Heidegger's Revolutionary Politics

Heidegger's Revolutionary Politics shows how metaphysics, history, and political longing intertwine in Martin Heidegger's work and inspire contemporary anti-Western intellectual and political movements. Alexander S. Duff looks at Iranian revolutionary intellectuals, neo-Eurasianist ideologues in Russia, and other post-liberal movements and their turn to Heidegger's philosophy, which offers a vocabulary for radical civilizational alternatives that reject liberalism and humanism. Duff argues that Heidegger's combination of visionary expectations for political revolution and ensuing disenchantment describes the basic dynamic of today's radicalism.

At the center of Heidegger's Revolutionary Politics is the philosopher's effort to respond to modern nihilism by envisioning a "new beginning" rooted in a deeper relation to Being, history, and communal existence. This beginning is not conceived as evolutionary but rather requires a rupture with prevailing political forms and existing cultural arrangements. Duff traces how Heidegger developed this revolutionary impulse in lecture courses, the Black Notebooks, and writings from across his published corpus, and how it shaped Heidegger's search for a transformative overturning of the modern world.