Political Anthropology

In Political Anthropology, Helmuth Plessner considers whether politics—conceived as the struggle for power between groups, nations, and states—belongs to the essence of the human. Building on and complementing ideas from his Levels of the Organic and the Human (1928), Plessner proposes a genealogy of political life and outlines an anthropological foundation of the political. In critical dialogue with thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, and Martin Heidegger, Plessner argues that the political relationships cultures entertain with one other, their struggle for acknowledgement and assertion, are expressions of certain possibilities of the openness and unfathomability of the human.

»Political Anthropology is a compelling and luminous introduction to Helmuth Plessner's philosophical anthropology; it is also a timely and urgent response to the rampant skepticism about political life now current. In demonstrating that politics belongs to the very fabric and 'unfathomability' of being human, Plessner returns to the human sciences a depth and indispensability for addressing our present.« J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research