Schmitt is much worse, politically, than Heidegger. H was a romantic anticapitalist who hated the falsity of bourgeois life, and through a combination of personal weakness and political naivete ended up with the Nazis, whom, however, he only served officially briefly before retreating into inactivity. I actually do not think there are instrinsic links between H and the Nazis. He resonated to their Blood and Soil rhetoric and their rejection of modernity, capitalist and communist; and, unfortunately, to the sort of very traditional German antisemitism that sees the Jew as the representative of modern, commercial, bourgeois society (sound familiar?)--but world conquest, mass murder, the torchlight rally, aren't really part of his perspective. Schmitt's another story. His philosophy of the Enemy is genuinely fascistic, and not just in resonances; and he was personally committed to and very active in the Nazi Party all the way through. He was the only fisrt rate mind to make that sort of commitment. Heidegger's relation to Nazism is much more equivocal.
As far as not learning German, it's your loss. The published translations of Marx rage from workmanlike to unreliable, and that includes the "approved" Moore and Aveling translations. I have a translation of the Section of Capital I on the Fetishism of Commodities that I did some years ago for a study group I was in; it's better--at least more accurate--than anything in print. The translation in print are pretty bad. I should probably try to have my version published. The better translations of Hegel (e.g., Miller, Knox) are OK (the worse, like Baille, are awful), but Hegel doesn't translate very well at all. I wish I had time to learn Latin and Greek too. I envy Joanna for knowing them.
--jks
They seems to have attracted at times a
>leftish political philosopher with Frankfurt type sentiments from Notre
>Dame, Fred Dallmayr.
>
>I would agree with Justin that Heidegger needs serious attention, not so
>much because his ideas are directly assimilable into a left project, but
>because he is one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, and
>arguably the best of the continental types. But he is like Carl Schmitt:
>there are some intrinsic links between his ideas and his political
>affiliations with the Nazis, and they must be approached with a critical
>edge. It is not accidental that _Telos'_ slide into nasty racial
>conservatism, one might even say proto-fascist ideology, accompanied their
>embrace of Schmitt.
>
>But contrary to Justin, I can't think of any good reason to learn German.
>For a native English speaker, it has to be the most wretchedly difficult
>language to learn [English fulfilling that role for others, due in no small
>part to its German antecedents], with is compound to the fifth degree terms
>and its convoluted sentence structure. I have to admit that I was never a
>great one for skills which require hearing aptitude [I am pretty tone
>deaf], and so I have never loved language acquisition to begin with. But
>learning German was the worst part of my Ph.D. degree, and I forget it all
>as soon as I passed the test. Whatever fictions academia would like to
>believe, I knew that I was not going to produce better English translations
>of Hegel and Marx than professional translators, and I stuck with some few
>exceptions to the published translation.
>
>Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New
>York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
>Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.
>If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
>freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing
>the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the
>ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
>
>
>
>
>
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