No doubt, there are successful moderate right-wing conservative parties all over Europe. Their names may be different, but they have one thing in common: they grow stronger while forcing government to alter policies and solve problems caused by illegal immigration and tendencies toward more centralization within the European Union. Therefore, it becomes more and more difficult to eliminate public debate about those and other topics.
However, there is one big exception: Germany. A party comparable to the Austrian Freedom Party still doesn’t exist there. The five “big players” that are represented in the Bundestag (the national parliament) and in the Landtag (the federal state parliaments) are either left-wing or at the center. One example is the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is part of the current government coalition together with the Free Democratic Party (FDP). One may assume that only a small minority of the electorate sympathizes with the agenda of staunchly conservative groups. But surveys conducted last year strongly refute this assumption.
Whatever the ostensible theme of the September 2012 Telos conference, it seems the real one was the mess in the West. Has the West lost its pizzazz, gravitas, ability to guide? Have we become too secular, merely rational, and thus paradoxically ungrounded? Or are we not rational enough, our politics and economics still beset by emotional, quasi-religious beliefs? 
To presume that individual interests precede political action is not only to place the proverbial cart before the horse, it is to formulate a theory of social agency based on a belief in sequential phenomena sans justification for the particular sequence proposed. In “On the Rationality of Democratic Choice,” Alessandro Pizzorno argues that the system of political actions and interests is an annular one, which is why utilitarian and rational choice theories lack sufficient explanatory value. He proposes the goal of affirmation of socio-political identity is an alternative explanation of political action that does not speak the traditional language of costs and benefits, as that language is housed within a universalizing framework that doesn’t reflect reality. 
Psychology is the study of human thought and processes, and all around the world people have brought different perspectives together for a better and more complete understanding of it all. The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios is an English translation of the 1938 German psychological writer Ernst Jünger who wrote on his perspective of the mind and what we seek in life, touching on the nature of intuition. Revered throughout the literary and psychological international communities, The Adventurous Heart is a strong read for those who want a better understanding of the man who saw much in his time of turmoil.
It would be simplistic to argue that behind the Marxist critiques of capitalist society there was only an objective intention simply to improve its effectiveness and avoid the political complications found in capitalist society. Despite its strict scientific tone, Marxism still carries a heavily moral intention. This is what Georg Lukács comes to argue in this essay on culture. In his analysis of capitalist cultural structure and its many differences from capitalist reality, Lukács points to what he regards as the ultimate goal behind communism: a new cultural order. 
