ABSTRACT
The founder of phenomenology is known as neither a political philosopher nor an intellectual who publicly expressed his political views. However, this should not lead us to think that Husserl himself or his thoughts were completely ‘unpolitical.’ In this chapter, our main claim is that two things are distinctive in Husserl’s approach to politics: First, it is of utmost importance to him that politics should be guided by ‘ideas,’ which means that it should not just engage in realpolitik but be regulated by an idealistic, maybe even utopian picture of how the state and the community should be organized. Second, Husserl grounds ‘the political’ (i.e., the existential basis for organized politics) in a phenomenology of communities. In the last section, we differentiate between different strands in the reception of Husserl’s political philosophy: one group that creatively expands on Husserl’s ideas on the state, community, and home and alien worlds; one that expresses reservations about whether Husserlian phenomenology, for methodological reasons, allows for genuine political thought at all; and one that uses analyses or methods that Husserl developed in a non-political context and employs them in a politicizing and critical manner.
