Eine soziale Ethik der Distanz: Helmuth Plessners Gemeinschaftskritik und die moderne politische Konstellation

Abstract

In this contribution, we offer a re-reading of Helmuth Plessner’s Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (1924), situating Plessner’s anthropologically grounded critique of modeling the political order after community or Gemeinschaft within the crisis of the Weimar Republic and examining its relevance to current debates on affective politics and democratic pluralism. Plessner, whose concept of “social radicalism” anticipates key tensions of 20th-century politics, defends modern society or Gesellschaft not as a deficit, but as an ethical achievement based on the eccentricity of human existence. We relate this early intervention to later works by Plessner ( Macht und menschliche Natur and Die verspätete Nation ) and critically compare them to current theoretical positions. We argue that Plessner’s insistence on distance, form, and institutional mediation remains crucial for addressing the affective transformations of democratic politics in the 21st century.