The Crisis of German Historicism

Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-1-107-09303-4
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 512 g

Reihe: Ideas in Context

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German-Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a common intellectual formation in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Keedus, Liisi

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; 1. The untimely generation; 2. The problem of politics in Arendt's and Strauss' early writings; 3. History and political understanding: an ambivalent symbiosis; 4. Liberalism and modernity: rethinking the question of the 'proud'; 5. Retrieving the problem of theoria and praxis: the antagonisms; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Keedus, Liisi
Liisi Keedus is a research fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at University of Helsinki. She is affiliated with Tallinn University and the Boccaccio Intellectual History Programme at the European University Institute, Florence.