The Gift of Time and the Hour of Sacrifice: A Philosophical-Anthropological Analysis of the Deep Difference between Political Liberal and Populist Politics

George Orwell wrote a review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in which he made the following observation: “[H]uman beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.” Philip Stephens brought this observation of Orwell’s to my attention in a Financial Times article that sought to make sense of the rise of populist politics in Europe and the United States in our time; a development that came startlingly to a head with the British referendum that triggered Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in October 2016. My paper presented at the January Workshop in Luxembourg engaged with this passage from Orwell’s discussion of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Stephens’ reading of it in the Financial Times. It described or explained the difference between liberal and populist/fascist responses to times of crisis in terms of the difference between the liberal economy of the gift and the illiberal economy of sacrifice, and scrutinised the possibility of a stable distinction between these two economies with reference to especially Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida

The pitfalls of postoperative theatre to intensive care unit handovers: a review of the current literature

Postoperative handovers present a critical step in the management of intensive care unit (ICU) patients. There are many challenges in the transportation of unstable patients with complex medical histories from theatre to the ICU, and the subsequent transfer of responsibility for care from one group of caregivers to another. Communication between the providers of the handover report (anaesthetists, surgeons and theatre nursing staff) and receivers of the report (ICU physicians and ICU nursing staff) is often poor. The unstructured presentation of information, the noisy ICU environment, and discussions between healthcare workers from different disciplines at different levels of training adds to the burden of communication. The handover report may be seen as a sentinel event in the ICU patient’s stay. ICU staff use the handover process as an important source of information to coordinate management input from multiple disciplines. Despite its importance, the practice of a structured postoperative handover protocol in our region’s hospitals is non existent. The authors reviewed the current literature to better understand the challenges facing proper handover processes and suggest some interventional strategies

Factors influencing the catalytic activity of Fe-ZSM-5 during the catalytic conversion of N₂O

Zeolites have found widespread applications as acid catalysts for decades. By introducing transition metal ions in the cation position, the zeolite is transformed into a redox catalyst. The nature of the trivalent heteroatom influences the properties of the zeolite. Contrary to Al-zeolites, Fe-containing zeolites show redox properties, since Fe can easily change its oxidation state (Fe²⁺, Fe³⁺, or Fe⁴⁺). Catalytic function of isolated redox sites within zeolite cavities (or channels) may result in a material with specific redox properties (Kiwi-Minsker et al., 2003). The properties of transition metal exchanged zeolites have been studied from the 1960's onwards and the conversion of N₂O over Fe-Y zeolites has been studied by Fu et al. (1981) in late 1970's. In this study, the preparation of iron ZSM-5 zeolite catalysts by mechanochemical means and thermally induced solid-state ion exchange was studied. After grinding the NH4-Zeolite and ferrous chloride, no x-ray reflections characteristic of ferrous chloride are detected. After heating the sample to 120 and 200 °C reflections characteristic of ferrous chloride are visible but disappear upon further heating to 300 °C. No porosity is observed after grinding and heating up to 200 °C as a result of pore mouth blocking. Moreover, upon heating up to 500 °C porosity starts to develop with pore volumes and pore sizes slightly lower than those of the parent zeolite. From the thermogravimetric analysis it is evident that the ion exchange takes place during calcination from 150 and 420 °C in agreement with the literature. In the second part of the study commercial Fe-ZSM-5 catalyst samples with different N₂O conversion activities (in the presence of H₂O and NO at 425 °C), ranging between 70 and 90 % (high, mid and low activity) are studied and characterised. The effect of temperature during calcination of the plant produced and laboratory calcined extrudate catalyst material was investigated. Panov et al. (1996) reported in the literature that the Fe²⁺ is oxidised to Fe³⁺ in the presence of N₂O forming what they called the α-oxygen, a form of active surface oxygen, with the evolution of molecular nitrogen. During the conversion, two surface α-oxygen atoms migrate, combine and desorbs as molecular oxygen from the surface. The α-oxygen forms between 200 and 350 °C and desorbs as molecular oxygen above 350 °C (Taboada et al., 2005). In this study, no correlation to N₂O conversion activity could be found for the α-oxygen content and correspondingly the concentrations of the respective iron oxides and iron hydroxides in the Fe-ZSM-5 samples

The ombre spirituel of Statehood in the European Union: Reflections on Nikos Scandamis’ Essay L’Etat dans l'Union européenne: Passion d’un grand acteur

