Global climate change has been characterised as the crisis of reason (Val Plumwood), imagination (Amitav Ghosh) and language (Elizabeth Rush), to mention some. The 'everything change', as Margaret Atwood calls it, arguably also impacts on how we aesthetically perceive, interpret and appreciate nature. This article looks at philosophical theories of nature appreciation against global environmental change. The article examines how human-induced global climate change affects the 'scientific' approaches to nature appreciation which base aesthetic judgment on scientific knowledge and the (...) competing 'non-scientific' approaches which emphasise the role of emotions, imagination and stories in the aesthetic understanding of environment. The author claims that both approaches are threatened by global climate change and cannot continue as usual. In particular, he explores aesthetic imagination in contemporary times when our visions about environment are thoroughly coloured by worry and uncertainty and there seems to be little room for awe and wonder, which have traditionally characterised the aesthetic experience of nature. Finally, he proposes that art could stimulate environmental imagining in this age of uncertainty. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the problems of European political identity and European identity as a whole conception and as a foundation for European integration. Before 24 February 2022, European political identity had been in crisis. The contradictions between the EU member states seemed to be hardly resolvable. The Russian aggression against Ukraine gave a strong impetus to the formation of European identity. However, it is still a negative incentive for unity and solidarity rather than cohesion around positive values, (...) as well as from the outset the European integration was caused by devastating World War II as a negative experience, which should never be repeated. The text makes use of methods peculiar to the philosophical sciences, i.e. critical textual analysis, historical-analytical and comparative methods. (shrink)

Western societies today are coming unmoored in the face of an earth-shaking ethical and cultural paradigm shift. At its core is the question of what it means to be human and how we are meant to live. The old answers are no longer accepted; a dizzying array of options are offered in their stead. Underpinning this smorgasbord of lifestyles is a thicket of unquestioned assumptions, such as the separation of gender from biological sex, which not so long ago would have (...) been universally rejected as radical notions. In the spring of 2019, a group of Orthodox Christian scholars drawn from a wide variety of academic disciplines met together to offer responses to the moral crisis our generation faces, elaborating upon its various forms and facilitating a fuller understanding of some of its theological and philosophical foundations. In doing so they offer support to all those who question the claims that are so forcefully insisted upon today--a clarity that will aid them in standing up and resisting trends that have already shown to be the cause of great suffering and unhappiness. (shrink)

This original, contemporary synthesis between phenomenology and Marx’s late work begins from Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology to chart a new program for Socratic phenomenology in the current confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity.

Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations (UN), political leaders and health professionals to recognise that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackled together to preserve health and avoid catastrophe. This overall environmental crisis is now so severe as to be a global health emergency. The world is currently responding to the climate crisis and the nature crisis as if they were separate challenges. This is a dangerous mistake. (...) The 28th Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change is about to be held in Dubai while the 16th COP on biodiversity is due to be held in Turkey in 2024. The research communities that provide the evidence for the two COPs are unfortunately largely separate, but they were brought together for a workshop in 2020 when they concluded that: ‘Only by considering climate and biodiversity as parts of the same... (shrink)

The financial crisis was caused by the complex, constantly growing web of regulations designed to constrain and redirect modern capitalism. This complexity made investors, bankers, and perhaps regulators themselves ignorant of regulations previously promulgated across decades and in different “fields” of regulation. These regulations interacted with each other to foster the issuance and securitization of subprime mortgages; their rating as AA or AAA; and their concentration on the balance sheets (and off the balance sheets) of many commercial and investment (...) banks. As a practical matter, it was impossible to predict the disastrous outcome of these interacting regulations. This fact calls into question the feasibility of the century-old attempt to create a hybrid capitalism in which regulations are supposed to remedy economic problems as they arise. (shrink)

The global ecological crisis is upon us. From global warming to the long-term implications of ocean acidification, air and water pollution, deforestation, and the omnipresent dangers of nuclear technology the future of our planetary home is threatened. Yet in the midst of the unfolding crisis, the conventional ideologies of the twentieth century and their representations of nature remain unchallenged by both the defenders of capitalism and capitalism's most radical critics. The Distortion of Nature's Image illustrates how the anti-naturalism (...) of late capitalist society, in which nature is reified into the emptiness of mere matter, simply a thing to be dominated, is subtly complemented by the failure of the Left to go both beyond the historic limitations of Marx's ninteenth-century viewpoint and beyond anarchism's blind faith in "natural law." However, an alternative for comprehending nature and the ecological crisis as historical and social phenomena remains open in the dialectical naturalism of Western Marxism and Murray Bookchin's social ecology. By examining in closer detail how Bookchin's social ecology politicizes the concept of nature, as well as how precursory models in Western Marxist thought provide a foundation for this, Damian Gerber illustrates how the notion of an ecological society remains a decisively political question. (shrink)

