Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pankakoski, Timo

Titel

Peaceful strife: Dolf Sternberger's concept of the political revisited

Ist Teil von

• History of European ideas, 2020-05, Vol.46 (4), p.374-392

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article revisits Dolf Sternberger's 1960 theory, which, in explicit opposition to Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy thesis, found the essence of politics and the political in peace. The essay contextualizes Sternberger's propositions by relating them to his immediate post-1945 considerations - such as normalizing domestic politics, jettisoning authoritarianism, and laying the conceptual foundations for the nascent political science - and thereby reconstructs the questions his theory of the political sought to answer. The analysis shows in detail how the key elements of Sternberger's 1960 theory derived from the late-1940s: rather than reflecting an already normalized political situation or proposing naïve pacifism, Sternberger's text took political conflicts seriously and provided an outline of a desired but only prospective political peace amidst a crisis. Despite substantial polarity, Sternberger's view is largely compatible with Schmitt's theory once we remove context-induced polemics and grave misinterpretations - and carries potential for systematic political theorizing.