Description: In this fresh interpretation of Heidegger, Alexander Duff explains Heidegger's perplexing and highly varied political influence. Heidegger and Politics argues that Heidegger's political import is forecast by fundamental ambiguities about the status of politics in his thought. Duff explores how in Being and Time as well as earlier and later works, Heidegger analyses "everyday" human existence as both irretrievably banal but also supplying our only tenuous path to the deepest questions about human life. Heidegger thus points to two irreconcilable attitudes toward politics: either a total and purifying revolution must usher in an authentic communal existence, or else we must await a future deliverance from the present dispensation of Being. Neither attitude is conducive to moderate politics, and so Heidegger's influence tends towards extremism of one form or another, modified only by explicit departures from his thought.
Brief description: Alexander S. Duff was educated in the humanities and history at Carleton University, Ottawa, and received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He has held fellowships from the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and American Public Life at the University of Notre Dame and from the Program for the Study of the Western Heritage at Boston College, and taught at Skidmore College, New York and College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts. He writes widely in the history of political philosophy, and his publications on classical, modern, and contemporary political philosophy have appeared in both scholarly and popular publications.
Review Quotes: 'In a manner that seeks neither to reduce Heidegger's thought to fascism nor to drive a wedge between that thought and the politics that ensues from it, Duff's study constitutes (to my mind) the first real engagement of Heidegger's thought of philosophical relevance for political scientists and theorists.' Jeffrey A. Bernstein, The Review of Politics