Fraternity and Politics: Choosing One's Brothers

(Hardback)

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Baumann examines the recurring efforts to establish fraternal relations in modern societies by political, and in particular, radical means. He proceeds by examining a series of related examples, beginning with a brief discussion of the metaphor for fraternity itself, and then he turns to a consideration of the historical development of the quest for fraternity. He first examines the quest for fraternity among the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Baumann then turns to the sans-culottes before and during the period of the French Revolution. The third analysis is philosophical, rather than historical, and treats Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to understand radically and thus justify the relation of fraternity to terror. His conclusion sums up the argument about the necessary self-contradiction and failure of the pursuit of political fraternity and points to the long-discarded concept of aesthetic education developed as an alternative to the political pursuit of fraternity by the poet and philospher Friedrich Schiller.

Author Bio

FRED E. BAUMANN is Professor of Political Science at Kenyon College. He has edited a number of books and published a translation of Leo Strauss's Philosophie und Gesetz.