Table Of ContentKierkegaard on Politics
Doi: 10.1057/9781137372321
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Doi: 10.1057/9781137372321
Kierkegaard on Politics
Barry Stocker
Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
Doi: 10.1057/9781137372321
© Barry Stocker 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-37231-4
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Tarquinius and Brutus: Political Fear
and Trembling 7
3 Previous Perspectives on Kierkegaard
and Politics 27
4 Kierkegaard and the Danish Political
Community 43
5 Communities of Liberty 54
6 Ethical and Legal Community 79
7 Tragic Community 92
8 Political Irony 103
9 Conclusion 126
Bibliography 130
Index 142
Doi: 10.1057/9781137372321 v
1
Introduction
Abstract: The argument is made that Kierkegaard is not just
an apolitical thinker, who is an extreme conservative when
he has anything to say about politics. There is a look at the
ways that philosophers bring in political ideas when discuss-
ing other areas of philosophy, which is relevant to the way that
Kierkegaard expresses his political thought. The argument is
made that his response to the liberal and democratic tenden-
cies of his time was sympathetic if critical. The more indirect
ways in which Kierkegaard deals with politics are mentioned,
with reference to his thoughts about literature and religion.
Keywords: Descartes; individualism; J.S. Mill; Leibniz; 1848
revolutions
Stocker, Barry. Kierkegaard on Politics. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: ./.
Doi: 10.1057/9781137372321
Kierkegaard on Politics
This book addresses political thought in a writer who was not attempt-
ing to make a contribution to political thought. Such a seemingly
perverse enterprise is justified, and necessary, because political thought
does not only exist in texts explicitly devoted to expounding a position
in political theory. For example, understanding of political thought is
clearly enhanced by knowledge of Homer, Greek tragedy, Shakespearean
tragedy, and the masterpieces of the ‘realist’ nineteenth-century novel.
This arbitrary list, which is by no means a complete selection, refers
us to literary works which give an archaic view of kingship, a classical
antique view of law and monarchy, a Renaissance view of government
and tyranny, and some more recent explorations of individual freedom
and democracy. We can imagine someone engaging in political theory
without knowledge of literature, but that theorist would have lost a lot
in terms of understanding the different possibilities of thinking about
politics.
Equally the more epistemological and metaphysical parts of philoso-
phy may use, or even depend on, political ideas. Descartes, in Discourse
on Method 2, partly explains the benefits of his attempt to reconstruct
philosophy from first principles, as like the creation of the best possible
state through the laws of a single wise legislator, so that laws have a uni-
fied end (1968, 36). In ‘Discourse on Metaphysics’ 36, Leibniz compares
the metaphysical relation of God to the world with that of a prince to his
people in a law governed state (1998, 88–89). John Stuart Mill thought
that knowledge benefits from the liberty of speech in general, in On
Liberty 2 ‘Of the liberty of thought and discussion’ and liberty is partly
justified by that benefit (1991, 52). Kant sets up his Critique of Pure Reason,
in the preface to the first edition, with reference to the model of govern-
ment through law, as opposed to despotism or anarchy (1997, 99–100/
Prussian Academy Edition A IX).
One indirect, but significant, justification for thinking about
Kierkegaard as a political thinker is then that he was a literary writer, and
narrative literature at least contains a good deal of material of political
and social interest, by virtue of representing action over time in a prop-
erly formed social world. That argument is only going to have limited
force if there is some more direct political content to Kierkegaard’s writ-
ing, whether taking him both as a literary and philosophical figure, and
there is in two senses. One sense is that on occasion political issues are
at the centre of his writing; the other is that much of what Kierkegaard
writes has distinctly political implications. We can look at Kierkegaard
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Introduction
as a political thinker in his literary and philosophical aspect; and taking
into account both explicit and implicit meanings. That is the program
for the present book.
