scholarly journals The Response to COVID-19 by the Italian Populist Government: Is It Populism or Neo-Liberalism That Makes the Response to the Pandemic Inadequate?

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 336
Author(s):  
Leila Simona Talani ◽  
Fabiana De Bellis

The COVID-19 crisis caused unprecedented disruption in terms of human losses, economic damages, social isolation, and general malaise. It seems that, although the advice of the scientific communities to adopt rigorous measures of track and tracing, mass testing, and lock down was often considered at odds with economic performance, eventually it was precisely that kind of advice that avoided the economic debacle. This article will try and find out the reasons why Italy was more efficient and effective in implementing the measures suggested by national and transnational scientific communities. The article will do so by answering the following questions: (1) What are the political determinants of the different state responses to the pandemic? (2) Why have epistemic communities’ receipts to exit the COVID-19 crisis been ignored in some countries to follow a misguided economic logic? (3) Has the state response to the crisis anything to do with the importance of neo-liberalism and neo-liberal forces in the organization of the economy or have populist countries been less efficient than others as suggested in the recent literature on the subject?

1990 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 524-552
Author(s):  
Fred Dallmayr

Recent literature on Heidegger concentrates heavily on his (temporary) involvement in or collusion with Nazi ideology and policies. Without belittling the gravity of the issue, this article shifts the focus somewhat by invoking a distinction which recently has emerged (or reemerged) in political thought: namely, the distinction between “politics” and “the political” or between politics viewed as partisan ideology or policy making, on the one hand, and politics seen as regime or paradigmatic framework, on the other. The main thesis of the article is that Heidegger's promising contributions to political theory are located on the level of ontology or paradigmatic framework rather than that of ideological partisanship. While not neglecting the dismal intrusions of the latter plane, the article probes Heideggerian cues for a “rethinking of the political” by placing the accent on four topical areas: first, the status of the subject or individual as political agent; second, the character of the political community, that is, of the polity or (in modern terms) the “state”; thirdly, the issue of cultural and political development or modernization; and finally, the problem of an emerging cosmopolis or world order beyond the confines of Western culture. In discussing these topics, an effort is made to disentangle Heidegger from possible misinterpretations and to indicate how, in each area, his thought pointed in the direction of an “overcoming” of Western political metaphysics.


2018 ◽  
pp. 101-139
Author(s):  
David Francis Taylor

This chapter looks at William Shakespeare's Macbeth as a source for graphic satire. Given both its resonant depiction of regicide, atrocity, and criminality, and its sensational conjoining of the political and the fantastical, it is to be expected that Macbeth was a recurrent source for the period's graphic satirists. Between 1754 and 1835, at least sixty-two political prints cite the play in some manner: thirty-seven do so in extended or elaborate ways, and many others engage with it by means of brief but often complex intertextual gestures of the kind exemplified in Isaac Cruikshank's The Near in Blood, The Nearer Bloody (1793). The chapter then considers the largest and most prominent cluster of Macbeth prints, that is, parodies of the weird sisters. The weird sisters have long been the subject of scholarly fascination, but when looked at through the political and parodic lens of graphic satire, their history and status seems suddenly less familiar.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-431
Author(s):  
Chiel van den Akker

AbstractWe do not learn from the past nor from possible analogies between the past and the present. Rather we learn from representations of the past and the insights they offer, for those insights allow us to adopt the political and moral values that we need to plan a future course of action. It follows, so Frank Ankersmit argues, that aesthetics in its sense as a general theory of representation precedes ethics. This essay is concerned with this bold and important thesis. It will do so in the context of the politics of historical representation and the fact–value and subjectivity–objectivity distinctions. The subject was also dear to the heart of Ankersmit’s late American colleague Hayden White. Ankersmit is concerned with how historical representations support a future course of action. White, by contrast, was (also) concerned with how historical representations limit a future course of action since they cannot serve as a basis for utopian politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-68
Author(s):  
Juliette Ronsin

The objective of this article is to analyze the consequences of the political, social, and economic ruptures of Yugoslavia and France on the trajectories of Yugoslavs recruited by the Peugeot company in France after the the 1965 Franco-Yugoslav bilateral agreement on the employment of temporary labor. Using a monographic approach to the case of the employment area of Sochaux, it is clear that (post-)Yugoslav workers went through periods of upheaval and even disillusionment after their arrival in France. This study mainly deals with a generation of men born in the 1940s and 1950s and recruited by Peugeot from 1965 onwards, but also includes other members of the family and the plurality of generations. The history of Yugoslav immigration to France has rarely been the subject of research, although studying it makes it possible to analyze relations between a western country and a communist country and the consequences of the breakup of a country for emigrants living abroad. To do so, this article relies on archival sources (files on foreigners kept in the archives of prefectures, archives of associations, and the Peugeot company’s archives) and on interviews with former workers.


