Volume 14: Kierkegaard's Influence on Social-Political Thought

Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351875080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

While scholars have long recognized Kierkegaard's important contributions to fields such as ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophical psychology, and hermeneutics, it was usually thought that he had nothing meaningful to say about society or politics. Kierkegaard has been traditionally characterized as a Christian writer who placed supreme importance on the inward religious life of each individual believer. His radical view seemed to many to undermine any meaningful conception of the community, society or the state. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to correct this image of Kierkegaard as an apolitical thinker. The present volume attempts to document the use of Kierkegaard by later thinkers in the context of social-political thought. It shows how his ideas have been employed by very different kinds of writers and activists with very different political goals and agendas. Many of the articles show that, although Kierkegaard has been criticized for his reactionary views on some social and political questions, he has been appropriated as a source of insight and inspiration by a number of later thinkers with very progressive, indeed, visionary political views.

Index of Subjects

absolute and relative, 46, 63, 111–13, 126, 165, 199, 268.

absurdity, 37, 47, 65, 233, 234, 238–40.

acedia, 116.

acoustic illusion, 201.

alienation, 128, 130, 163, 244, 269.

ambiguity, 102, 203, 223, 244, 268.

anarchism, 117, 152.

anguish, see “anxiety.”

anthropology, xv, 47, 79, 100, 215, 217, 219, 220, 227.

anti-Semitism, xii.

anxiety, 43, 63, 94, 100–4, 127, 128, 191, 218–27 passim, 233, 234, 236, 238, 240–3, 262–4, 267–9.

appropriation, 198.

atheism, 37, 49, 82, 83, 115, 124, 130.

atonement, 242.

Aufhebung, 60.

authenticity, 149, 154, 155, 219.

authority, 66, 128, 148, 202, 204, 237.

Bible, 9, 22, 23, 25, 95, 98, 197, 217, 236, 242, 258.

Job, 236, 242, 248.

Isaiah, 23.

Jeremiah, 93.

Psalms, 9, 10.

John, 187.

Romans, 21.

1 Corinthians, 104.

Revelation, 197.

bull of Phalaris, 128.

capitalism, 74, 125, 246.

categorical imperative, 82, 104.

Catholicism...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Giorgio Agamben: State of Exception
• Hannah Arendt: Religion, Politics and the Influence of Kierkegaard
• Alain Badiou: Thinking the Subject after the Death of God
• Judith Butler: Kierkegaard as Her Early Teacher in Rhetoric and Parody
• Jürgen Habermas: Social Selfhood, Religion, and Kierkegaard
• Martin Luther King, Jr.: Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, King’s Strength to Love
• György Lukács: From a Tragic Love Story to a Tragic Life Story
• Herbert Marcuse: Social Critique, Haecker, and Kierkegaardian Individualism
• José Ortega y Gasset: Meditations on “Provincial Romanticism”
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Between Kierkegaard and Marx
• Carl Schmitt: Zones of Exception and Appropriation
• Eric Voegelin: Politics, History, and the Anxiety of Existence
• Cornel West: Kierkegaard and the Construction of a “Blues Philosophy”
• Richard Wright: Kierkegaard’s Influence as Existentialist Outsider
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects