For others, withdrawal, nihilism, materialism.

For some time, the historical nihilism, abused entertainment and other undercurrents emerge.

Now for some people, that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism.

And I've assembled a sampling of work that all share a kind of productive nihilism that's used in the service of creating a particular special effect.

So far, he has done nothing to counteract the legal nihilism against which he himself has spoken. But maybe he will in the course of this trial, which resembles a personal vendetta even more than the first one did.

Terrorism is the product of a fusion within a part of Islam of religious extremism, thwarted nationalism, and what Dostoyevsky called nihilism. Our challenge is to understand the root causes of these forces and to make distinctions among them.

But it s theoretical nihilism, Cochrane argues, to ascribe these excessive fluctuations to irrationality as Krugman does. What Krugman is really after ( though he can t quite come out and say this ) is for the government to take charge of the allocation of capital.

In Dostoievski s great novel Crime and Punishment , Raskolnikov is pushed to committing his crime not only by his nihilism and rebelliousness, but also by poverty. His social identity is not the same as Mailat s, his spiritual entity is drastically different, but his double crime is no less abominable.

Elites and protesters fellow citizens should respond conscientiously and creatively to moral indignation, comprehending that it is ultimately about an affirmation of liberal democracy, and not about all out revolution, let alone nihilism. And they should seek to calm anger and defuse outrage, which can be a serious threat to liberal democracy.

When Dmitry Medvedev was elected as Russia s president a little more than a year ago, he promised to do away with the legal nihilism in Russia. Although he was a close confidante of Vladimir Putin and probably was able to assume presidential office exclusively for that reason, many dared to hope that he would stop the vendetta against Khodorkovsky and all those who had been close to him.

If today s protest movements are based on righteous indignation, the lack of concrete demands should not be a problem shared norms (and the policies that would follow from them) can still broadly be assumed. But if they are being driven by rage, then a lack of clear goals might merely produce more anger and frustration, which in turn could eventually lead to physical violence and some kind of political nihilism.