CREATIVE DISINTEGRATION

THE PERPETUAL EMERGENCE OF MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

IAN HUNTER

Review article on After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought, Michael Sonenscher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023)

History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025)

Michael Sonenscher's After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought offers a rich overview of nineteenth-century French, Swiss, and German political thought. The work's central argument is that modern political thought emerges in a series of attempts to close germinal “gaps” opened in the fabric of European intellectual life by Kant's philosophy and philosophical history. Less a narrative than a bricolage, the work consists of a myriad of intellectual cameos, walk-on roles, philosophical speculations, and political and social theories whose detail threatens to overwhelm even the most assiduous reader. The most striking feature of Sonenscher's book, however, is its theoretical method. Measuring his distance from both dialectical philosophical history and Cambridge school contextualism, Sonenscher makes powerful use of a method of intellectual history whose last great exponent was Arthur Lovejoy. Under this method, political thought is neither governed by the telos of self-consciousness nor explicable in terms of the historical circumstances in which it has arisen and whose uses and purposes it might serve. Instead, political thought “emerges” unforeseen from a condition of sheer metaphysical indeterminacy. This condition is brought about by the dissolution of prior conceptual oppositions in an amnesic maelstrom of inversions, arguments, and debates. New oppositions are then created through “chance and choice” only to disintegrate in their turn, leading to further cycles of destruction and recreation that Sonenscher calls “palingenesis.” This anti-contextual method is responsible for the rich mosaic of intellectual fragments that the reader encounters in this engaging book. It is also responsible for the book's central shortcoming, for it renders the author oblivious to the way in which their impact on those forced to live and think through them makes historical circumstances resistant to their metaphysical liquefaction, with this in turn making Sonenscher heedless of the historian's duty to investigate these circumstances.

Credit: Arnaud Jaegers