Politics without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century

Tracy B. Strong

Mar 2012 · University of Chicago Press

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“Magisterial…a frequently surprising treatment of major political thinkers.”—Perspectives on Politics 
 
From Plato through the nineteenth century, the West could draw on comprehensive political visions to guide government and society. Now, for the first time in more than two thousand years, Tracy B. Strong contends, we have lost our foundational supports. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the state of political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has left us effectively thinking without a banister.
 
Politics without Vision takes up the thought of seven influential thinkers, each of whom attempted to construct a political solution to this problem: Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lenin, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Arendt. None of these theorists were liberals; nor, excepting possibly Arendt, were they democrats—and some might even be said to have served as handmaidens to totalitarianism. And all, to a greater or lesser extent, shared the common conviction that the institutions and practices of liberalism are inadequate to the demands and stresses of the present times. In examining their thought, Strong acknowledges the political evil that some of their ideas served to foster but argues that these were not necessarily the only paths their explorations could have taken. By uncovering the turning points in their thought—and the paths not taken—Strong strives to develop a political theory that can avoid, and perhaps help explain, the mistakes of the past while furthering the democratic impulse.
 
Confronting the widespread belief that political thought is on the decline, Strong puts forth a brilliant and provocative counterargument that in fact it has endured—without the benefit of outside support. A compelling rendering of contemporary political theory, Politics without Vision is sure to provoke discussion among scholars in many fields.

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Tracy B. Strong is distinguished professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a former editor of Political Theory and the author or editor of many books, including Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary, and The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World.