Promise and Failure : Nationalism in the Interwar Thought of Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin

This article analyses the role played by the concept of nation in the interwar writings of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). It contends that, although these conservative thinkers were drawn in different ways to the anti-progressive potential of nationalist ideas, the centre of their political and theoretical horizons in that period is occupied by the problems of political unity and authority. Therefore, their nationalism is fundamentally determined by, and instrumental to, their adherence to a monistic and authoritarian conception of the state. This, in turn, leads them to embrace, though not without some reservations, the solutions put forward by the emergent far-right 'strongmen' to the interwar crisis of liberal democracy. Each author tested in his own way the porous borders between conservatism, nationalism, and fascism - a topic whose scholarly and political relevance is far from being exhausted.Peer reviewe

Democracy and the Body Politic : From Sovereign Power to Indeterminacy

As a political technology, camps materialize the ominous potential of modern democracy understood as sovereign power. Indeed, although one usually associates the massive projects of segregation, reeducation and extermination carried out in and through camps to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, the more puzzling truth is that the reasoning justifying them is not incompatible with the concept of popular sovereignty. The popular collective subject in whose name divine-right monarchs were deposed, and whose constituent power brought forth new, more egalitarian political institutions, can also turn out to be a force that closes in on itself and fosters a quest for transparent, homogeneous identity that does not shy away from employing the most ruthless coercive means. In this paper, I turn to Claude Lefort’s concept of indeterminacy as an alternative reading of the modern democratic endeavour that preserves a self-critical awareness of democracy’s ominous side. My contention is that Lefort’s concept proves to be fruitful in two ways. On the one hand, it allows us to grasp why the camp – and, for that matter, the populist strongman – is an ever-present possibility of democratic politics. On the other hand, and most importantly, it equips us with the tools to challenge these sovereigntist drifts from a specifically democratic perspective.Non peer reviewe

The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy

By re-examining the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, this book offers a reflection on the nature of modern democracy and the question of its legitimacy. Pedro T. Magalhães shows that present-day elitist, populist and pluralist accounts of democracy owe, in diverse and often complicated ways, an intellectual debt to the interwar era, German-speaking, scholarly and political controversies on the problem(s) of modern democracy. A discussion of Weber’s ambivalent diagnosis of modernity and his elitist views on democracy, as they were elaborated especially in the 1910s, sets the groundwork for the study. Against that backdrop, Schmitt’s interwar political thought is interpreted as a form of neo-authoritarian populism, whereas Kelsen evinces robust, though not entirely unproblematic, pluralist consequences. In the conclusion, the author draws on Claude Lefort’s concept of indeterminacy to sketch a potentially more fruitful way than can be gleaned from the interwar German discussions of conceiving the nexus between the elitist, populist and pluralist faces of modern democracy. The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy will be of interest to political theorists, political philosophers, intellectual historians, theoretically oriented political scientists, and legal scholars working in the subfields of constitutional law and legal theory

Methodological nationalism and migration studies : historical and contemporary perspectives

This chapter approaches the issue of methodological nationalism in the social sciences from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, with particular emphasis on migration studies. First, it offers a historical overview of the problem and delves into its early intellectual history by examining Eric Voegelin’s reflections on ‘national minds’ in the interwar period This anticipates many questions and challenges that future critics of methodological nationalism would consider to be central. Second, we examine the persistence of nation-state-centred concepts and methods in the context of migration and refugee studies. Third, the chapter discusses different conceptual tools for overcoming the insufficiencies of methodological nationalism, weighing both their fruitfulness and their limits. Notwithstanding the ineradicability of nation-state-centred frameworks in social science as well as in the self-perceptions of migrant populations, we show that it is possible to conceive of both ‘community’ and ‘knowledge’ in non-national terms to investigate the possibilities of knowledge produced through experiences of displacement.Peer reviewe

Scattered Clouds in the Horizon of Consensus: Attitudes of Portuguese Parliamentary Elites Towards Europe Before and After the Crisis

