| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Birth Date: | 4 August 1970 |
| Birth Place: | Frankfurt am Main, Germany |
| Institutions: | University of Tübingen |
Jörg Tremmel (born 4 August 1970 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) is a political theorist and philosopher. He is a professor at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany.
Tremmel holds two PhDs, one in philosophy and one in social sciences. From 2010 to 2016, he was the incumbent of a Junior Professorship for Intergenerationally Just Policies at the University of Tübingen.[1] Spending a year in England, from 2009 to 2010, he was a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, both at its Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and (part-time) at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and Environment. Before, he completed studies in political science (2003) and business administration (1998).
Tremmel has published in major national and international peer-reviewed journals and with distinguished publishing houses (inter alia Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Edward Elgar). In total, Tremmel's publication list encompassed seven monographs, eight edited anthologies, 25 journal articles, 28 chapters in anthologies (thereof 4 encyclopedia entries) and 11 book reviews in 2021. Tremmel's diploma thesis in Political Science "Sustainability as an analytical and political category" won the Procter & Gamble Award for exceptional final theses in environmental science. He founded the peer-review journal Intergenerational Justice Review.[2]
In political theory, Tremmel has designed the "four-branches-of-government model". Tremmel sees the ecological crisis also as a crisis of democracy as a form of government. His claim is that Western political institutions, as we know them, were designed in and for the Holocene, the transition into a new phase of geology, the Anthropocene, would necessitate a reform of these institutions. The linchpin of this new paradigm is that the old separation of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches would no longer be appropriate today. Similar to the eighteenth century, when in the course of first establishing a democracy in a large territorial state, the Federalist Papers proposed a system of "checks and balances" to protect minorities against the "tyranny of majority," in Tremmel's view there is a need of "checks and balances" against the "tyranny of the present over the future". Tremmel proposes to establish a "future branch," representing the interests of future citizens in the legislative process, and regarding future generations as a legitimate and necessary part of a democratically constituted community.[3]