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Any attempt to reaffirm equality as a fundamental democratic value faces two tasks: it must respond to social and cultural changes accompanying the most recent phase of capitalist development, and it must reactivate the original context of the democratic transformation that brought equality to prominence, in close conjunction with other aspects of an innovative vision. At the outset, equality was interpreted in terms of “a world of similar human beings, a society of autonomous individuals, and a community of citizens”. In this context, equality was closely linked to liberty, but their interconnections were also open to historical changes. Later developments – including the shift to a more organized kind of capitalism, two world wars and the rise of a temporarily successful rival version of modernity – led to significant upgradings of equality. But during the past half-century, the case for equality has been undermined by historical trends. Mutations of the capitalist economy, on the level of organization as well as production, and the disappearance of a really existing alternative, lent support to a new type of individualism. Drawing on Simmel’s distinction between the individualism of similarity and the individualism of distinction, the present phase can be interpreted as a radicalization and democratization of the individualism of distinction into an individualism of singularity. A social-liberal strategy, aiming at a reconciliation of liberty and equality, must take this new individualism on board and understand it as a social relationship, thus maintaining critical distance from neo-liberal ideology.
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Isaac Deutscher, raised in his youth to be a Talmudic scholar, instead became a communist. In 1958, he addressed the World Jewish Congress on the topic of “The Non-Jewish Jew.” There was a Jewish tradition – Deutscher began, citing Spinoza and Marx, Freud and Luxemburg and Trotsky – of breaking with Jewish tradition. Jews had always been restless and rootless, always lived on the borders of various heritages, languages, and cultures, at once in and apart from society. Victimized by religious intolerance and nationalist sentiments, Jews longed for a universalist Weltanschauung. It is true that “non-Jewish Jews” played a disproportionate role in the history of European Marxism. Yet Jews’ contributions to Marxism might be understood in a larger context: namely, that “non-Jewish Jews” have played a disproportionate role in the intellectual history of modern Europe much more broadly. This essay is an attempt to place the relationship between Jews and Marxism in a larger context – less the larger sociological context than the larger intellectual context of European modernity.
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The article discusses political processes in post-Soviet Russia from the perspective of the multiple modernities theory. A study of Russia’s political transformation on the basis of this approach allows us to reconsider the obstacles to democratization that existed in the 1990s and the socio-cultural preconditions for de-democratization in the 2000s. The author draws on Johann Arnason’s analysis of the Soviet model of modernity. From this perspective the Soviet model possessed only some civilizational traits and did not lead to a sustainable civilizational pattern. Nevertheless, remnants of that model and the imperial legacy of the Soviet period influenced Russian politics of the last two decades. The dynamics of democratization and de-democratization in Russia represent a case of path dependency which is both post-communist and post-imperial.
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The Austro-German population of Ireland in 1936 was 529. Approximately 25% of the adult male cohort were, or became, members of Hitler’s Nazi Party (NSDAP). A small cadre of senior figures in the party were active in recruiting new members as Nazi Germany’s fortunes rose from 1933 to 1939. Some 32 Germans and Austrians resident in pre-war Ireland have been identified as Nazi Party members, although a small number of these were exchange students rather than full-time residents. This paper examines the six NSDAP members who held senior positions in the Irish public service. As Irish state employees they were in a contradictory position: swearing loyalty to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich while attempting to hold down important jobs on the Irish state payroll. Dr. David O’Donoghue’s article scrutinises the activities of these six men, as well as explaining how they tried, by varying degrees, to serve two masters. The paper also examines their wartime and post-war lives.
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The conventional history of Europe, connecting the Enlightenment heritage with our time, makes a huge detour around the violent nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth one. The article explores the European peace utopias of 1815, 1918 and 1951, and their eventual loss of suggestive force, and argues that they link today’s global Europe to the post-Napoleonic world two hundred years ago. This connection, through a series of illusions and disillusions about the nature of politics, represents a different view on the nineteenth and twentieth century than the conventional teleological narrative about fulfilment of the Enlightenment promise of progress. The analysis of the bicentenary chain of shifts between postwar, prewar and war should not be read in terms of a teleology necessitating a new war; the point is, rather to draw attention to the fragility and openness of historical processes. The new narrative outlined here emphasizes that there was no necessity in the development towards today’s Europe; the story is full of alternatives, and highlights the role as well as the responsibility of human agency. No solution appears as a necessary result of impersonal forces, everything has depended, and continues to depend, on human choice.
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According to Duckitt’s two process theory (2001), right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation are different psychological dispositions, allowing to cope either with unpredictable, dangerous social world or a world seen as a place of continuous struggle for position. If so, while forming impressions about others, authoritarianism should direct attention to the communion related traits (in order to reduce unpleasant feelings through trust in others and group membership), whereas dominance should be connected to competence traits (to determine who is the competitor). In this research (91 university students) it was shown that authoritarianism increases inference of positive communion traits, while SDO decreases inferences of both positive and negative communion traits.. The results are discussed in terms of psychological needs behind each of the dispositions.
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Recent work has shown that stereotype suppression leads to depletion of regulatory resources. This effect is particularly likely to occur in people with low internal suppression motivation. In this research, we explored the impact of motivation-based prejudice reduction interventions. In two experiments, participants were randomly allocated to four conditions: thought suppression, thought suppression with induced internal or external motivation, and no-treatment condition. They performed a difficult logical and reasoning task, followed by the multi-prejudice scale task (Intolerant Schema Measure) to assess depletion. As compared with participants who did not suppress, participants who suppressed stereotype performed worse at the math task. However, participants with induced internal motivation to regulate prejudice performed better on the math task compared to participants who suppressed the stereotype. The same manipulations failed to increase explicit prejudice. These findings did not support the ego-depletion interpretation and offer evidence for an alternative explanation in terms of Brehm’s motivational intensity theory.
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