The concept of ‘nihilism’ is ambiguous and has had and continues to be attached to several different usages. This special Focus primarily looks at the ways in which ‘nihilism’, in and following the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, has been understood as specifically tied to a crisis of European culture or civilisation, and has come to be politicised in conjunction with the National Socialist and Fascist movements in Germany and Italy during the twentieth century. Specifically, the individual articles deal with the connection between an understanding of nihilism and what it entails for the question concerning political responsibility. This introductory article presents this thematic, introduces the other contributions, and attempts to situate these debates on nihilism in the context of processes of secularisation. The article retrieves three major themes in relation to the critiques surveyed in this special Focus: nihilism as a crisis of beliefs and values, as an appropriation of religious elements into ideological grand narratives, and as the unshackling of an instrumental approach towards reality, and argues that all of them remain relevant to contemporary debates.

In Nietzsche, ‘European nihilism’ has at its core valuelessness, meaninglessness and senselessness. This article argues that Nietzsche is not replacing God with the nothing, but rather that he regards ‘European nihilism’ as an ‘in-between state’ that is necessary for getting beyond Christian morality. An important characteristic of a Nietzschean philosopher is his ‘will to responsibility’. One of his responsibilities consists of the creation of the values and the concepts that are needed in order to overcome the intermediate state of nihilism. For prevailing over nihilism in science, Nietzsche suggests drawing on philosophy for the creation of values and drawing on art in order to create beautiful surfaces that are based on these values. He regards science as a cultural system that rests on contingent grounds. Therefore, his work is concerned with the responsible construction of the narratives of science in such a way that they enhance agency and promote a life-affirming future.

The aim of this article is to describe the connection of the concepts of nihilism and responsibility in the writings of Karl Jaspers. The article starts with his early writings in the late 1910s and traces his use of nihilism until the late 1950s. Jaspers first defines nihilism in a general, anthropological sense. It is essential to the human condition, which involves questioning everything. However, as his critique of contemporary society evolves, nihilism is treated as the impetus behind concrete threats such as National Socialism and the Second World War, as well as the post-war nuclear arms race.

This essay discusses the philosopher Karl Löwith’s critique of the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Friedrich Gogarten. My aim is twofold: first, I want to reconstruct Löwith’s thesis in his 1935 article on Schmitt’s ‘occasional decisionism’ (updated to include a critique of Gogarten in 1960), together with a reading of some central texts by Schmitt and Gogarten; second, I want to raise some critical points regarding Löwith’s claims through these readings. While I agree with Löwith that aspects of Schmitt’s and Gogarten’s thought helped hastening the nihilistic tendencies they themselves claimed to counter, I believe that his diagnosis of their decisionism as nihilism misses important nuances in their work, nuances crucial to the problematization, historicization and philosophical analysis of nihilism. Ultimately, I find that the main point of contestation between Löwith and Schmitt/Gogarten is not whether the latter two affirm modern meaninglessness, but rather whether history can and should be invested with meaning in the first place.

This essay considers Heidegger’s 1933–34 seminar ‘On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State’ as an attempt to develop an anti-nihilist political philosophy based on human finitude and qualitative difference. I examine Heidegger’s views on the relation between people and state, the role of a leader, and the nature of political space. Heidegger distinguishes human existence from the natural world and argues that a people can attain its full, distinctively human Being only through its state, which is to be ruled absolutely by the soaring will of a born leader. He also offers an account of political space that distinguishes between the local homeland and the ‘interaction’ that connects it to a broader territory. I relate these ideas to some other texts by Heidegger and sketch an Arendtian critique of them.

This article deals with the figure of Julius Evola, philosopher and well-known freelance political commentator both during and after Italy’s Fascist dictatorship. My analysis of his intellectual production and political role in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s is a case study that focuses on both continuity and discontinuity of ideological issues in the crucial historical period between the Fascist regime and the establishment of neo-fascism in post-war Italy. Special attention will be paid to unchanging elements in Evola’s philosophy, such as criticism of modern society, rejection of faith in progress, reference to traditional values as reaction to nihilism and belief in the existence of a spiritual hierarchy. A central issue is the ideological influence that Evola exercised on a young generation of neo-fascists in Italy after the Second World War, based on the intention of offering them new rules of conduct in a post-nihilist world. It is exactly this phenomenon that enables us to put in question the declared apolitìa of Evola.

