SummaryThis article sheds light on intellectual politics under Nazism by looking at a crucial shift in the field of Hobbes studies that was marked in a congress celebrating the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Hobbes's birth, organised in Kiel, 1938. Before the congress, the decisive voice in Hobbes studies had for almost fifty years been that of Kiel University professor Ferdinand Tönnies. Tönnies was purged from the university upon the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and died three (...) years later. At the opening of the Hobbes congress in Kiel, its convener, Cay von Brockdorff, declared that the phase of Hobbes studies shaped by Tönnies was ending and that a new phase, represented by Paul Ritterbusch and Carl Schmitt, had emerged. Against the background of a long tradition of Hobbes studies in Kiel, this article summarises Tönnies's contribution to Hobbes studies; analyses organisation and proceeedings of the congress, paying special attention to politico-theoretical disagreements between Ritterbusch and Schmitt and to von Brockdorff's exploitation of their rivalry; and contextualises Schmitt's interpretation of Hobbes published in the aftermath of the congress. (shrink)

Leo Strauss's readings of historical figures in the philosophical tradition have been justly well explored; however, his relation to contemporary thinkers has not enjoyed the same coverage. In Leo Strauss and Contemporary Thought, an international group of scholars examines the possible conversations between Strauss and figures such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, and Hans Blumenberg. The contributors examine topics including religious liberty, the political function of comedy, law, and the relation between the Ancients and the Moderns, (...) and bring Strauss into many new and original discussions that will be of use to those interested in the thought of Strauss, the history of philosophy and political theory, and contemporary continental thought"--Back cover. (shrink)

Deremetz and Scheffler devote their contribution to the analysis of communication structures in digital collectives using the debate about the General Data Protection Regulation (German: DSGVO) on German Twitter as an example. They first discuss current recollectivization theories, and in particular take up Michel Maffesoli's approach of neo-tribalism, which ascribes certain characteristics to »modern tribes«. Summarizing these characteristics, the authors conceive of them as the »retribalization hypothesis« and ask about its validity as well as its empirical testability in online discourses. (...) The methodological goal of the article is to transform sociological, theory-based social diagnoses into verifiable hypotheses with the help of computer-assisted methods and to show ways of testing their validity. For this purpose, the authors propose an analytical framework to transform the retribalization hypothesis into network and corpus linguistic terms. They use the DSGVO debate on German Twitter over a period of 3.5 years (December 2015 to June 2018) as their object of study, based on which they examine whether a retribalization of social discourses is taking place. Using the methods developed, they show that the retribalization hypothesis must be rejected for this discourse, at least in part, and emphasize the importance of the interaction of quantitative computational and qualitative interpretive methods for multidisciplinary research projects of digital processes. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that even though the concept of community does not play a significant role in Marxist theory, Marxism needs a notion of community, and the paper sets out to theorize how to make sense of this concept in a Marxist theoretical setting. The paper claims that Althusser’s philosophy, especially his elaboration of the concept of practice, may assist us in this task, and it sets out to explore what can be gained by redefining community in (...) terms of practice. In Althusser’s theory, practice and ideology are very closely linked. While recognizing the importance of Althusser’s theory of ideology, the paper then subsequently explores an alternative configuration of the concepts community and ideology. Finally, it is claimed that this analysis may help us to better understand ideologies such as racism and nationalism. (shrink)

Ferdinand Tönnies, the founder of sociology, has been characterised as contributing to the “destruction of reason,” although he viewed himself as a champion of Enlightenment with a social vocation. Here, we shall consider Tönnies’s discussion of the epistemological bases of what he called “rationalism”: his theory of the state, based on the rationalism of Hobbes, and of society, based on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith and Hume; his implicit development of rationalist ethics and the positions he took on (...) Spinoza and Kant; and the relationship between his philosophy of history and that of his philosophical forebear, Adam Ferguson, who wrote in the age of bourgeois emancipation that marked the high Enlightenment. We shall conclude with reflections on the grounds on which Tönnies has been read as an opponent to rationalism and even as a foe of Enlightenment. (shrink)