From political philosophy to popular culture and comic books, philosopher Bosko Karadjov explores liberty, utopian thinking, symbols, and the philosophical ideas hidden within the stories we tell and the characters that shape our culture.
About the Guest
Dr. Bosko Karadjov is a philosopher and the author of five books: Paradoxes of Inductive Logic, Compendium Philosophiae, Logical Analysis of Scientific Knowledge, Aesthetics of Comics, and Social Ontology. He is the co-founder and president of the Center for Humanities and the Institute for Graphic Literature “Le 9ème Art.
Interview
Simon Sarevski: Culture changes constantly, and every generation grows up differently from the one before it. Since you teach younger generations, what feels most different in their worldview compared to yours?
Bosko Karadjov: The biggest difference is not that younger generations know less or more, but that they experience the world differently. My generation grew up in a culture of scarcity — information had to be sought. We discovered the internet with a sense of romantic excitement and even utopian hope, believing it would open unprecedented possibilities for knowledge, communication, and freedom. Today’s students, however, have never known a world without it. As members of a post-digital generation, they are growing up in a reality where the boundaries between the physical and the virtual have almost disappeared. Their challenge is no longer gaining access to information but learning how to live with its overwhelming abundance—amid constant noise, acceleration, and the superficiality of perpetual hyperstimulation. This is why meaning has become harder to find than information.
As a philosophy teacher, I increasingly see my role not as transmitting knowledge but as cultivating judgment: helping students ask better questions, distinguish truth from noise, resist manipulation, and connect knowledge with responsibility. The purpose of education is not to make young people think like previous generations, but to help them preserve depth in an age that constantly rewards speed, cultivate wisdom in a culture saturated with information, and remain fully human in a world increasingly shaped by technology.
One defining feature of the smartphone and the internet era is the rise of highly visible cultural and ideological movements, including what is often called “woke culture.” Do you see this as a lasting cultural shift, or more of a temporary ideological wave?
Bosko Karadjov: History suggests that cultural movements rarely disappear entirely; they usually leave behind lasting insights while their more dogmatic elements gradually fade. The real question is not whether “woke culture” will endure, but what it reveals about the way digital media reshape public debate. In an environment driven by visibility, outrage, and instant reactions, there is a growing temptation to replace persuasion with moral certainty and dialogue with social pressure.
My concern is with the tendency of certain forms of woke politics to replace liberal values with moral absolutism, where ideological conformity becomes more important than freedom of expression, intellectual pluralism, and open inquiry. А free society depends on the right to question, disagree, and even offend without fear of censorship or ideological coercion. Whenever moral purity becomes more important than liberty, democracy itself is weakened — regardless of whether that impulse comes from the political left or the right.
Looking at these cultural shifts, what do they reveal about the role of values like liberty in society? What is it that leads you personally and intellectually back to liberty as a central value?
Bosko Karadjov: The more our culture becomes polarized, the more convinced I become that liberty is not a luxury but a necessity. I return to it because it is the foundation of human dignity, personal responsibility, and the pursuit of truth. As John Locke argued, the purpose of a legitimate society is not to direct people’s lives but to secure their natural freedom. And as John Stuart Mill reminded us, silencing an opinion robs humanity — even if that opinion proves to be wrong. No individual, institution, or ideology possesses a monopoly on truth, which is why freedom of thought and expression remain indispensable. Liberty is valuable not because it guarantees perfect outcomes, but because it gives society the best chance to recognize and correct its own mistakes.
In Compendium Philosophy, you mention the “ontology of liberty.” For readers unfamiliar with the term, how would you explain what that idea means in simple terms?
Bosko Karadjov: Compendium Philosophiae is primarily a book on political philosophy, and its central theme is what I call the ontology of liberty. By ontology, I do not mean an abstract metaphysical exercise, but an inquiry into the essence, structural foundations, and perennial characteristics of liberty as a political and axiological value. I argue that liberty belongs to the same family of fundamental philosophical categories as truth, reality, and justice. It is not merely one political preference among others, but a precondition for the existence and meaningful pursuit of all other values. The book approaches this question from multiple perspectives: Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, Francis Fukuyama and the end of political romanticism, Robert Nozick’s libertarian theory of justice, the semiotics of liberty, Marxist anthropology and the problem of freedom, the relationship between security and the minimal state, and even Bob Dylan’s poetics of liberation. These diverse themes are united by a single philosophical question: what must liberty be, in its deepest structure, for a free society to remain possible?
