If modern political theory has, to a great extent, neglected the role that myth plays in politics, there has been a moment in European history when this role became tragically conspicuous. The massive use made by totalitarianism of political symbols and myths, and the achievements reached by this, not only manifestly exhibited the power of myth, but also posed a major intellectual problem for those intellectuals who had believed in the Enlightenment's promise of a liberation of politics from myth.

The first book in Western political philosophy that, from the very title, promised to deal with a modern political myth was published in 1946: it was Cassirer's posthumous The Myth of the State. The man Ernst Cassirer, a German of Jewish origin, who had left his homeland just after the advent of Nazism, could not but perceive the morally tragic challenge posed by the “appearance of a new power: the power of mythical thought” (Cassirer 1973: 3). The philosopher Cassirer, who had spent most of his intellectual life developing a theory of the symbolic forms in which myth was presented as a primitive form of consciousness, also appeared to feel the intellectual challenge, as did other theorists educated in the school of the Enlightenment. The Myth of the State begins: