ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between phenomenology and politics during the interwar period, focusing on the work of lesser-known second-generation phenomenologists: Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Aurel Kolnai—thinkers who were influenced by Max Scheler as well as Edmund Husserl. Each helped expand the range of realist phenomenology into areas of political and social concern: civil rights and law, the state, empathy, community, ethical theory, and moral action. Hildebrand and Kolnai went further still. In the 1930s, with the rise of Hitler, they joined an important circle of conservative Catholic critics of Nazism based around the journal Der christliche Ständestaat in Vienna. After examining the links between phenomenology and activism in their work, this chapter concludes by considering how interwar thinkers can revise our understanding of phenomenology’s history of social engagement and its potential relevance to social and political debate today.
