Recent studies of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism have often presented Heidegger's philosophy as a forerunner to his political involvement. This has occured often to the detriment of the highly complex nature of Heidegger's relation to the political. Heidegger and the Political redresses this imbalance and is one of the first books to critically assess Heidegger's relation to politics and his conception of the political. Miguel de Beistegui shows how we must question why the political is so often displaced in Heidegger's writings rather than read the political into Heidegger. Exploring Heidegger's ontology where politics takes place after a forgetting of Being and his wish to think a site more originary and primordial than politics, Heidegger and the Political considers what some of Heidegger's key motifs - his emphasis on lost origins, his discussions of Holderlin's poetry, his writing on technology and the ancient Greek polis - may tell us about Heidegger's relation to the political. Miguel de Beistegui also engages with the very risks implicit in Heidegger's denial of the political and how this opens up the question of the risk of thinking itself. Heidegger and the Political is essential reading for students of philosophy and politics and all those interested in the question of the political today.

Martin Heidegger's ties to Nazism have tarnished his stature as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The publication of the Black Notebooks in 2014, which revealed the full extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism and enduring sympathy for National Socialism, only inflamed the controversy. Richard Wolin's The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger has played a seminal role in the international debate over the consequences of Heidegger's Nazism. In this edition, the author provides a new preface addressing the effect of the Black Notebooks on our understanding of the relationship between politics and philosophy in Heidegger's work. Building on his pathbreaking interpretation of the philosopher's political thought, Wolin demonstrates that philosophy and politics cannot be disentangled in Heidegger's oeuvre. Völkisch ideological themes suffuse even his most sublime philosophical treatises. Therefore, despite Heidegger's profundity as a thinker, his critique of civilization is saturated with disturbing anti-democratic and anti-Semitic leitmotifs and claims.

This book is an important and timely contribution to the debate concerning the relation between Heidegger′s philosophy and his political affiliations to Nazism. But it is more than that: it is also a study, by the leading sociologist in France today, of some of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical discourse. Drawing on his distinctive methods of analysis, Bourdieu argues that philosophical discourse - like all discourse - is the result of an interaction between an expressive drive and the censorship generated by the social field in which it is produced. Hence, to understand Heidegger′s work, it is necessary to reconstruct the logic of the philosophical field in early twentieth-century Germany and its relation to the broader social and political fields of the Weimar Republic. In this way Bourdieu is able to shed fresh light on Heidegger′s philosophical language and orientation, while steering clear of the partisan judgements adopted by those critics who charge him with an apologetics for Nazism or those who seek to redeem him at any cost. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, and social and political theory, as well as to anyone interested in the controversy surrounding Heidegger and his links with Nazism.

This book traces Heidegger's influence on a variety of political movements to fundamental ambiguities in his understanding of everydayness and nihilism.

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) challenged earlier thinking about the basic structures of human being, our involvement in practical affairs, and our understanding of history, time, and being. Blitz clarifies Heidegger’s discussions, offers alternative analyses of phenomena central to Heidegger’s argument, and examines the connection between Heidegger’s position in Being and Time and his support of Nazism. As Blitz explains in his new afterword, “When I began to study Martin Heidegger nearly fifty years ago, my goal was to explore the meaning of Being and Time for political philosophy. I wished to discover what it might offer for clarifying the grounds on which the basic concepts and alternatives of political philosophy rest. Would a close reading of it help us understand the questions of justice, freedom, the common good, natural rights, virtue, human happiness, and the philosophic life? These questions are as important today as they were then.” Although Blitz often questions and criticizes Heidegger’s views, he presents them with scrupulous care and clarity. Specialists and students in the areas of political theory, phenomenology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy will find Heidegger’s Being and Time & the Possibility of Political Philosophy an invaluable resource.

Gregory Fried offers in this book a careful investigation of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of politics. Disturbing issues surround Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, his disdain for liberal democracy, and his rejection of the Enlightenment. Fried confronts these issues, focusing not on the historical debate over Heidegger’s personal involvement with Nazism, but on whether and how the formulation of Heidegger’s ontology relates to his political thinking as expressed in his philosophical works. The inquiry begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, particularly the term polemos (“war,” or, in Heidegger’s usage, “confrontation”). Fried contends that Heidegger invests polemos with broad ontological significance and that his appropriation of the word provides important insights into major strands of his thinking—his conception of the human being, understanding of truth, and interpretation of history—as well as the meaning of the so-called turn in his thought. Although Fried finds that Heidegger’s politics are continuous with his thought, he also argues that Heidegger’s work raises important questions about contemporary identity politics. Fried also shows that many postmodernists, despite attempts to distance themselves from Heidegger, fail to avoid some of the same political pitfalls his thinking entailed.

Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers (including critical theorists, communitarians, and participatory democrats) who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics. Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God (i.e., the collapse of objective correlates to our ideals, ends, and purposes). After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics.