Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis paper examines the strong support for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) from lower socio-economic groups like blue collar workers and the unemployed in Germany, who would be most economically weakened by the radical market-oriented policies of this party. The AfD has achieved remarkable electoral successes within a short period of time, with the main basis of the support it receives coming from the above-mentioned demographic groups. These are not the dominant segment or the majority of all the supporters of the AfD, but they provide a considerable proportion of the party's votes and are the groups which display the highest approval ratings for the AfD. Their support is quite surprising, given the fact that the economic, labor, welfare and tax policies of the party are very market-oriented. In this light, this paper focuses on the major factions (the economic liberal and the national conservative) and main agenda items (opposition to the euro and antipathy to immigration and refugees) of the AfD, and demonstrates the discrepancies between the party's policy goals and the circumstances and needs of the core groups which support the party. The two internal party factions prioritize different agendas, though they are both fundamentally opposed to the existing euro system and the influx of immigrants and refugees to Germany. The party's radical market-oriented policies were devised under the influence of the eurosceptic economic liberalism which played a leading role in the party's foundation and in its initial phase. However, even in the early period when it drew most attention as an anti-euro party, the AfD owed its electoral successes to its anti-immigration and anti-refugee stance rather than to its anti-euro position. The former issues were more emphasized by the national conservatives within the party after they won the ideological struggle with the economic liberals. The anti-immigrant and anti-refugee policies first appealed to blue collar workers and the unemployed. In addition, their support was mobilized effectively by the election strategy of the AfD, which campaigned mainly on an anti-immigration and anti-refugee platform, and obscured or de-emphasized the radical market-oriented policies of the party.

AbstractThe original inspiration of Hannah Arendt's last work, The Life of the Mind, was the question of whether human thinking could help us resist evil. Arendt concluded that its answer was positive: thinking was a shield against evil. But, subverting this claim, her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, showed that thinking could not have served as a moral safeguard in the history of Nazism. Conversely, Arendt's interpretation of that same history, in her most controversial work Eichmann in Jerusalem, revealed an all too real defense against evil: human judgment. But, paradoxically, the model of judgment that she sketched in her philosophy of mind denied the survival of judgment under the historical conditions of Nazism, transforming its existence into a mysterious puzzle. This essay thus argues that Arendt's philosophical thinking—her conceptions of thinking and of judgment—clashed with her understanding of the history of Nazism, and this conflict disorganized her views on morality in the time of this, the greatest political and historical crisis of the modern West.

The concern that Heidegger voiced in his later work for the plight of nature in a world dominated by technological rationality and commercial exploitation has often been seen as sign of his commitment to environmental ethics. This paper argues that the roots of Heidegger's concern lay elsewhere, most notably in his identification with the beliefs and practices of Germanic paganism. Beginning with a discussion of Heidegger's notion of the 'Geviert' (the 'fourfold'), this paper examines how Heidegger drew upon the elemental tropes of the pagan mind, most noticeably those that celebrated water, land and forest, to ground his appropriation of nature in an ethos of spiritualized naturalism.

Despite Nietzsche's frequent disavowals of Hegelianism, scholars have repeatedly stressed Nietzsche's affinities with Hegelian dialectics. Other scholars have responded by denying such affinities. Taking On the Genealogy of Morality as a case study and comparing it to the paradigmatically Hegelian A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right by Marx, this article argues that the question of whether or not Nietzsche is a dialectician unduly narrows the scope that Nietzsche envisioned for philosophy. For Nietzsche, a certain mode of philosophizing (dialectical or otherwise) becomes activated within a rhetorical matrix. Marx sees dialectics as the inexorable logic of history, but has to rely on the rhetorical persuasiveness of the chiasmus to make his claim plausible. Nietzsche, on the other hand, conceives of two incompatible logics: the nobles' positive affirmation (non-dialectical) and the priests' negative oppositionality (enabling dialectics). Instead of arguing for one logic over another, Nietzsche foregrounds their rhetoricity by performing the historically contingent invigoration and desiccation of each, leaving it to the reader to assimilate whichever mode of philosophizing they find most plausible.

In his early twenties Marek Hłasko (1934–69), an 'angry young man' and a rare 'authentic' working-class voice, became the great literary hope of the Polish Communist Party. In the space of a few months, and at a crucial moment in post-war Polish history, he made his literary debut, published two books, received the Polish State Literary Prize and instantly became a popular youth-hero and celebrity rebel. But just as rapidly he became an exile, an outcast and a pariah. In the West he found 'freedom' as difficult to negotiate as life under communism, and while he continued to write, after 11 nomadic years he died of an overdose. His life and his writing are of one piece: his career trajectory illustrates how the Party could operate to promote writers it favoured, but to block and isolate those who opposed it.