ABSTRACT
When Arthur O. Lovejoy set out to describe the “life history” of the Great Chain of Being concept, he saw it as a complexion of “ideas which have, throughout the greater part of the history of the West, been so closely and constantly associated that they have often operated as a unit”,1 and he located the origins of that combination in Neoplatonic thought.2 For the reasons mentioned in the last chapter, retelling conceptual history as the “life and adventures” of ideas is no longer feasible, and irrelevant for the metaphor of the state as a body. Even the assumption of a distinct starting point in the work of one author (or group of authors) would be fallacious. The beginnings of the body-state metaphor in Western culture have been traced back to early ancient Greek political philosophy, but even earlier sources can be identifi ed in the Indo-European foundation myths of tribes and nations (as well as of royal and caste lineages as descendants of the body parts of mythical founder fi gures).3 However, as our concern is specifi cally with the metaphor versions that may have been relevant for Nazi ideology, we shall confi ne our study to Western traditions that are most likely to have served as inputs to political theory and discourse in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
