ABSTRACT
It is a standard view in the reception of Søren Kierkegaard that his thought does not provide an adequate foundation for political philosophy. Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the individual, interiority, and subjectivity appear to be incompatible with a proper political and social perspective. Already in his 1933 dissertation on Kierkegaard, Theodor Adorno argues that Kierkegaard’s distance from the economic conditions of his world turned his thought towards an objectless interiority that prevents all active engagement with the social sphere (71-2). Similarly, Martin Buber, in another central contribution, claims that Kierkegaard champions a resignation from the world as the only possible access to God, and thereby necessarily negates not only ethical relations among individuals but also politics in general (224, 229). In a still more dismissive reading, Georg Lukács argues that Kierkegaard’s “irrationalism” denies ethics and society and prevents any active intervention in history (231, 241). More recently, positions such as these have been echoed by, for example, Louis Mackey, who claims that Kierkegaard’s ethics is caught in a self-contradiction that denies the reality of the external world it supposedly attempts to save (157).1
