Christian Wevelsiep

The concept of the pre-political, which fits with the »liberal« vocabulary, has its origin in two political thinkers, who, following very different political and normative conceptions, contributed to the radical questioning of rationalistic and teleological concepts of politics. Hannah Arendt was a critic of totalitarianism, Carl Schmitt affirmed the decisionist setting of aims. Both approaches are considered in this article. The aim of the essay is not so much to compare their conceptions as rather to expose the meaning of the notion of the pre-political for the concept of the political. mehr