Liberty and freedom belong to human existence itself. That’s why the ontology of liberty begins with a simple philosophical intuition: human beings are ends in themselves, not instruments for the purposes of others. Liberty is the existential condition that allows a person to become the author of his or her own life. From this follow all the other dimensions of freedom — freedom of thought, conscience, speech, association, creation, exchange, and property. These are not isolated rights but different manifestations of the same underlying reality: the moral sovereignty of the individual. In other words, liberty is not the product of political order; political order is legitimate only insofar as it respects the ontological priority of liberty.
When people speak about liberty today, they often mean very different things — personal autonomy, free markets, freedom of speech, or even liberation from social norms. Does modern society still share a coherent understanding of liberty, or has the concept itself become fragmented?
Bosko Karadjov: I don’t think liberty has become fragmented; I think our understanding of it has. We increasingly define freedom through particular political agendas rather than through its underlying philosophical essence. From a classical liberal perspective, liberty is one reality with many manifestations. Freedom of speech, conscience, property, association, and enterprise are not competing liberties but different expressions of the same principle: every individual is an end in himself, not a means to the purposes of others. The task today is not to redefine liberty but to rediscover its unity.
If liberty is an abstract idea, it also has to be communicated through images and symbols. Why do political movements rely so heavily on symbols and colors?
Bosko Karadjov: Political ideas rarely move people through arguments alone. We understand the world not only through concepts but through symbols. Political symbols translate abstract values such as liberty, justice, or equality into images that people can recognize, remember, and emotionally identify with. A flag, a color, a raised fist, a torch, a broken chain, or the Statue of Liberty are never just visual objects; they are condensed political narratives. They transform ideas into collective imagination.
In Compendium Philosophiae, I argue that symbols unite the image with the idea. They make the invisible world of values visible. They are the grammar of political culture because they shape not only how we perceive politics but also how we imagine the future. Every political movement, therefore, develops its own symbolic language — from the tricolor flags of liberal revolutions and the Gadsden snake with its ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ motto to the red flag of socialism or the rainbow flag of contemporary identity movements. Symbols are not the end of political meaning, but its beginning: they do not conclude interpretation, they initiate it.
While we are on the subject of symbols and images, what best captures the idea of liberty today, if anything?
Bosko Karadjov: There is no single symbol today that can fully capture the idea of liberty, and perhaps there should not be one. Liberty is not a static image but a dynamic relationship between the individual and the conditions of their existence.
Historically, different symbols have tried to express it: the broken chain as liberation from coercion, the torch as enlightenment and reason, the open hand as non-domination, or even the figure of the road or horizon as openness to possibility. Each of them captures an aspect, but never the whole. In contemporary culture, I would say that the most adequate ‘image’ of liberty is not a fixed symbol but a constellation of practices: free speech in digital space, the ability to exit and choose alternatives, and the protection of private life against surveillance. In that sense, liberty today is better understood less as an icon and more as a lived structure of openness — fragile, constantly negotiated, and always dependent on vigilance. Perhaps this is the paradox: the more we try to reduce liberty to a single powerful image, the more we risk simplifying what is essentially a plural and evolving condition of human freedom.
Political ideas rarely survive through theory alone — they also depend on imagination. Throughout history, movements have inspired people not only through arguments, but through visions of the future, myths, and collective narratives. Why do human beings seem to need these larger stories and imagined futures?
Bosko Karadjov: Why do we need larger stories and imagined futures? Why do we need to dream? Because political ideas cannot survive as pure theory; they require a utopian horizon that gives them direction, energy, and meaning.
Every ideology contains within itself a utopian dimension, even when it denies it. The utopian is not its opposite, but its telos. When this forward-looking, projective dimension disappears, ideology loses its capacity to motivate action and gradually becomes mere commentary — literature, interpretation, or detached reflection on reality. An ideology without utopia becomes politically ineffective because it no longer speaks to the motivational core of the individual. It no longer inspires transformation; it only describes the world. In that sense, it undergoes what I would call a ‘philosophization’ — a transformation into contemplative thought without praxis, into a kind of theoretical stillness. This is why ideology is only truly alive when it remains in contact with the impossible. Paradoxically, it becomes unrealistic precisely when it abandons the unreal.
The human political imagination needs what seems impossible in order to orient what is possible. Without that tension, politics loses its creative dimension and becomes administration of the given rather than exploration of the new. Perhaps this is the deeper reason why we need larger stories and imagined futures: they are not escapism from reality, but the very condition for transforming it.
Throughout history, many thinkers proposed ideal societies built around one vision of the good life. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick instead suggested a “framework of utopias,” where different communities and ways of living could coexist. How does this differ from traditional utopian thinking, and why does it matter?
Bosko Karadjov: Robert Nozick’s idea of a ‘framework of utopias’ marks a decisive shift from traditional utopian thinking. Classical utopias are built around a single, unified vision of the good life — a total social design in which plurality is often subordinated to coherence. Nozick, by contrast, replaces the idea of one perfect society with a meta-structure that allows many different and even incompatible forms of life to coexist.
In my own work, I describe this shift through the distinction between utopia with a capital ‘U’ and utopia without. The first tends toward closure, finality, and often ideological totalization; the second opens a space of plurality, experimentation, and individual freedom. Utopian and uchronian thinking, in this sense, are not blueprints for a final society, but modes of expanding the horizon of possibility — the chiliastic core of political imagination. They function as a necessary corrective to reality, because without utopian projection, political thought collapses into mere administration of the given. Nozick’s importance lies precisely in the fact that he decentralizes utopia. There is no single shared end-state of history, but a multiplicity of personal utopias, each grounded in individual choice and autonomy. This preserves what is essential: no vision of the good life has the right to monopolize political reality. In that sense, liberty becomes the framework within which utopias are allowed to exist rather than a single utopia imposed upon all. Why this matters is simple: once utopia becomes singular, it risks becoming coercive; but when it becomes plural, it becomes a space of freedom. The task of political philosophy is therefore not to abandon utopia, but to prevent its monopolization. The question is not whether we need utopia, but whether we allow it to remain plural — or allow it to become a form of domination.
Beyond political philosophy, these ideas often appear in culture and storytelling in more indirect ways. Pop culture often carries philosophical ideas in disguised form — characters like Batman, Captain America, or the Punisher are frequently interpreted as having moral or political symbolism. Does modern storytelling functions as a vehicle for ideas about freedom, authority, and responsibility?
Bosko Karadjov: Yes, especially popular culture and comics, which function as a powerful vehicle for ideas about freedom, authority, and responsibility. In fact, I have explored this in detail in Aesthetics of the Comic, where I analyze the ideological embedding of pop culture and its role in shaping collective imaginaries.
Comics and graphic narratives, as a form of visual storytelling, have historically played a significant ideological role, particularly in the decades following World War II, when they contributed to the legitimization and diffusion of dominant social values. Their specific multimodal structure — combining text and image — makes them exceptionally flexible as a medium for the construction and dissemination of meaning. This allows for a powerful process of ideological inscription, where social identities, conflicts, and moral archetypes are visually and narratively stabilized. Because of this, comics are not merely entertainment; they are a form of discourse, a way of seeing and interpreting reality. Their condensed visual language often produces archetypal and even stereotypical representations, which makes them particularly effective in transmitting political and ethical ideas in accessible form. This is why pop culture today does not only reflect ideas about freedom and authority but actively participates in their construction. And this applies not only to ideas of liberty, but also to their opposites.
Pop culture is one of the main arenas in which ideological conflicts are symbolically staged. In that sense, contemporary storytelling is not neutral: it is a battlefield of narratives in which competing visions of freedom, control, responsibility, and power are constantly negotiated. Pop culture today is not outside ideology — it is one of its most effective languages.
Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, had strong philosophical convictions that some readers connect to his creative work. When you look at those characters, do you think it makes sense to interpret them philosophically, or do we sometimes overinterpret or overanalyze pop culture?
