Shadows of Being: Encounters with Heidegger in Political Theory and Historical Reflection

In a review of the work of Karl Jaspers composed several years before the publication of his book Being and Time, Martin Heidegger suggested that the philosophical orientations of his period had made a wrong turn and skirted by the fundamental path of thought. He suggested that instead of taking up a heritage of original questions, his contemporaries had become preoccupied with secondary issues, accepting as fundamental what was in fact only incidental. In the years that followed, Heidegger’s promise to reorient philosophy in terms of the Seinsfrage, the question of Being, exercised a well-known influence on successive generations of thinkers on a global scale.


The present book delves into the philosophical sources of this influence and raises the question whether Heidegger indeed made good on the promise to reveal for thought what is truly fundamental. In proposing this investigation, the author assumes that it is not sufficient to take Heidegger at his word, but that it is necessary to scrutinize what is posited as fundamental in light of its broader implications–above all for ethico-political judgment and for historical reflection. After addressing this question in the first part of the book, the second part examines the significance of Heidegger’s reorientation of philosophy through the prism of its critical reception in the thought of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricœur.

Jeffrey Andrew Barash is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amiens, France. He obtained his doctorate at the University of Chicago and his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches in Philosophie at the University of Paris Ouest – Nanterre. His publications have focused on the themes of collective memory and its modern articulations, political philosophy, historicism, and modern German thought. His books include Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (second, paperback edition, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003) and Collective Memory and the Historical Past (University of Chicago Press, 2016, second paperback edition, 2020). He has also edited a book entitled The Social Construction of Reality. The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (University of Chicago Press, 2008).