A renewed focus on “the common” in contemporary political theory, as it gained momentum in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is a direct response to the failure of community in political theory. I argue that Hardt and Negri develop what we can understand as an “insurgent democracy of the common.” On the one hand, such an insurgent democracy of the common seeks to preserve the revolutionary potential of democracy. On the other hand, this democracy of the common also tends toward political romanticism: the legitimacy of “the common” depends on a political subjectivity tied to a paradoxical nostalgia for failed revolutions. As such, the democracy of the common entails an escape from the realities of the political world that undercuts its emancipatory potential. This becomes particularly obvious in the hope that Hardt and Negri place in social movements of resistance, but also in their critique of neoliberal capitalism.

This chapter begins in medias res; it traces and exemplifies Romantic historicism and its enduring potency in the political imagination of the two World Wars. Two specific legacies of Romanticism are identified: the idea that the nation is a transcendent principle deserving our devotion and loyalty; and the paradox that the nation, while inspiring our fervent political allegiance, it is itself not political or contentious but, rather, ‘unpolitical’. This twofold legacy explains the title of this book, Charismatic Nations. That concept is also discussed with reference to the emergence, in the century between Edmund Burke and Max Weber, of the notion of ‘charismatic leadership’; it is suggested that such leaders, as typified by Weber, often derive their charisma from the fact that they are seen to intuit and address the historical needs of the nation as a unified whole.

By analysing material from and slightly after Heidegger’s brief time as rector of Freiburg University, I show that he conceives of the state and the educational system as means to sustaining a communal commitment to a philosophically inflected nationalism. Although it relies on a distinctly Heideggerian conception of the state, Heidegger’s nationalism is by most measures rather trivial. He does, however, try to philosophically justify his nationalism and antisemitism by recourse to what has become known as the history of being. I show that this period of Heidegger’s thought is marred by several assumptions and inferences that contradict his earlier and much more convincing social ontology. I thus find myself in a position to criticise Heidegger’s politics from within. More specifically, I criticise Heidegger for inconsistently attributing an exceptional type of world-disclosure to the Führer; for confusing ontic and ontological senses of community and the shared world; and, finally, for giving methodological priority to a radical form historicism over and above transcendentalism.

The chapter discusses Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s metaphilosophical investigations. They result in two different versions of a postmetaphysical philosophy of finitude. For Nietzsche, metaphysics puts forward ideas of the absolute and of absolute value, such as goodness or freedom per se. The qualities and qualifications that specify human beings, however, are provisional and relational, in short: finite. They are, in fact, instances of one unique force that feeds them all, viz the will to power. Even our thoughts and values seem to supervene on actual power relations. Metaphysics completely misses this point, Nietzsche argues; hence, we should abandon it. Heidegger, too, wants to dismiss metaphysics because it fails to accommodate human finitude. For him, metaphysics initially dealt with the question of the Being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes) but, unfortunately, has forgotten about Being altogether. Focusing on the understanding of beings as beings instead, metaphysics, including Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, has been occupied with fleeing from Being. Yet,for us humans, our very Being (as well as the meaning of Being in general) is always an issue about which we most deeply care, even though it entails nothing but time, transience, and, ultimately, death.