Bosko Karadjov: Interestingly, you mention Steve Ditko, because he is a crucial example of how philosophical commitments can shape popular storytelling. As you know, Ditko was influenced by Objectivism and Ayn Rand, and he even described himself as a consistent Aristotelian. That already tells us that his creative work cannot be separated from a deeper philosophical framework. In that sense, I do not think it is a mistake to interpret characters like Spider-Man or Doctor Strange philosophically. On the contrary, there is a long tradition — especially in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy — of reading pop culture as a legitimate site of philosophical reflection. There are entire academic projects dedicated to this field, such as the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series (Batman and Philosophy, Spider-Man and Philosophy, Doctor Strange and Philosophy, and many others), as well as edited volumes like Graphic Novels as Philosophy and Comics as Philosophy. These works explore a wide range of philosophical themes through comics and popular narratives, including questions such as “What If? DC’s Crisis and Leibnizian Possible Worlds,” “Plato, Spider-Man, and the Meaning of Life,” “Jean-Paul Sartre and Existential Themes in Ghost World,” “The Good Government According to Tintin,” A Contract with God, Love and Liberty: The Social Contract and V for Vendetta,” and Queering Epistemology and the Odyssey of Identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.
I often ask guests to recommend books for the intellectually curious readers. Could you also recommend a few films, TV series, or even comics that you think meaningfully explore themes of freedom, authority, or human nature?
Bosko Karadjov: I tend to focus mainly on comics and graphic novels, because I see them as one of the most interesting narrative platforms for political philosophy today. The most compelling works are those in which graphic storytelling becomes a medium for articulating explicit ethical, social, and political positions. In other words, socially engaged comics that address questions of justice, power, authority, and freedom in a meaningful way.
Among the works that have most strongly shaped my own intellectual sensibility are the comics of Alan Moore — especially Watchmen, for its meta-textual deconstruction of the superhero archetype and the very logic of power, and V for Vendetta, for its iconic political impact and its enduring engagement with questions of anarchism, resistance, and political freedom. I also greatly value Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, for its literary depth and philosophical imagination, and Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, which offers a dystopian vision of the future that feels both disturbingly close and politically prescient.
In addition, I find the graphic memoir tradition particularly important: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Joe Sacco’s journalistic works such as Palestine and Safe Area Goražde, Guy Delisle’s travel and political narratives, Chester Brown’s Paying for It, and Frederik Peeters’ Blue Pills — all of which engage directly with political, historical, and ethical realities.
On a more theoretical level, I am also interested in how philosophy and comics intersect in works such as Adam Hines’ Duncan the Wonder Dog, Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions, G. Dillon’s The Nao of Brown, and Jean Van Hamme and Griffo’s S.O.S. Bonheur, which reflect critically on the relationship between the individual and the state and the dangers of an omnipotent political order.
In general, comics have allowed me to see how philosophical ideas are not only discussed in abstract form, but also visually and narratively embodied. They are not merely entertainment; they are a powerful form of cultural and ideological articulation. Comics and graphic novels are one of the rare spaces where philosophy becomes visible.
Beyond theory, how do you see ideas about liberty actually shaping real-world institutions — politics, education, or media today? Do institutions tend to preserve liberty, or gradually erode it?
Bosko Karadjov: Institutions rarely preserve liberty in a stable or guaranteed way. As Friedrich Hayek suggested, liberty is not the product of design but of evolved constraints on power — always fragile, always partial. At the same time, following a more pragmatist line like Richard Rorty, we can say that liberty survives not as a fixed principle embedded in institutions, but as a cultural vocabulary that is constantly renegotiated through public discourse. For this reason, institutions are ambivalent: they both protect and gradually standardize freedom. They stabilize liberty through law, education, and media frameworks, but over time they also tend to bureaucratize and normalize it, turning open possibilities into regulated routines. Thus, institutions do not simply preserve or erode liberty — they continuously reinterpret it. The real question is whether a society keeps the language of freedom alive enough to correct its own institutions when they begin to ossify. The distinction is indeed crucial.
From a Hayekian perspective, formal freedom — legal rights and protections — is only one layer of liberty. The more decisive layer is the structure of constraints produced by dispersed social pressures, markets, institutions, and increasingly digital systems, none of which are centrally designed yet collectively shape the field of possible action.
People are not necessarily ‘less free’ in an objective sense, but they often misunderstand the nature of freedom in complex societies. Modern freedom is not the absence of constraint, but the presence of multiple, overlapping systems that expand choice while also making it less visible who or what constrains it. So the problem is less a loss of freedom than a loss of transparency about how freedom actually operates.
Finally, zooming out: how do we find freedom in an unfree world?
Bosko Karadjov: Freedom is never a condition we fully inhabit, but a horizon we continuously reconstruct within constraint. The task is not to escape the unfree world, but to prevent it from becoming the only imaginable one.