This paper concerns the character of argumentation in inner dialogue, i.e. dialogue that an individual keeps to herself in her own mind. The problem of inner dialogue research is the methodological difficulty connected with its externalization. In the text, the activity of crisis diary-writing is suggested as a way of naturally externalizing inner decision-making. By adopting a pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation, the text attempts to characterize crisis diary-writing as an argumentative activity type. The argumentative characterization of crisis (...) diary-writing involves identifying the institutional point and implemented genre as well as distinguishing the empirical counterparts of the four stages of critical discussion. For illustration, the paper draws its examples from Anne Frank’s Diary. As a result of the characterization achieved in the paper, it is concluded that crisis diary-writing is a conventionalized deliberative activity type preconditioned by implicit norms governing the conduct of argumentation. (shrink)

The Ukrainian–Russian conflict of 2013–2017 is characterized as ‘hybrid’ warfare, with a crucial role of informational component. Using ideological discourse analytic tools, this article demonstrates how two prominent Russian TV channels shaped the persuasive message, creating strong unity and mobilizing a high level of support among the national audience. Based on legitimation and de-legitimation patterns, Channel One and Russia-1 built ideologically polarized opposition between ‘Our’ and ‘Their’ sides of the conflict. The wide range of editorializing tools, socio-cultural and historical Soviet-time (...) constructs, and references to gay culture served to promote one group and to debase the opposition. Close institutional ties between government and media in Russia sustain multiplicity and intertextuality of ‘general line’, thus eliminating discordant interpretations. The article shows strong evidence that the analyzed TV news programs present a typical illustration of ideological discourse, exploited by the Russian government in order to achieve its political goals. (shrink)

From 1773 until 1776, Smith remained in London ‐adding finishing touches to WN, whose publication was timed to seize Parliament's attention, and influence Members to support a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the American colonies. North America offered a major point of application for free‐market theory, and if Smith could win supporters, there was some hope of ending the cycle of violence induced by efforts to preserve the old colonial system involving economic restraints and prohibitions. Smith advocated the creation (...) of an Atlantic union, which would accommodate economic dynamism, develop new political institutions, and allow a place for the revolutionary spirit to be exercised. He foresaw that the pace of American economic growth would inevitably guarantee that leadership would pass from Britain to the former colonies. On an entirely different front at this period, Smith, in commenting on a proposal for reform in university medical education, revealed the strength of his endorsement of competition and detestation of monopolies of any kind. (shrink)

It is an open question when procreation is justified. Antinatalists argue that bringing a new individual into the world is morally wrong, whereas pronatalists say that creating new life is morally good. In between these positions lie attempts to provide conditions for when taking an anti or pronatal stance is appropriate. This paper is concerned with developing one of these attempts, which can be called qualified pronatalism. Qualified pronatalism typically claims that while procreation can be morally permissible, there are constraints (...) on when it is justified. These constraints often concern whether an individual is motivated to procreate for the right reasons. For instance, if someone is not sufficiently concerned with the child’s future welfare, the qualified pronatalist will say that procreation is not justified. Moreover, David Wasserman says that this concern forms a role-based duty. That is, prospective parents have special duties to be concerned for the child’s future welfare by virtue of the role they occupy. In this paper, I argue that a proper examination of a prospective parent’s role-based duties entails that more is needed to justify procreation. Bringing a new person into the world leaves fewer resources for people who already need them, and the current size of the human population is unsustainable from a planetary point of view. Therefore, even if there is nothing wrong with procreation per se, the external condition of overpopulation, and its ensuing public health issues, plausibly gives rise to a role-based duty that prospective parents must account for when deciding whether to procreate. (shrink)

