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Summary
This book offers a collection of essays in contemporary political philosophy from a wide range of Continental viewpoints. The authors include some of the most prominent European and European-oriented philosophers and political thinkers of our day.
Two sections out of four focus on the debate between prescriptive and descriptive types of political thinking. On the prescriptive or normative side, Karl-Otto Apel, Robert Paul Wolff, Robert Spaemann, Hans Jonas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard discuss current forms of legitimating political life via some ultimate grounding. On the descriptive or phenomenological side, Bernhard Waldenfels, Michel Henry, William J. Richardson, Jurgen Link, and Vincent Descombes argue that an understanding of praxis is always implied as one reaches insights into the life-world; there is no need to either construe or set normative standards for action.
The remaining two sections deal with transcendental and institutional types of political philosophy, respectively. Manfred Riedel, Stanley Rosen, Thomas Seebohm, and Ludwig Siep develop Kant's search for "a priori" conditions in the public realm; explicitly or implicitly, they confront the ancient Greek with the modern Enlightenment conceptions of life in public. Lastly, Agnes Heller, Alain Touraine, Reinhart Koselleck, and Bertram Schefold put to work many ways of looking at the life of our institutions.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On Judging and Its Issue
Reiner Schürmann
Part I. A Transcendental Philosophy of Politics
Chapter 1. Transcendental Politics? Political Legitimacy and the Concept of Civil Society in Kant
Manfred Riedel
Chapter 2. Man's Hope
Stanley Rosen
Chapter 3. Kant's Theory of Revolution
Thomas Seebohm
Chapter 4. Person and Law in Kant and Hegel
Ludwig Siep
Part II. A Normative Philosophy of Politics
Chapter 5. Normative Ethics and Strategical Rationality:The Philosophical Problem of a Political Ethics
Karl-Otto Apel
Chapter 6. Notes for a Materialist Analysis of the Public and the Private Realms
Robert Paul Wolff
Chapter 7. Remarks on the Ontology of "Right" and "Left"
Robert Spaemann
Chapter 8. Ontological Grounding of a Political Ethics: On the Metaphysics of Commitment to the Future of Man
Hans Jonas
Chapter 9. Notes on Legitimation
Jean-Fançois Lyotard
Part III. A Descriptive Philosophy of Politics
Chapter 10. The Ruled and the Unruly: Functions and Limits of lnstitutional Regulations
Bernhard Waldenfels
Chapter 11. The Question of Life and Culture from the Perspective of a Radical Phenomenology
Michel Henry
Chapter 12. Contemplation in Action
William J. Richardson
Chapter 13. Collective Symbolism in Political Discourse and its Share in Underlying Totalitarian Trends
Jürgen Link
Chapter 14. The Socialization of Human Action
Vincent Descombes
Part IV. An Institutional Philosophy of Politics
Chapter 15. An Imaginary Preface to the 1984 Edition of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Agnes Heller
Chapter 16. Social Movements, Revolution and Democracy
Alain Touraine
Chapter 17. Toward a New Economic Style in Our Society?
