The Crisis of German Historicism: The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: 109 (Ideas in Context, Series Number 109)
Cambridge University Press, 11/28/2019
EAN 9781107471511, ISBN10: 1107471516
Paperback, 244 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
Language: English
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.
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.