Ulrich Arnswald

For Emmanuel Levinas, the death of the other is the "first death" and the fundamental ethical experience. He emphasizes that it is through the experience of the death of others that we develop a relationship with death. Thus, Levinas reverses the traditional perspective. Death breaks down the isolation of the self and makes existence pluralistic. It is the occasion for breaking out of one's own self-reference. The "death of the other" is the starting point of ethics, as it marks the beginning of an infinite responsibility of the self towards the other. This aspect of Levinas's work has only been considered from an ethical point of view to date. However, this is not the only conceivable one. Ethics and anthropology have areas of overlap. It is equally plausible to consider this aspect from an anthropological perspective. The article will do so using the Holocaust and the actions of the Nazis as examples.

The criticism of neoliberalism is omnipresent. The term is seemingly self-explanatory, but its original use in public has been forgotten. Its form originated in the international movement of ordoliberalism in the 1930s, which used neoliberalism to describe its distinction from laissez-faire capitalism. This conceptual confusion has created considerable consequential problems that overlay today’s debate on the future of the market economy. The fact that the neoliberalism of the ordoliberals is today equated by its critics with the capitalism of the libertarians raises questions. Since the economic dogma of Milton Friedman, who was the inspiration for the so-called Chicago Boys in Chile, whose economic policy was first captured by today’s negatively connoted term neoliberalism, this approach needs to be looked at more closely. Should the ideas of the Chicago school of thought substantially distinguish themselves from the other currents of economic liberalism, a solution to the confusion of terms could be possible, giving a new twist to the debate on the market economy. Such a clarifiation would be of fundamental importance for the ethical question of the social orientation of the economic order, since ordoliberalism was in turn the godfather of the social market economy. Furthermore, this would have consequences for applied political ethics in the context of political theories of justice, whose theoretical constructs reflect the existing economic order as a fact of experience.