This anthology is a significant contribution to the debate over the relevance of Martin Heidegger's Nazi ties to the interpretation and evaluation of his philosophical work. Included are a selection of basic documents by Heidegger, essays and letters by Heidegger's colleagues that offer contemporary context and testimony, and interpretive evaluations by Heidegger's heirs and critics in France and Germany.In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida (...) as a springboard for examining questions about the nature of authorship and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the book.Richard Wolin is Professor of Modern European Intellectual History and Humanities at Rice University. He is the author of Walter Benjamin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Poststructuralism. (shrink)

Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.

In contrast to members of other developed, capitalist societies, Germans still attach some positive connotations to collectivism. In particular, they see the welfare state as a guarantor of collective security and social harmony, and as an agent of national interests by means of macroeconomic planning. The combination of collectivist social goals and statist means can be traced back to the Protestant Reformation in Germany, when the political vacuum left by the defeat of Roman internationalism was filled by local, secular governments (...) which took over responsibility for the collective welfare of their subjects. The welfare state began in Germany as a stringent moral order; it was acceptable to the emerging middle class because public welfare was associated with the suppression of idiosyncratic desire. The maintenance of public welfare was viewed as a precondition for economic and military viability, encouraging the growth of state power in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collective public good became associated with the enlargement of dynastic glory. When unification finally came in the late nineteenth century, the authoritarian state was well entrenched in Germany. Bourgeois individualism in the form of social corporatism was considerably weaker than state corporatism. Competing interest groups sought to impose their visions upon the state, which symbolized society as a whole. Nazism, too, successfully exploited the German yearning for a state that would express the nation's collective energies in the form of a?higher?; community, the Volksgemeinschaft. It was only in the aftermath of the catastrophe, when the Federal Republic succeeded in building solid economic and political foundations around collectivist impulses, that a viable?social state?; emerged, one that seemed to offer both universal social security and a large sphere for private initiative. State corporatism played a large role after 1945 in diffusing social conflict and maintaining the social contract, the presupposition of which was continuing prosperity. Since the Conservatives regained power in 1982, however, economic hardship among the lower third of society, in glaring contrast to the opulence of the upper third, has begun to jeopardize the social harmony which the welfare state was supposed to ensure. The potential cost of social programs to rectify this situation and to meet the needs of the new eastern states has called forth neoliberal criticism of the idea that there is a? German model?; in which the negative aspects of collectivism can be successfully transformed into a positive collaboration between state and society. (shrink)

Skillful, sophisticated translations of two of Nietzsche's essential works about the conflict between the moral and aesthetic approaches to life, the impact of Christianity on human values, the meaning of science, the contrast between the Apollonian and Dionysian spirits, and other themes central to his thinking.