ABSTRACT
From the earliest moments of a career spanning over five decades, Fred Dallmayr’s work has sought to rethink some of the central concepts of modern political philosophy. Above all, it has challenged the hegemony of a modern “subjectivity” at the heart of Western liberalism, individualism, and rationalism, clearing a space for alternative voices, claims and ideas. Dallmayr has been among those who have most productively confounded the crucial lynchpin of Western modernity, Descartes’ “cogito, ergo sum,” along with its attendant egocentrism and logocentrism. He has consistently articulated the effects on traditional political theory of newer intellectual and philosophical trends pointing in the direction of “post-individualist” or “post-egocentric” theories of selfhood. His work draws attention to the costs imposed by the modern attachment to subjectivity and anthropocentric individualism, while construing the political community not as a totalizing unity but as a differentiated whole where freedom and solidarity can co-exist. Rather than seeking to discard the individual subject, however, he recasts this entity as an emergent and relational being capable of transformation.
