CONTINENTAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

While Continental philosophy has said much about the nature of politics and modern political institutions, it has not produced much political philosophy in the standard sense of evaluating policies or justifying institutions. That is, it has not been concerned with elaborating the principles necessary to justify the existing political and legal institutions, so much as examining and criticizing the very presuppositions of modern politics and society. This stance derives from the fact that the decisive influences have been two philosophers whose politics must be considered radical: Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. Both rejected modern political institutions as currently constituted and sought to provide the basis for a new kind of politics. For Marx it would be a politics freed from the dynamics of class domination and rule, while for Heidegger it would be a new way of “dwelling on the earth,” freed from the unthought presuppositions of Western metaphysics and rationalism. Such a critique of politics and political thinking is radical in the sense that it “goes to the root” not just of political institutions and their underlying norms, but to the very way in which modern society is organized, to its deepest structures of thought and its dynamic historical process. In both philosophers, there is a sense that something is deeply wrong with a whole complex set of ideas and practices that we might more generally call “modernity,” so that, under their influence, political thinking in Continental philosophy concerns the question of what is to be negated and preserved in modern ideas of reason and politics. A range of different positions on “modernity” as a philosophical problem still characterizes Continental political theory to this day, from Marx to Heidegger and Habermas to Derrida. For many different reasons, however, this radicalness about politics has become increasingly difficult to sustain, and much of Continental philosophy’s recent history represents a challenge to the Marxist and Heideggerian influence on political philosophy.