essays, memoranda, interventions and curated contributions on political judgement, public reason and the intellectual foundations of the democratic polity.
Sensus Communis PapersThe Sensus Communis Annual Forum has two interlocking parts.
Every Annual Forum begins by capturing the Zeitgeist and framing a guiding question against which judgement can test itself, practise and find its bearings. It frames all formats and gives the Annual Forum its shared field of inquiry for the year.
True Sensus Communis means that all generations enter into conversation with one another. A two-tier Mentor & Fellowship Model anchors this in the structure: every participant brings a younger, emerging companion, such as a student or young professional, and at the same time takes on a mentorship on site for a participating school pupil. Each Annual Forum thus forms its own cohort: a community that stays connected beyond the forum and, over time, becomes an interwoven expression of a lived Sensus Communis.
It comprises four complementary formats: the Sensus Communis Seminars, the public Sensus Communis Dialogues, the confidential Sensus Communis Roundtables and the Sensus Communis Debates.
The intellectual heart of the Annual Forum. Each seminar works on the “Zeitgeist”, prepared by a curated chair and carried by participants and rapporteurs. Participation requires early registration and thorough preparation for every session. The seminar meets four times a year, including the concluding seminar during the Sensus Communis Annual.
The public format of Sensus Communis. Recorded conversations, also open to a live audience, in which leading voices from business, politics, academia, culture and society deliberate and debate complex questions. No panel, no exchange of blows, but a genuine conversation that trusts its audience with what it deserves: authenticity and seriousness.
Closed-door conversations for decision-makers from politics, associations, foundations and think tanks. Under the Chatham House Rule, a space opens up in which institutional practice meets theoretical depth. The classic, more protected meeting ground of political life.
One motion, two sides, disciplined and intergenerational dissent. The format demands constructive, productive conflict and the capacity to bear ambivalence. At the end there is no winner, but a sharpened judgement and an attentive audience in which every single person has been able to put their own position to the test.
The Annual Aestheticus complements intellectual discourse with the dimension of shared, lived experience. Sensus Communis Music, Sensus Communis Theatre & Film, Sensus Communis Literature and Sensus Communis Art & Encounter open up paths that rational argument alone cannot reach. They create spaces of resonance and imagination and affirm humanism, or quite simply what it means to be human.
Where people listen together, resonance arises even before argument. Music carries the Annual Forum as a shared experience — from the concert moment to the sonic framing of the debate — and opens a way into a common sense that language alone cannot fully capture.
The stage makes situations of judgement tangible that remain abstract as long as they are only discussed. Theatre and performance place perspectives, conflicts and ambivalences in the room and invite us to put ourselves in the place of others — the staged rehearsal of shared judgement.
Literature trains the imagination and widens the sense of possibility. Readings, conversations and texts open up realms of experience beyond one’s own perspective and cultivate the narrative depth from which reflective judgement draws.
Visual art and cultural encounters create common points of reference — moments of seeing, feeling and experiencing in which a humanism that can be lived becomes tangible. Social cohesion can grow from such shared experiences.
The Founding Colloquium prepares the Sensus Communis Annual 2027 and is meant to bring forth the first “Zeitgeist”. With the question “Are we still capable of common ground and a shared judgement?” we set out to examine the conditions of political and everyday judgement amid intensifying polarisation and social plurality.
Sensus communis here evidently means not only that general capacity present in all human beings, but at the same time the sense that founds community.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 26 (our translation)“In the cultural and the political realm, that is, in the whole sphere of public life, what matters is neither knowledge nor truth, but judging and deciding: the judicious appraisal and discussion of the common world, and the decision about how it is to look from now on and in what manner one is to act in it.”
(KP, 300; our translation)
“What one cannot achieve alone, many can.”
“Europe is the great hope of our century.”
“The unforced force of the better argument.”
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