We analyze the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the stock market performance in the post-global financial crisis period. A new measure of social responsibility by Thomson Reuters, called the ESG Combined Score, is used. As a novel feature of our analysis, socially responsible engagement is divided into the strategic activities closely related to the examined companies’ core business and the remaining secondary activities. The results of the fixed effects regression show a positive and statistically, as well as economically, (...) significant impact of the strategic activities on the corporate stock market performance of companies. This impact is up to 103% higher compared to the secondary activities. The empirical results suggest that if companies aim to increase their share prices via the corporate social responsibility channel, they should strategically select their socially responsible initiatives. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a health crisis of a scale unprecedented in post-war Europe. In response, a large amount of healthcare resources have been redirected to Covid-19 preventive measures, for instance population-wide vaccination campaigns, large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing, and the large-scale distribution of protective equipment to high-risk groups and hospitals and nursing homes. Despite the importance of these measures in epidemiological and economic terms, health economists and medical ethicists have been relatively silent about the ethical rationales underlying the (...) large-scale allocation of healthcare resources to these measures. The present paper seeks to encourage this debate by demonstrating how the resource allocation to Covid-19 preventive measures can be understood through the paradigm of the Rule of Rescue, without claiming that the Rule of Rescue is the sole rationale of resource allocation in the Covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

We investigated the significance of an economic crisis for organizations’ ethical behavior, employees’ unethical behavior, and association. To capture the effect of the “2008’ World economic crisis,” we compared the behaviors of organizations and employees’ unethical behavior during a crisis with their behavior in more favorable circumstances before and after the crisis. We used structural equation modeling to analyze answers collected from 2024 employees in Slovenian organizations between 2006 and 2016. The results showed significant growth of (...) organizational engagement in ethical behavior, despite the crisis in the middle of the observed period. The employees’ unethical behavior was significantly less acceptable in crisis compared to before the crisis, while after the crisis, its acceptability increased again, despite not significant. The aggregate sample revealed a significantly negative influence of employee’s unethical behavior on organizations’ ethical behavior that was not significantly different across the considered periods. The research suggests the need to manage the organization’s ethical behavior in times of economic downturn, like in the present COVID 19. Additionally, managers need to devote more attention to prevent employees’ unethical behavior and its influence on organizations’ ethical behavior. (shrink)

This paper examines the crisis in the nursing profession in Western industrial societies in the light of Max Weber's theory of rationalisation. The domination of instrumental rational action in modern industrial societies in evident in the field of modern medicine. The burgeoning mechanistic approach to the human body and health makes modern health care services increasingly devoid of human values. Although the nursing profession has been influenced by various changes that took place in health care during the last few (...) decades (for example greater reliance on technology), the underlying values of the nursing profession still emphasise a broad definition of the well-being of patients. Hence, in recent years the irrational consequences of growing technological medicine in North America has resulted in a serious crisis in the nursing profession. To resolve this crisis the authors propose a reorganisation of modern health care services on the basis of a new paradigm which is compatible with both the health care needs of the people and the main emphasis in education and training of the nursing profession. (shrink)

Virtually everyone knows that Aristotle sometimes lies. His account of the pre-Socratics in the first book of the Metaphysics leaves out of account everything that does not suit his scheme, the gradual disclosure of the four causes, compelled, as he says, by the truth itself. Heraclitus’ fire is there but not Heraclitus’ logos. Parmenides’ Eros is there but not Parmenides’ mind. This triumphant progress, however, comes abruptly to an end at the end of Book I, and Book II begins the (...) crisis of first philosophy. It is the very triumph of Book I that brings about the crisis of Book II, and it is Book II that is first philosophy: it consists of nothing but questions. These seventeen questions could not have been formulated had not Book I preceded it and confirmed that wisdom was the theoretical knowledge of cause. The knowledge of cause, however, does not establish first philosophy; it merely discloses what still must be known, being. Being emerges as the problem of first philosophy through the non-problematic status of the four causes. The emergence of being as the problem is not adventitious to the four causes. There lurks within the four causes one cause that is not an answer but a question, and the question is, What is? Formal cause is the only cause that appears among the categorial predicates, and of these it is the only one that is a question, and whose formulation includes in itself that which the question is about. To ask about being is to acknowledge belatedly that it has come to light as a question about which one asks questions. If, then, first philosophy is first only the second time around, where are we to begin? Aristotle has another name for first philosophy. He calls it theology. Theology is a tainted word. It is first used, as far as we know, by Plato, and he puts it in the mouth of Adimantus, whom Socrates is questioning about what myths are to be told the future guardians when young. Theology, then, is theomythy. It precedes any true account of the gods. Socrates’ theology is set in opposition to the stories of Homer and Hesiod. It is one set of myths against another. Hesiod’s myth, however, is not Hesiod’s but the Muses’, and the Muses tell Hesiod that they speak lies like the truth and they pronounce, whenever they wish, the truth. Before philosophy there are lies like the truth. Before philosophy, we say, there is poetry. Poetry has already divided lies from truth and put them together again. Poetry is not at the beginning but after the beginning, when the speaking about the speaking about things has become part of the speaking. This double speak puts things at a distance from us. The things the Muses speak about are the beginning. We are not at the beginning when we hear from the Muses about the beginning. At the beginning are the Muses who sing about the beginning. (shrink)