In this article we analyze the evolution of the attitudes towards Europe of Portuguese parliamentary elites in the context of the sovereign debt crisis. Our analysis relies on interviews to a total of 227 MPs in the context of the ENEC project in 2014 and of the Intune Project in 2009 and 2007. Our principal finding is that an important gap has risen between the attitudes of the MPs and of the masses. Indeed, while the Portuguese are becoming increasingly less pro-European, this is not the case of their deputies. We show that, in 2014, the percentage of deputies that believed that EU membership benefited the country has decreased a little, but it stays as high as 89%. Our data, however, show that MPs now exhibit lower levels of trust towards the European institutions. Interestingly, the drop in the levels of trust towards EU institutions does not affect all institutions equally: trust towards the European Parliament remains constant regarding 2007, whereas the levels of trust in the remaining two institutions decrease. Finally, we show that it is in the Socialist Party (PS) that there is the steepest decline in the level of overall trust, which is rooted in declining levels of confidence in the European Commission. Given that PS has traditionally portrayed itself as the most pro-Europe of the Portuguese parties, this is solid evidence of a growing discontent with the European Commission

Das Constituições dos Regimes Nacionalistas do Entre-Guerras, de Pedro Velez

UID/CPO/04627/2013publishersversionpublishe

Editorial: Conservative dispositions in continental thought

nonPeerReviewe

Face-to-Face and distance education modalities in the training of healthcare professionals: A quasi-experimental study

This study evaluates the effectiveness of an 18-month-long course in Family Health. The course was offered in two modalities, distance education and face-to-face learning. Dependent variables were as follows: self-regulation of learning, procrastination, the perception of self-efficacy, and academic performance. The course was attended by 27 health professionals (i.e., physicians, nurses, and dentists) working in the Brazilian Unified Health System. The investigation followed a quasi-experimental design. Participants in the two modalities achieved similar academic performance; and globally no statistically significant differences were found regarding the study variables. Findings, notwithstanding their importance for professional training in health, are preliminary and further research is needed on the effectiveness of training modalities distance education and face-to-face learning (e.g., focus groups, interviews, online monitoring). The educational implications of this study are discussed and analyzed considering specificities and differences of each modality.We wish to thank the clinical psychologist Ana Carolina Faedrich dos Santos (Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre), for the help on the statistical analysis. We thank for Open University of the Unified Health System (UNASUS), Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre (UFCSPA), and Institute of Research and Education (HMV) for the promotion course in Family Health offered in modalities distance education and face-to-face learning. We also thank CAPES for the support of the Pro-Health Education Project, Project 39, with daily funding for collection and participation in an event during the research

A scan for genes associated with cancer mortality and longevity in pedigree dog breeds.

Selective breeding of the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) rigidly retains desirable features, and could inadvertently fix disease-causing variants within a breed. We combine phenotypic data from > 72,000 dogs with a large genotypic dataset to search for genes associated with cancer mortality and longevity in pedigree dog breeds. We validated previous findings that breeds with higher average body weight have higher cancer mortality rates and lower life expectancy. We identified a significant positive correlation between life span and cancer mortality residuals corrected for body weight, implying that long-lived breeds die more frequently from cancer compared to short-lived breeds. We replicated a number of known genetic associations with body weight (IGF1, GHR, CD36, SMAD2 and IGF2BP2). Subsequently, we identified five genetic variants in known cancer-related genes (located within SIPA1, ADCY7 and ARNT2) that could be associated with cancer mortality residuals corrected for confounding factors. One putative genetic variant was marginally significantly associated with longevity residuals that had been corrected for the effects of body weight; this genetic variant is located within PRDX1, a peroxiredoxin that belongs to an emerging class of pro-longevity associated genes. This research should be considered as an exploratory analysis to uncover associations between genes and longevity/cancer mortality

Do Sleep Disturbances Predict or Moderate the Response to Psychotherapy in Bipolar Disorder?

This study examined whether sleep disturbance predicted or moderated responses to psychotherapy in participants who participated in STEP-BD, a national, multi-site study that examined the effectiveness of different treatment combinations for bipolar disorder. Participants received either a brief psychosocial intervention called collaborative care (CC; n=130), or intensive psychotherapy (IP; n=163), with study-based pharmacotherapy. Participants (N=243) were defined as current (past week) short sleepers (<6 hours/night), normal sleepers (6.5-8.5 hours/night), and long sleepers (≥9 hours/night), according to reported average nightly sleep duration the week before randomization. Sleep disturbances did not predict the likelihood of recovery nor time until recovery from a depressive episode. There was no difference in recovery rates between IP versus CC for normal sleepers, and medium effect sizes were observed for differences in short and long sleepers. In this study, sleep did not play a major role in predicting or moderating response to psychotherapy in bipolar disorder