The Platonic Roots of Heidegger's Political Thought

Abstract

Heidegger's most notorious political text is the Rectoral Address on ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’, delivered in Freiburg in May 1933. This work is puzzling in that it manifests not ideology, but what Dominique Janicaud called an ‘exacerbated Platonism’. Accordingly, this article is an attempt to search for the roots of Heidegger's political views in his early work, and above all in the lecture courses on Plato and Aristotle delivered before the publication of Being and Time (1927), a book that still underpins the Rectoral Address. The investigation is in three stages: 1) an analysis of the political elements in Heidegger's thought before 1933; 2) a survey of the development of his political thought after 1933; 3) an examination of the prejudices involved in the Platonist approach to politics, with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt, who was a former student of Heidegger in Marburg.