Skip to main content
Home

HCIH member Timo Pankakoski receives Academy funding: Congratulations!

Political Conflict in Modern German Political Thought

 

 

Battle and Competition: Conceptualizing Political Conflict in Modern German Political Thought

The project studies the conceptualizations of political conflict in modern German political thought (c. 1890–1968). My approach is political theory, supplemented with conceptual history and metaphor analysis. I focus on the complex relation between military ‘battle’ and economic ‘competition’ and show how limited competition became the main model for democratic politics gradually, in interaction with ‘battle’, and by subtle conceptual shifts. After an overview of the conceptual development, I focus on 5 case studies on the key steps of the shift: Franz Oppenheimer’s and Georg Simmel’s positive reinterpretations of competition, Max Weber’s formalization of battle as a general social category, Hans Kelsen’s competitive democracy, and Ernst Fraenkel’s neopluralist reimplementation of democracy in Germany. Through the cases, I capture the interplay between battle and competition, address the metaphors of political conflict used, and reassess German democratic development in this light.

 

13.6.2017

Archive events

News

  • Culture

Share this page

Newsletter

All research groups Home
  • About
  • People
  • Projects
  • News
  • Events and running seminars
  • Intellectual History Archive
  • 'Con­tri­bu­tions' (journal)
  • How to join
  • In and Out of the Canon in Intellectual History
P.O. Box 3 (Fabianinkatu 33) 00014 University of Helsinki Switchboard: +358 (0) 2941 911 (mobile call charge / local network charge)