It is not only that the literary nature of Kierkegaard’s writing suggests
that we look for political thought there in the way we do for literary fic-
tion, but also his philosophical discussions of literature which suggests
that we look for implicit views about politics. Either/Or [Enten-Eller],
Repetition [Gjentagelsen], and Stages on Life’s Way [Stadier paa Livets Vei]
provide good examples of the former aspect; Either/Or also provides
good examples of the second aspect as does The Concept of Irony [Om
Begrebet Ironi]. The major example of Kierkegaard as political thinker
through discussion of literature takes place in his discussion of tragedy,
a literary genre very directly engaged with political issues of law, king-
ship, justice, power, and tyranny; and his discussion of Romantic Irony,
which touches on the politics of Romanticism. There is another way
in which politics enters into Kierkegaard’s thought, in relation to the
religious aspect of his writing. That is the role of God in Kierkegaard,
which is clearly a major theme for this deeply Christian thinker,
though it is not the constant object of direct attention. The idea of God
and the idea of government have always been intertwined. The Leibniz
reference earlier is an illustration of a connection that has always been
made. The idea of just rule of the other world or of the universe as a
whole is never going to be completely separable from the idea of the
just rule of a state in this world. Divine and secular governance can
never be completely distinguished, and the idea of divine governance
is a frequent point of reference for Kierkegaard, though most obviously
from how it is distinct from political power rather than the long tradi-
tion of seeing a model.
The idea of God as model of political government is just one part of
how Christian themes in Kierkegaard have a political aspect. The other
major part is the status of the single individual, just one word in Danish,
Enkelte, and a word that Kierkegaard often uses, as essentially in relation
to God, but with less directly religious aspects of the single individual
also coming into his writing. Further references to Enkelte will be in
English as ‘the Single Individual’ or in Danish with the definite article
‘den Enkelte’. The Single Individual is defined by a relationship with
God, but the connections with political understandings of individual-
ity are unavoidable (Kierkegaard 1998a, 76), and further connect with
Kierkegaard’s more direct social and political comments.
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Kierkegaard on Politics
Questions of how we can have a relation with God, know of God,
have faith and communicate with the absolute being are central to
Kierkegaard, and connect with questions of the existence of societies as
unified political entities under some supreme agency of sovereignty. We
come to two political theory issues now. First the issue of what the indi-
vidual who has political interests and rights is, and why the individuality
of that single individual is important in politics. Second the issue of
the relation between the single individual and the state, or the political
world as a whole. The individual is a particular compared with the uni-
versal nature of the political sphere and of civil laws; the individual is a
particular compared with the absolute nature of sovereignty, wherever it
is we locate sovereignty, of the people, the ruler, the state, and so on. The
issues of the relation of subjective particularity to ethical universality
and to the absolute sovereignty of God are at the heart of Kierkegaard’s
writing. The nature of that subjectivity, that moral agency, raises issues
about political liberty, the history of subjectivity’s understanding of itself
in relation to its social world in Pagan and Christian worlds, how that
is intertwined with the history of political liberty, of the changes in the
concept of that liberty in ancient and modern times.
Kierkegaard’s own references to the political events, and conflicts,
of his time are brief, but no less significant for their brevity. He lived
through the one really successful transition to constitutionalism and
representative government, amongst the many European revolutions of
1848. Kierkegaard was sensitive to this drama and the underlying tension
it exposed in modern politics: the tension between revolutionary idealism
and mundane pragmatism, a tension that parallels his view of Christian
life. He was critical of democracy as a political movement and as a social
tendency towards equality, but much of his criticism is similar to that
of those recognised as thinkers about liberal democracy, who wished
to protect it against its own negative tendencies. Our understanding of
thinkers, like Tocqueville and Mill, will be enriched by comparison with
Kierkegaard, as will our understanding of Kierkegaard.
The reading of Kierkegaard that follows is one that rejects any idea that
philosophical texts can or should be identified as only pertaining to one
very well defined and delimited branch of philosophy. Kierkegaard is a
particularly strong example of a philosopher whose work does not even
try to divide itself between discrete branches and sub-branches of philos-
ophy, in different texts, and which does not engage in well-ordered steps
of pure deduction within texts. Kierkegaard certainly makes arguments
Doi: 10.1057/9781137372321
