Beyond Liberalism: Martin Heidegger’s Political Thought

o pensamento político de Martin Heidegger

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to approach the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and politics. In the context of Nazism’s arrival to power in Germany, Heidegger refuses to take the people as ‘race’ and ‘supreme value’. In line with this, and taking Ernst Jünger’s concept of ‘the worker’, he tries to think the relationship the worker and the world, i.e. the ‘total mobilization’ of the world by the ‘will to power’, beyond what he calls the ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’, to which Jünger himself remains attached. On the other side, in face of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, Heidegger accepts the challenge of thinking the political itself as something irreducible to the state.  However, if thinking the political as something prior to the state takes Schmitt to think it at the basis of the differentiation between friend and enemy, and to support this differentiation’s monopolization by the state, Heidegger tries to think the political outside the relationship between friend and enemy and, accordingly, as something that would destroy the state’s status as “supreme value”.