Volume 26, Issue 2

This essay re-considers Karl Mannheim’s notion of democratic behaviour in the context of mass society. Although the term ‘mass society’ seems archaic, it is still the precondition of democracy today. Mannheim conceptualized mass society as irrational, disintegrating Great Society and presented the remedy of Planning for Freedom to counter the crisis of mass democracy. In his remedy Mannheim advocated social education that fosters citizens’ democratic interaction, and the keywords of his education were ‘integrative behaviour’ and ‘creative tolerance’. The similar orientation of his remedy can be found in much more contemporary critiques of deliberative democracy. Iris Marion Young’s ‘communicative democracy’ was a version of her democratic interaction in a complex, large-scale mass society. Young’s notion of ‘reasonableness’ has substantial affinity with Mannheim’s integrative behaviour, both of which require the democratic attitude of hearing the other side and the readiness to self-transform. Mass society theory has relevance for contemporary democratic theory.

This paper aims to establish which factors influence whether people in eastern/central European countries decide to continue in paid work or retire. The situation in Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Slovakia in 2010 is analysed. In order to pursue this aim, the following objectives were set: firstly, to analyse previous research on the topic, secondly, to evaluate factors influencing people’s decisions on whether to continue in paid work or retire in selected eastern/central European countries, and, finally, to conclude. Secondary analysis was conducted in order to pursue the research aim. Sources of data include European Social Survey Round 5 (2010) data, Eurostat, and MISSOC. Descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression were used to analyse the data. The extent to which a person is willing to engage in work on reaching the legal age of retirement is analysed in relation to economic situation, state of health, and working conditions.

This paper looks at the research results of research into the risky behaviour of Slovak children on the Internet, implemented in late 2013 and 2014 by a research team at the Centre for the Prevention of Risky Virtual Communication, Palacký University in Olomouc. In this article we focus on a key part of the research—cyberbullying from the perspective of victims and attackers. The paper describes the most common forms of attacks Slovak children are exposed to and also focuses on role-switching from victim to attacker which occurs fairly frequently among the Slovak population. The article also looks at the most common Internet services and communication platforms which are exploited in attacks.

The article considers human enhancement from the perspective of liminality. It defines the concept of liminality, introduced by ethnologist van Gennep in an attempt to generalise the rites of passage. It shows how, thanks to Turner, this concept has spread beyond anthropology to characterise the many situations ‘betwixt and between’ associated with transitioning from the original social structure to the new one. The article points out that, by definition, liminal situations break down traditional structures; hence, polemical debates on whether to allow human enhancement cannot be conducted from the position of existing normative standards. It argues, on the contrary, that these must be fundamentally expanded so as to reflect the current transitional phase from treatment to enhancement and that preparations must be made for the policies and institutions that will deal with the consequences. Otherwise, we will face threat of a new kind of totalitarianism.

This paper investigates the meaning of conscience in providing healthcare and Slovak healthcare workers’ lived experience of conscience. It draws on data from semi-structured interviews with eleven healthcare professionals. The data was analyzed using a phenomenological hermeneutic interpretation. Two main themes relating to the lived experience of conscience were derived—preserving one’s conscience integrity, by satisfying one’s conscience in order to sustain it, using defense mechanisms for protection, following one’s inner conviction, and respecting the patient’s individuality and having a troubled conscience in relation to external factors, medical procedures and options, and demands by the authorities. The results are discussed in relation to the literature.

This study analyzes the “sick-lit” narrative phenomenon, a story writing genre rooted in self-harm and suicide, which seems to be gaining remarkable popularity amongst adolescents. This success is a symptom of young people’s need to address the issue of death. The qualitative research was composed of two parts: the first explored the ambivalent representation of sick-lit on the internet, where two opposing factions argue about its educative usefulness vs. its potentially dangerous copycat effect. The second part investigated six novels and their representations of self-harm, death, sufferance and suicide. The analysis confuted the idea that sick-lit may be a positive instrument for making adolescents aware of mortality and showed the need to transform the Werther risk effect into the Papageno possibility by exploring the content of these books with adolescents in death education courses.

There is a significant lack of psychological research on death-as-a-state thinking and expectations. This study aimed to map that unexplored terrain, using qualitative methodology to provide information about what people picture and feel when they think about what comes after death. We investigated conceptions of death, initial associations with the word death and polarity of feeling in death thoughts in 52 young Czech adults. We identified three main types of belief about what happens once we die: conceptions of a specific form of transcendence that comes in multiple shapes, mostly based on an eclectic combination of motifs from various eschatologies; conceptions of non-specific forms of transcendence based on a belief in continued existence in forms that are hard to imagine; conceptions of nothingness after life and for all eternity.

This paper is a critical analysis of some controversial questions concerning the principle of the ethical neutrality of the state, which is one way modern political and legal orders can respond to the challenges and unresolved problems associated with the fact that members of modern ethical pluralistic societies hold different and sometimes mutually inconsistent axiological beliefs and conceptions about the good and ways of life. The principle of the ethical neutrality of the state requires the state to withdraw from a politics of mutually competitive axiological beliefs and ways of the good life and occupy ethically neutral ground and seek solutions to the issues of righteousness and rights which concern all members of a pluralistic society. In particular, the author of the paper analyses a particular kind of relativization of this principle, which arises when the state identifies with a particular prevailing morality or truths of a dominant religion and then, from this normative position only “tolerates” to a certain extent the different values and ways of life pursued by others. The author also attempts to clarify some aspects of this issue by considering how the morally controversial issue of the rights of homosexual couples is understood in Slovakia.

This article will explain and critically examine Hannah Arendt’s concept of worldliness with the aim of clarifying its limitations when it is used in the context of the social sciences, particularly where understanding and contributing to solving the problem of the forced displacement of people are concerned. Arendt defines “worldliness” as “having a world” in the double sense of having a tangible world of references and a political world. Her ideas regarding the worldliness of tribes and stateless people will be discussed and criticized, together with her avoidance of considering the relevance of oral history and oral resources and her position on human rights. Finally, this article proposes that social scientists require a broader conception of worldliness, in which intangible resources like shared oral narratives, virtual networks or shared views of the homeland are not dismissed, and can even serve as a basis for fighting for political and social rights.

In the present article I shall argue that human emotion is multifaceted and has a cognitive dimension in virtue of its intricate connections with beliefs, memories, imagination, and other products of human rationality. Human emotion also has a social and political dimension. When we think about fear we cannot characterize it as a mere stimulus-response phenomenon: it is, due to its cognitive facet, more complex and related to our ideas about survival and well-being. This leaves fear exposed to political rhetoric, and thus to political manipulation. Fear can be aroused, guided and nourished amongst the population, giving rise to a biopolitics of fear. In this article, I will consider the heuristics and biases that lead people to evaluate risks mistakenly, and governments to consequently act erroneously. I will also consider how these psychological mechanisms are exploited by social entrepreneurs in order to achieve their own goals, such as reinforce in-group bonds, generate a sense of crisis or keep hold of power. I shall argue that we must be alert to certain kinds of political discourse that pose a threat to democratic society.