Heidegger and the Ideology of War

About this book

"In Heidegger and the Ideology of War, Domenico Losurdo reconstructs the genesis of Heidegger's philosophy in its historical context, analyzing the characteristics of the peculiar "ideology of war" developed in Germany at the outset of the First World War. In the twentieth century, conflicts between states for the first time took the form of total war, requiring the mobilization of an entire society. On the one hand, among the allied nations, this all-pervasive ideological mobilization centered on the principle of "democratic intervention," the Wilsonian idea of a holy crusade able to subvert the eternally militarist and autocratic Germany and, in this way, favor a kind of great "international democratic revolution." On the other hand, in a spiral of radicalization, the German ideology of war characterized the looming conflict as a great clash between irreconcilable civilizations, faiths, world-visions, and even races. Germans affirmed not only the superiority of their culture, but above all a political and social model that expelled from modernity every universal concept of emancipation and democratization."--Jacket.