ABSTRACT During the middle decades of the twentieth century, American Catholic scientists experienced a sense of crisis owing to the paucity of scientific research performed either by individual Catholics or in Catholic institutions of higher learning. In 1953 the Rev. Patrick Yancey, S.J., the chairman of the biology department at a small Jesuit college and a member of the newly created National Science Board, led efforts to establish a national organization of Catholic scientists. Subsequently known as the Albertus Magnus (...) Guild, this organization attempted both to improve Catholics’ scientific performance and to refute the widely held notion among non‐Catholic Americans that Catholicism was inherently hostile to science. By reflecting on Yancey’s career as an educator and scientist and on the history of the guild, this article seeks to deepen our understanding of twentieth‐century Catholic science education and reveal the ways in which Catholic scientists approached the issues surrounding the interaction of science and religion. (shrink)

The Anthropocene crisis is frequently described as the rarefaction of resources or resources per capita. However, both energy and minerals correspond to fundamentally conserved quantities from the perspective of physics. A specific concept is required to understand the rarefaction of available resources. This concept, entropy, pertains to energy and matter configurations and not just to their sheer amount. However, the physics concept of entropy is insufficient to understand biological and social organizations. Biological phenomena display both historicity and systemic properties. (...) A biological organization, the ability of a specific living being to last over time, results from history, expresses itself by systemic properties, and may require generating novelties The concept of anti-entropy stems from the combination of these features. We propose that Anthropocene changes disrupt biological organizations by randomizing them, that is, decreasing anti-entropy. Moreover, second-order disruptions correspond to the decline of the ability to produce functional novelties, that is, to produce anti-entropy. (shrink)

The Danish Golden Age of the first half of the nineteenth century endured in the midst of a number of different kinds of crisis -- political, economic, and cultural. The many changes of the period made it a dynamic time, one in which artists, poets, philosophers, and religious thinkers were constantly reassessing their place in society. This book traces the different aspects of the cultural crisis of the period through a series of case studies of key figures, including (...) Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen Martensen, and Søren Kierkegaard. Far from just a historical analysis, however, the book shows that many of the key questions that Danish society wrestled with during the Golden Age remain strikingly familiar today."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This book provides a history of the ethnic persecution of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and their disputed ethnic and national identity. It focuses on how the crisis has morphed into a geopolitical encounter among Bangladesh, China, India, and Myanmar. It further explores the moral, ethnographic, and public policy issues in the humanitarian response to the crisis of the Rohingya people. The volume analyzes the question of citizenship for the Rohingyas by analyzing historical documents and interviews which chronicle the (...) status and identity of the community and their past involvement in the government and politics of Myanmar. The authors focus specifically on the changing geopolitical context of state formation in South Asia and the tense relationships between Myanmar and its neighbours - Bangladesh, China, and India. The book examines the alliances and disputes in the South and Southeast Asia region, which are predicated on economic and strategic gains, and their impact on the Rohingya crisis. It also looks at the failure of bilateral and multilateral negotiations among these countries to adequately address or alleviate the plight of the stateless Rohingyas. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of international studies, peace, human rights and conflict studies, sociology, ethnic studies, border studies, migration and diaspora studies, discrimination and exclusion studies, public policy, and Asian Studies. It will also be useful for professionals working in the media, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and policy makers, as well as general readers interested in the history of the persecution of the Rohingya people. (shrink)