Nikos Scandamis’ essay L’Etat dans l'Union européenne: Passion d’un grand acteur suggests the EU has flayed the Westphalian Leviathan. It has laid its dark insides bare to relentless scrutiny. But perhaps it could only do so by appropriating these dark insides for itself. The ombre spirituel that Schmitt associated with sovereign statehood does not seem to have disappeared like the rest of nationalistic mists before the rising sun of European integration. It has simply shifted along with the pretentions of this rising sun. The market place has in broad daylight become the source of a new shadow. This response to Scandamis argues that the CJEU, the principal agent of EU integration since its decisions in Costa v ENEL and Van Gend & Loos, has simply taken over the many ombres spirituels of the Member States in the form of one cloudy jurisprudence that allows for little democratic transparency. True, the EU does not claim to be a sovereign state as yet and it is often said that its goal is also not to become one. In the meantime, however, it pursues its governmental goals in the manner of a sovereign state under the ombre spirituel offered by the obscure jurisprudence of its highest judiciary

Rawls, Habermas and Liberal Democratic Law

peer reviewedThe theoretical undertakings of both Rawls and Habermas pivot on an aspiration to explain (and surely to promote through explanation) the Enlightenment ideal of reason reflected in the idea of liberal democracy. The thoughts developed in my book The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law (2020, CLDL hereafter) pivot on the same aspiration. What obviously distinguishes the theoretical undertaking in CLDL from those of Habermas and Rawls, is the greater emphasis in CLDL on the precariousness of this ideal of reason. This article first gives a short exposition of some of the main lines of thought developed in CLDL. It then moves on to an analysis of Rawls’ theory of political liberalism and Habermas’ discourse-theoretical explanation of the legitimacy of modern law through the prism of the key elements of CLDL highlighted in the first part of the article

When Time Breaks: The Hiatus of Refugee Status

“In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’ We ourselves call one another ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants.’” Already here, in the first sentence of Arendt’s essay “We Refugees,” does the hiatus of refugee status become manifest. A divide already opens up between different habits of reference. Refugees refer to themselves in one way, non-refugees refer to them in another, and so does the projected or desired possibility of one world in which both refugees and non-refugees might find accommodation, split into two very different realities. Consciousness of the split is of course solely that of the refugees, at first. Initially, the hiatus is theirs only. Others – non-refugees – remain soundly oblivious to this fundamental split until such time as it brutally breaks into their world too, for instance, when the corpse of a four-year old child washes up on a beach, and washes up on every doorstep in a succession of media waves. And then the hiatus is suddenly everywhere and no one remains exempted. As the last sentence of Arendt’s essay contends forcefully, the split begins with the refugee status of some, but it ends with the bigger split of a world that begins to falter and fall apart: “The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.” The comity of European peoples show all signs of going to pieces again today. When the comity of peoples goes to pieces, it is not only common space that cracks up, but also common time, the common time that warrants common space according to Kant’s Schematismuslehre. It is ultimately this breaking of time – the hiatus of time – that Arendt thematises elsewhere with reference to “the desolate aimless wanderings of Israeli tribes in the wilderness and the dangers which befell Aeneas before he reached the Italian shore.” “[T]his hiatus,” she continues, obviously creeps into all time speculations which deviate from the currently accepted notion of time as a continuous flow.” (Arendt On Revolution, 205). This text is also a supplementary discussion of my reviews of two recent monographs on Arendt. See: RECENT ARENDT SCHOLARSHIP: Review of The Wandering Thought of Hannah Arendt by Hans Jörg Sigwart, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-137-48214-3, 147 pages (abbreviated as WT below), and Rightlessness in an Age of Rights. Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants by Ayten Gündoğdu, New York: Oxford University Press: 2015, 298 pages, forthcoming in Constellations

Irresponsible Ordoliberalism and the Imperialistic Fantasy That We All Might Become Good Germans One Day

What follows is a reply to the critical responses of Malte Dold and Tim Krieger, Josef Hien, Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Emmanuel Pierre Guittet, Filipe dos Reis and Ben Kamis to my 2016 New Perspectives intervention ‘When One Religious Extremism Unmasks Another: Reflections on Europe’s States of Emergency as a Legacy of Ordo-liberal De-hermeneuticisation’ (hereafter ODH – for “Ordoliberal Dehermeneutisation”). My reply will be divided into two main parts. The first part will focus on what I will call ‘a disciplinary instruction not to think.’ The second will focus on what I will call ‘constructive invitations to think further.’ The first part focuses on Dold and Krieger’s arguments. The second focuses predominantly on those of the rest of the interlocutors listed above. What ultimately emerges out of this second section is a reflection on the need to consider both order and disorder as constitutive elements of human freedom, and to sustain the tension between them. Of concern, here, I argue, is a freedom that refuses to be subjected conclusively to any “order of liberty” that a liberal government in general and an ordoliberal government in particular may wish to establish

When One Religious Extremism Unmasks Another: Reflections on Europe’s States of Emergency as a Legacy of Ordo-Liberal De-hermeneuticisation

This intervention explores the extent to which the technocratic de-hermeneutisation of European political economical thinking, of which the ordoliberal economic principles of the Freiburg school in Economics are a key ingredient - may be contributing to the social conditions under which religious radicalisation typically takes place, or may at least be failing to provide significant responses on the basis of which religious radicalisation can be countered