Democracy and the Limits of Community

Christian J. Emden is the Frances Moody Newman Professor and Professor of German Intellectual History and Political Thought at Rice University. He is the author of Walter Benjamins Archäologie der Moderne (2005), Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (2005), Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge, 2008), and Nietzsche's Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2014).

• Introduction; 1. The urgency of community? Neoliberalism and the legitimation crisis of democracy; 2. The dangerous return of community: communitarian philosophy, authoritarian drift, and neofascism; 3. The depoliticized community: the normative emptiness of post-Marxist philosophy; 4. The political romanticism of the common: insurgent democracy and revolutionary nostalgia; 5. States of exception: from constituent power to dictatorship; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'In his thorough and comprehensive Streitschrift, Christian Emden attacks the regressive implications of political romanticism in various traditions of political thought. A pointed and timely defense of egalitarian democratic pluralism against the longing for communal authenticity in politics.' Rainer Forst, Goethe University Frankfurt