Postmetaphysics and democracy

Political Theory

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 1993, Pages 101-127

  Dallmayr, Fred ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23944442604     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591793021001006     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. See C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
2. Compare in this context Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” in History and Truth, translated by Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 247-70; also my “Politics and Power: Ricoeur's Political Paradox Revisited,” in David Klemm, ed. Meanings in Texts and Actions: The Questions of Paul Ricoeur (forthcoming).
3. See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); also Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). For a review and assessment of Voegelin's later opus, compare my “Voegelin's Search for Order,” in Margins of Political Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 73-94.
4. Voegelin, The New Science, 67-68, 75-77. As he states (p. 70): “If now the Platonic terminology be adopted, one may say, therefore, that the anthropological principle in a theoretical interpretation of society requires the theological principle as its correlate. The validity of the standards developed by Plato and Aristotle depends on the conception of a man who can be the measure of society because God is the measure of his soul.”
5. See KaiJtorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 87-97, 207-32, 451-95. Compare also Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, translated by J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
6. Voegelin, The New Science, 38, 42-43, 107, 121, 126, 132, 134. In the same vein, Hobbes is said to have outdone the gnostic immanentization by a “radical immanence of existence which denied the eschaton” (p. 179). At one point in the course of his indictment, Voegelin notes disarmingly, “Obviously one cannot explain seven centuries of intellectual history by stupidity and dishonesty” (p. 121).
7. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); the French original appeared as Essais sur le politique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986). For an earlier work, compare Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society; Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, edited by John B. Thompson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
8. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 11-12.
9. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 232, 236, 240-41.
10. Regarding the Spiegel interview (of 1966), see “Only a God Can Save Us,” translated by William J. Richardson, in Thomas Sheehan, ed. Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), esp. 55; for the rectorial address, see Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” translated by Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics 38 (1985): 470-80; and for an instructive discussion of the address, see Graeme Nicholson, “The Politics of Heidegger's Rectorial Address,” in Proceedings: Heidegger Conference (18th Annual Meeting, Stevens Point, WI, 1984), 196-219. Heidegger's vulnerability to populism appears to be captured by Lefort who offers an explanation “as to why so many contemporary philosophers- and by no means only minor figures - have become compromised in the adventure of Nazism, fascism or communism: The attachment to the religious which we noted earlier traps them in the illusion that unity and identity can be restored as such, and they see signs of its advent in the union of the social body.” See Democracy and Political Theory, 233.
11. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65; Frankfurt-Main: Klostermann, 1989), 14-17, 21-22, 33-34.