The current financial crisis in the Eurozone has put the debate on EU integration back on the table. Yet, how does the debate on EU integration, particularly the arguments and ideals used in it, actually influence the process of EU integration? This article wishes to provide some food for thought by arguing the debate’s irrelevance in furthering or hindering the EU integration process. It does so by discussing the role of the debate’s arguments in shaping EU integration and by comparing the EU debate with the one had by the founding fathers of the US. The article shows the debate is beside the point largely because most steps in EU integration are driven by circumstances, events, or national interests, that even when one argument seems decisive it is likely to be elevated over others by circumstances, and that none of the debate’s arguments hold an intrinsic value over others.

While demographers have long been concerned with population increases, recent significant declines in fertility also warrant concern. So far, however, most researchers have focused on the causes of lower fertility rather than its consequences. This study makes a theoretical contribution by proposing a new conceptual framework, which suggests that growing up with fewer siblings is associated with more participation in voluntary associations. Using General Social Survey (GSS) from the US, the relationship between sibship size and participation in voluntary associations is empirically tested. It is found that there is a negative relationship between sibship size and participation in voluntary associations among American adults who have at least four siblings. These findings have implications for researchers who seek a better understanding of the consequences of declining sibship size, not only in the US but also in Europe. Specifically, these results have implications for several countries in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, regions that have experienced ‘the lowest-low fertility’ in the last two decades.

This article examines the increasing competition in the academic market between conventional terms such as postcolonial and anglophone literature and their cognates, and the newly current term world literature. Even in postcolonial studies circles, world literature is increasingly taken to refer not only to ‘the best ever written’, as before, but to literature produced within and in response to a globalizing world. The paper explores the different valences of this shift, and the tensions and contradictions it has generated within the wider anglophone literary field.

This paper aims to explore the nature of digital culture research, and the fitting methodology. Although it is still felt to be a novelty, it is not so different from the more general domain of Cultural Studies. The aim of research for both domains is meaning, or the challenge to understand the dynamics of the encoding and decoding process. Both domains endorse a wide variety of subjects, although typically the concrete methodology of Cultural Studies still remains restricted to qualitative approaches. The question of quantitative data and their analysis is highlighted in digital culture, and we should consider both its opportunities and limitations for the research at hand. In our reflection, Cultural Studies research emerges as a performative enterprise, and this is one of its unique distinctions as a research domain.

The downfall of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union was at first considered by sociologists as a matter of transition from a dictatorial to a democratic regime. As a result, they inferred an affinity between the ongoing processes in the states constituting part of the Soviet Empire and the process of democratization occurring in Latin American or Southern European states. Shortly afterwards, however, the disparity between the various processes became obvious, when in some of the post-Soviet states the dictatorial regime lingered on, while others returned to a dictatorial regime after having been democratic in the past. Thus, sociologists have, in fact, no guidelines to account for the regime changes in these states, and it is also not clear what type of regime developed during Yeltsin’s presidency and what type of regime is developing in Russia under Putin.

Rus, whither are you speeding to? Answer me. No answer. The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy; the roaring air is torn to pieces and becomes wind; all things on earth fly by and other nations and states gaze askance as they step aside and give her the right of way. (Nikolai Gogol)

Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (Winston Churchill)

A person’s image of a foreign country is often not related to an actual encounter, but limited and one-sided based on the environment of the person’s native land. Consider, for example, the Russian elite perception of the West in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great’s reign shook Russia’s traditional society and led to the spread of promiscuity and general immorality. Consequently, for many Russians, whether or not they traveled, the West, epitomized by France, was a place of erotic pleasures and easygoing life. By the beginning of the nineteenth century some members of the Russian elite started to question the political system of their native land. For some of them, like Peter Chaadaev, the West stood as a symbol of the ideal political institutions and Russia for the dead end of history.