Massimo Cacciari’s career is nothing short of impressive. Both an academic philosopher and a public figure who has devoted a significant part of his life to active politics, he is also one of the high-profile intellectuals in contemporary Italy. Born in Venice in 1944, Cacciari graduated in philosophy from the University of Padua with a dissertation on Kant’sCritique of Judgment. When he was twenty years old, he and literary scholar Cesare De Michelis startedAngelus novus, an innovative journal that lasted from 1964 to 1966. Between 1968 and 1971 Cacciari coedited another journal,Contropiano: Materiali marxisti(Counterplan: Marxist Materials)...

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s work seems to amount to a research project on the languages and forms of “Romània.” But this “Romània” is not at all the stable dwelling that many interpreters have claimed, in the shadow of whose authority Hofmannsthal would overcome the aestheticism of his youthful dramas, of his Loris.¹ Loris’s “great art,” as Hermann Bahr would say, “has no feeling.”² Loris belongs to the Jugendstil that reflects upon the formal elements, the style of composition, rather than evoking feelings and moods. It is, after all, Jugendstil that is perfectly suited to its “problem:” transience.³ How can transience be...

The most authentic reactionary thinking of the German crisis remarked with sound intuition its own distance from the “political” Nietzsche. In August 1918, in reply to the accusations of “alliedZivilisation” against theKulturofDeutschtumand its “presumed advocacy of violence,” Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf wrote, “And finally, Nietzsche. It just makes us smile to see pitted against the advocates of the power of our State one of those individual anarchists who can afford to negate the social order precisely because he is protected by this society squarely set within the order of the State. After all, if one looks...

Eduard Bernstein’s analysis of Weber’s critique of socialism—of Second International Austrian-German social democratic orthodoxy—is only a basic prologue to the really decisive question (for Weber, as for Sombart, for Schumpeter, as for Kelsen): how is socialism possible? What is its transcendental condition?¹ The issue goes well beyond the purely historical-phenomenological sphere. The question of the origins of socialism differs from the reasons why it can actually exist as a theoretical and practical direction—or asthedirection—of the European worker’s movement. To bare without pity the errors contained in the Marxist prophecy is not only not enough...

What do we mean by the termproject? The question seems just as superfluous as it is normal-sounding in our language. Its basic emphasis is similar to technology. One only truly disposes of the world when there are paradigms at one’s disposal that make it available. The present dominion has actual value only insofar as it is productive of future dominion.Producingandprojectare joint terms representing, in our language, a single family. The project is understood as intrinsically productive: it elaborates models of production. Producing is included in the project whose meaning and purpose it illuminates. In the...

Writing to Antonio Valdés, secretary of Charles V, on August 1, 1528, this is how Erasmus explained, against his detractors, the enterprise of the boundary mark (Termine): “One time the borders of fields were marked by a special sign; it was a stone protruding from the ground that hereditary laws prescribed to be irremovable. Hence Plato reports the saying: Don’t remove what you did not put up…. This boundary mark, as is written in the Roman Annals, was the only one that stood up to Jove.”¹ Terminus is the God that sanctions boundaries; the feast day of Terminals celebrates their...

“The discursive legitimation of power by law universals” typical of all great revolutionary rhetoric and, more generally, of every “philosophical reading” of political facts”¹ seems to constitute the perennial inexhaustible polemical motive of Elias Canetti’s work. Fulvio Papi insists, correctly, that the forms of the destructive intellect “act in a daily shadow zone,” that their idols are not traceable so much at the height of great theoretical syntheses, as in the concrete behavior of the “tribe,” in their normal and apparently spontaneous circulation (“a destructive spontaneity of discourse circulates which is predisposed to the acceptance of any catastrophe”). This motive,...

Perhaps in no other place as in the interpretation of the role of mysticism in the modern political, Weber’s spirit of capitalism requires revision and study. A mystical type of religiosity (eine mystisch gewendete Religiosität) is in itself entirely reconcilable “with an eminent realistic sense of empirical data” (thanks precisely to its antilogocentric nature; Weber says: thanks to its rejection of dialectical doctrines) and with a rational conduct of life (rationale Lebensführung).¹ For Weber, however, mysticism lacks the “positive evaluation of external activity” (Wertung), which in Calvinism goes as far as the exigency of a “sanctity of works elevated to...

Here is the supreme struggle (agon eschatos), the labor (ponos), and the ultimate confrontation that the soul is called upon to bear: steering the steeds, which are also its parts, training them for the difficult ascent, preventing that the wicked one (the spirit of gravity, we could say!) drags us to earth, negating the joy of contemplating the hyperuranian reality (ta exo tou oranou). The memorablemythosof thePhaedrus(246–247), therefore, teaches that education (paideia) isagon, a struggle in the composite structure of the soul between opposite powers, but also that thisagonis harmonizing. The charioteer...

If by phenomenology we mean essentially that attitude or mode of thinking that puts the vision of essences before a formal definition of the valid criteria of knowledge, Max Weber is a great phenomenologist (even though his knowledge of Husserl’s philosophy may have been minimal), and any attempt to reduce his approach to a methodology of the sciences of culture is destined to be misunderstood. How imperative is in him the “return to the thing” is demonstrated by his two important lectures on the future of the scientist and politician.¹ These lectures actually make up a single study, since Weber’s...