The Paradoxical Success of an Antipolitical Philosophy

Abstract

As the Evil Empire showed signs of exhaustion before finally disappearing with barely a whimper, normative political theory came to play a political role in spite of its deontological premises. Political decisions and democratic choices could no longer be justified simply by their opposition to the supposed values of the enemy, as if it sufficed to say that since they’re bad we must be good. At about the same time, many on the critical left turned away from a socio-economic critique of capitalism to discover political philosophy by studying the work of Hannah Arendt. This turn to a German-born former student of Martin Heidegger had a curious precedent on the political right among students whose rejection of the consensus liberalism of the placid 1950s led them to the discovery of political philosophy through the work of Leo Strauss, another former student of Heidegger. I have discussed Arendt’s work in another chapter of this book¹; and I will leave the comparison of the political thinker and the master philosopher to intellectual historians. In the present context, I want to try to understand how an explicitly antipolitical philosophy could come to exercise so much political influence, within the academy and still more outside of its borders.