Commonplaces: Towards a political topogeography of culture: Carl Schmitt, Kant, and topics in political philosophy

It is difficult to underestimate the importance of place in human experience. Not only is it arguably the underlying preoccupation of political theory and practice alike, but also the implicit focus of the social sciences and humanities at large. In short, "place" is everywhere we look or happen to find ourselves; indeed, however varied our occupations, place is common to them all (an insight, certainly, that predates Zeno). This shibboleth of human experience and its manifold inflections is the topic of the current dissertation. Paramount is the role "place" is accorded in philosophical, jurisprudential, and political discussions addressed to the question of sovereignty. An examination of texts by Hobbes, Kant, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss will attempt to show that presuppositions concerning the nature of place not only implicate the authors in a university-wide clash of the faculties, but also commit them to embattled positions on the larger geopolitical map. As it turns out, the modern conception of sovereignty as the existential actualization of the body politic in the form of a geophysically defined state is hardly an answer to past and present Catholicisms, as Schmitt would have it, but the very basis from which an overture toward international dialogue or, simply, a political overture, is made in the first place.; The dissertation is divided into two parts, the first half dealing broadly with issues addressed more specifically in the second. Chapter 1, part I, focuses on the political philosophy of Leo Strauss in connection with contemporary concerns about the place of the university in modern democracies. It opens with a consideration of Allen Bloom's controversial book The Closing of the American Mind. The following chapter addresses the so-called crisis of culture and science as conceived by Hannah Arendt. Building on issues brought out in the latter, the next two chapters focus exclusively on Kant's ethical and political theories, with particular attention given to his exposition of the right to own. These are followed by a brief chapter on Hobbes's conception of "appetite." Part I concludes on the theme of the "Weltstadt" (world city), taking Friedrich Schlegel's "Essay on Republicanism" as a point of reference. Carl Schmitt's concept of sovereignty and his doctrine of political situationalism constitutes the exclusive focus of Part II.