The activity of any socio-economic system is associated with the instability of the external environment and the presence of negative factors influencing its functioning, which, in turn, can provoke the emergence of crisis phenomena, slows down the process of development of the organization and makes it less effective. The prerequisites for this may be factors that are formed not only in the external, but also in the internal environment. This issue is of particular relevance today, in the context of (...) the existence of the consequences of the pandemic in the world. Many years of experience in the activity of socio-economic systems in a market environment shows that this problem remains relevant to them even now in today's postmodern world. Successful overcoming of crisis situations depends on the effectiveness of anti-crisis management and management of anti-crisis potential, the type of crisis. After all, each crisis situation, which is formed under the influence of specific factors, has a clear characteristic and belongs to a certain category. With this information, you can form a clear plan of management actions to effectively overcome the crisis in socio-economic systems. But in order to determine what types of crises affect the activities of socio-economic systems, it is first of all necessary to determine the types of crises in socio-economic systems. The article analyzes the main features of the functioning of today's socio-economic system and the impact of such post-pandemic consequences on it. (shrink)

This article summarizes and contextualizes the vast unpublished correspondence between Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, two of the most prominent twentieth-century scholars of Renaissance Humanism. It details how Baron and Kristeller came to take their first steps in Renaissance scholarship in Germany before political circumstances forced them into exile; it recounts the story of their emigration and their strategies for survival in Italy, Britain, and the United States; it reveals the impact of the American academy on their intellectual journeys (...) and the extent to which they self-consciously stood for a methodology on the verge of extinction. Most important, the correspondence provides us with a personal etiology of the rebirth of Renaissance studies in the postwar period and of the concrete genesis of some of the books that brought it about. (shrink)

The crisis of western civilization is a crisis of public philosophy. This is the charge of Public Philosophy and Political Science, a stunning new collection of essays edited by E. Robert Statham Jr. Vividly cataloging the decay of the moral and intellectual foundations of civic liberty, the book portrays a generation of Americans alienated from institutions built on public philosophy. The work exposes the failure of America's political scientists to acknowledge and understand this alarming crisis in the (...) American body politic. The distinguished contributors examine the evolution of public philosophy; the inextricable relationship between politics and philosophy; and the interplay between public philosophy, the constitution, natural law, and government. They reveal the dire threat to deliberative democracy and the fundamental order of constitutional society posed by public philosophy's waning power to refine, cultivate, and civilize. The work is an indictment of a society which has discarded a way of life rooted in natural law, democracy and the traditions of civility; and is a denunciation of an educated elite that has divorced itself from the standards upon which public philosophy rests. It is essential reading for philosophers and political and social scientists seeking to resurrect the standards of American public life. (shrink)

Background “Crisis military deployment” was defined as a situation in which military personnel are suddenly ordered to duty to support an operation away from their home station and in a potentially dangerous environment. As a result of complex changes in the global political and economic landscape, military nurses are assuming an increasing number of crisis military deployment tasks. Moral distress has been widely studied among civilian nurses. However, little is known about the moral distress military nurses experience during (...) military deployments in crisis. Aim This review discussed the current state of research on the phenomenon, unique factors, specific sources, and measurement tools. Methods The scope of the study was defined using a framework developed by Arksey and O’Malley. Following English databases were searched: PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, and Embase, using MeSH terms and free word combinations; furthermore, Chinese databases: CNKI and CBMDisc, were explored using thematic terms from inception until January 20, 2023. Data were selected and defined by the inclusion and exclusion criteria and independently screened by two researchers. Ethical considerations The scoping review adhered to sound scientific practice and respected authorship and reference sources. Results Finally, 21 articles were included in the review. The moral distress of military nurses in crisis military deployments had unique and specific sources and reported positive aspects. The deployment environment and nature of the mission, responsibilities and obligations of military nurses, and the limited rights of patients were unique factors. Specific sources included third-party intervention, military triage, resource allocation, futile care, care of the enemy, and return to the battlefield. Military nurses in deployment reported positive aspects. They grow in their inner strength, build deep friendships and gain a greater sense of professional value. Conclusion It is important to understand the unique factors and specific sources of moral distress faced by military nurses in crisis military deployments and to identify the positive aspects. This research will help prepare military nurses for future deployments in advance by providing useful information to mitigate and eliminate moral distress. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted the psychosocial functioning of children and families. It is important to consider adversity in relation to processes of positive adaptation. To date, there are no empirically validated multi-item scales measuring COVID-related positive adaptation within families. The aim of the current study was to develop and validate a new measure: the Family Positive Adaptation during COVID-19 Scale. The sample included 372 female and 158 male caregivers of children ages 5–18 years old from the United Kingdom, (...) the United States, Canada, and Australia, who completed measures in May 2020. Participants responded to a 14-item survey indexing a range of perceived coping and adaptation behaviors at the beginning of the pandemic. An exploratory factor analysis yielded an optimal one-factor solution comprised of seven items related to family cohesion, flexibility, routines, and meaning-making. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated measurement invariance across female and male caregivers, demonstrating that the factor structure, loadings, and thresholds did not vary by caregiver sex. There was evidence for concurrent validity with significant bivariate correlations between the Family PACS scores and measures of caregiver positive coping, parenting practices, couple satisfaction, and family functioning, but not negatively-valenced constructs. Findings inform our conceptualization of how families have adapted to adverse pandemic-related conditions. Further, we provide preliminary support for the Family PACS as a practical tool for evaluating positive family adaptation during this global crisis, with implications for future widespread crises. (shrink)

