ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an effort to uncover the contributions or suggestive clues Martin Heidegger's work provides for a rethinking of the political, that is, for a reassessment of the very notion or meaning of political life. In the political domain, the linchpin of modern thought and action has undoubtedly been the individual seen as constitutive source of social life. As formulated by modern liberalism, public life after the contract was pre-eminently the work of individual initiative, although this role was precariously shared during the nineteenth century by social groups. Political conceptions of this kind were powerfully buttressed by parallel trends in modern philosophy and metaphysics. On the level of political institutions, Heidegger's thought is at odds with, or relates uneasily to, the structure of the modern state to the extent that the latter denotes a deliberately organized purposiveness or else a vehicle for collective management.
