W poszukiwaniu istoty polityki i tego, co polityczne. Tomasz Mann, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt i Hannah Arendt pomiędzy emocjami, marzeniami i poczuciem rzeczywistości

Abstract

IN SEARCH FOR THE ESSENCE OF POLITICS AND OF THAT WHICH IS POLITICAL. THOMAS MANN, MAX WEBER, CARL SCHMITT AND HANNAH ARENDT BETWEEN EMOTIONS, DREAMS AND THE SENSE OF REALITY

Politics understood as a social phenomenon is hardly a fundamental subject in the history of political thought. The awareness of its existence, specificity and especially particularity has appeared incredibly slowly and met a lot of resistance. The decline of societies resting on dynastical authority and birth of modern democracies caused blooming of political cogitation. This phenomenon showed its presence especially during the first decades of the twentieth century in Germany and later on, after Adolph Hitler’s ascendancy, in the thought of German-speaking emigrants. The article presents the ideas which were put forward by four German thinkers of that period in the context of social origin of their views and of their concepts’ possible acceptance which turned out to be not only limited but simply fragmentary. Max Weber’s and Carl Schmitt’s intellectual-and-political achievements especially deserve another interpretation which however should not be focused on normative ambitions of both authors but rather on their contributions to the realm of social phenomena’s explanations, primarily on their analysis of that which is political in the context of that which is social.