The problem of the crisis situation of Western European culture at the beginning of the 19th century became the central problem in the ideological heritage of R. Guenon. In his reflections, the French thinker turns to the consideration of the role and significance of traditions in the life of a person and society. R.Guenon fills the term “tradition” with his semantic load, making this term a key element in his philosophy. The reflexive space of Guénon’s philosophy is the sphere (...) of the philosophy of religion and it is difficult to attribute it to the sphere of religious philosophy. This difficulty lies in the departure of the French thinker from the traditions of the Christian worldview to the ideological foundations of Eastern mysticism, agnosticism and theosophical views. Perhaps it is these preferences of Guénon that lead the researchers of his work to the idea that he is, in a certain sense, the “forerunner” of the postmodern era in Europe. Tradition and the crisis of traditions for the philosopher are considered as the main subject of study. The scale of historical and philosophical analysis is taken by the thinker without embarrassment as wide as possible. Ultimately, the very crisis of culture for Guenon can and must serve as a transition to a new stage in the development of culture. In this new stage, a syncretic creative renewal of world religions on the basis of the Eastern mysteries will take place. The cyclic concept of the author’s history does not retain its traditional connection with the Christian understanding of the future, the loss of the Christian eschatological understanding of man. the Renaissance is declared a break point with the traditional understanding of being. For a philosopher, tradition is not reduced to folk custom. And already at this stage, we are witnessing Guénon’s attempt to give the established philosophical terms their own sound, fitting them to his concept and esoteric context. (shrink)

This paper situates the subprime crisis in the context of the performance of the American economy over the last twenty-five years. The restructuring of the US economy is briefly reviewed, followed by an examination of some of the contradictions of the neoliberal model. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the reasons behind stagnant investment, and how the US finance-led accumulation-régime has become dependent upon, and threatened by, credit-creation delinked from the financing of fixed-capital formation. I argue that while the (...) defeat of the remnants of the New-Deal/Civil-Rights liberal-democratic coalition has provided the political context for the bold re-assertion of the prerogatives of capitalist owners, the neoliberal model has not provided a path out of problems of stagnation and growing debt-dependency that presently plague the US economy. Further, I argue that evidence suggests that the post-1982 restoration of profitability that underpinned the relative improvement of US economic performance has peaked, and that compelling historical and theoretical reasons exist to expect that the profit-rate will decline in the coming decade. This will introduce additional stresses on the current debt-structure of the US economy, triggering a period of prolonged crisis and economic dislocation. The conclusion is that the US economy faces the spectre of a protracted crisis associated with the reassertion of the falling rate of profit. (shrink)

This book examines the U.S economy from 1967 to 2011 and utilizes a new method to predict the future of the economy as far ahead as 2030. Projections using estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Census are used to further project personal income, personal income annual change, and disposable personal income to 2030.

The growing cultural complexity in the face of new immigration waves influences the public understanding of religious diversity. The two central questions of this article are as follows: first, ‘how much religious difference and of what kind is compatible within Europe?’ and second, ‘to what extent can Muslim diversity be integrated into Europe?’. This article undertakes an investigation of these questions and explores the extent to which discourses on religious diversity imply boundary making and aim at limiting the religious freedom (...) of Muslims. Empirically, I scrutinize press coverage between 2009 and 2010, the years in which the minarets ban entered the sociopolitical arena of European public debate. The methodology adopts a social network analysis to uncover semantic macro-structures and elicit common discourses in the press of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. Subsequently, discourse analysis of relevant samples is applied to examine textual strategies used to legitimate inclusion or exclusion of religious difference. (shrink)