Author(s):  
D. E. Speliotis

The interaction of electron beams with a large variety of materials for information storage has been the subject of numerous proposals and studies in the recent literature. The materials range from photographic to thermoplastic and magnetic, and the interactions with the electron beam for writing and reading the information utilize the energy, or the current, or even the magnetic field associated with the electron beam.


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (4I) ◽  
pp. 321-331
Author(s):  
Sarfraz Khan Qureshi

It is an honour for me as President of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists to welcome you to the 13th Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Society. I consider it a great privilege to do so as this Meeting coincides with the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the state of Pakistan, a state which emerged on the map of the postwar world as a result of the Muslim freedom movement in the Indian Subcontinent. Fifty years to the date, we have been jubilant about it, and both as citizens of Pakistan and professionals in the social sciences we have also been thoughtful about it. We are trying to see what development has meant in Pakistan in the past half century. As there are so many dimensions that the subject has now come to have since its rather simplistic beginnings, we thought the Golden Jubilee of Pakistan to be an appropriate occasion for such stock-taking.


Author(s):  
Martin Loughlin

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt’s contribution to political jurisprudence. It approaches the issue through the concept of politonomy, a concept first alluded to by Schmitt but which he never developed. Politonomy seeks a scientific understanding of the basic laws and practices of the political. The chapter situates Schmitt within the German tradition of state theory and shows that his overall objective was to build a theory of the constitution of political authority from the most basic elements of the subject. It suggests that Schmitt occupies an ambivalent position in political jurisprudence and that this is because of his distrust of the scientific significance of general concepts. To the extent that he acknowledged the existence of a ‘law of the political’, this is found in Schmitt’s embrace of institutionalism in the 1930s and later in his account of nomos as the basic law of appropriation, division, and production.


Author(s):  
Ross McKibbin

This book is an examination of Britain as a democratic society; what it means to describe it as such; and how we can attempt such an examination. The book does this via a number of ‘case-studies’ which approach the subject in different ways: J.M. Keynes and his analysis of British social structures; the political career of Harold Nicolson and his understanding of democratic politics; the novels of A.J. Cronin, especially The Citadel, and what they tell us about the definition of democracy in the interwar years. The book also investigates the evolution of the British party political system until the present day and attempts to suggest why it has become so apparently unstable. There are also two chapters on sport as representative of the British social system as a whole as well as the ways in which the British influenced the sporting systems of other countries. The book has a marked comparative theme, including one chapter which compares British and Australian political cultures and which shows British democracy in a somewhat different light from the one usually shone on it. The concluding chapter brings together the overall argument.


Author(s):  
Yusra Ribhi Shawar ◽  
Jennifer Prah Ruger

Careful investigations of the political determinants of health that include the role of power in health inequalities—systematic differences in health achievements among different population groups—are increasing but remain inadequate. Historically, much of the research examining health inequalities has been influenced by biomedical perspectives and focused, as such, on ‘downstream’ factors. More recently, there has been greater recognition of more ‘distal’ and ‘upstream’ drivers of health inequalities, including the impacts of power as expressed by actors, as well as embedded in societal structures, institutions, and processes. The goal of this chapter is to examine how power has been conceptualised and analysed to date in relation to health inequalities. After reviewing the state of health inequality scholarship and the emerging interest in studying power in global health, the chapter presents varied conceptualisations of power and how they are used in the literature to understand health inequalities. The chapter highlights the particular disciplinary influences in studying power across the social sciences, including anthropology, political science, and sociology, as well as cross-cutting perspectives such as critical theory and health capability. It concludes by highlighting strengths and limitations of the existing research in this area and discussing power conceptualisations and frameworks that so far have been underused in health inequalities research. This includes potential areas for future inquiry and approaches that may expand the study of as well as action on addressing health inequality.


Itinerario ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Már Jónsson

On 2 January 1625, the English ambassador Robert Anstruther met with King Christian IV of Norway and Denmark and requested his participation in a union of Protestant states against Emperor Ferdinand II and the Catholic League in Germany. Within three days, King Christian proposed to contribute five thousand soldiers for one year, as part of an army of almost thirty thousand men. In early June, despite opposition from the Danish Council of State, reluctant to put a huge amount of money into foreign affairs, Christian decided to join what he called “the war for the defence of Lower Saxony”. He then headed an army of mercenaries southwards through Lower Saxony, secured all crossings over the river Weser and prepared to confront the Catholic forces. On 29 November, it was decided that Denmark would be in charge of military operations in Northern Germany, whereas England and the United Provinces would provide a monthly subsidy. The political and military prospects for Denmark were excellent, to say the least. It had the fourth strongest navy in Europe (after Spain and the two new allies), and only a few years before the Danish warships had been described by a French observer as “merveilles de l'océan”. A small standing army of two regiments had recently been established and Denmark was the fourth European state to do so after France, Spain and the neighbouring Sweden.


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