PERSONALISM AS POLITICAL THEORY: A STUDY OF THE WORKS OF MAX SCHELER (PHILOSOPHY, PHENOMENOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY)

The study is divided into five chapters. Chapter One begins with a consideration of the philosophical currents from which the political theory of Max Scheler draws inspiration. In turn, each considered in some detail, are: Lebensphilosophie, as evidenced in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson and Rudolf Eucken; phenomenology, as in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl; and, the so-called revival of metaphysics, which has its origins in reaction to Machian-style positivism and empirical materialism. Chapter Two offers a more direct treatment of the aspects of Scheler's thought which pertain to the thesis of personalism as political theory. Largely exegetical, the first section of the chapter reviews Scheler's all-important conception of the person as being an "ontic unity of acts." From this groundwork, the remainder of the chapter outlines the intersubjectivity, the philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of nature and history which are joined to this special conception of "person." Chapter Three, the centerpiece of the study, endeavors to follow Scheler's lead in the establishment of a political theory congruent and linked with the personalism developed in the second chapter. Here the possibility of a person community is extended to its political implications and an appraisal of the transformation of personal anthropology is extended to reveal certain political imperatives inherent for a theory of politics based upon personalism. The fourth chapter utilizes Scheler's personalism as political theory in an analytical examination of modern politics. Contending that the two dominant strands of modern politics--liberalism and Marxism--are but different faces of the common coin of bourgeois politics, the study nonetheless suggests certain new directions for the theory and practice of contemporary politics. The concluding chapter of the study attempts to take a friendly but "critical" examination of suspect Schelerian elements in the previously outlined personalist political theory.