Abstract

This dissertation examines the romantic tendencies latent in the notion of community in an effort to find a conception that does not fall prey to the totalitarian politics which have their origin in these tendencies. To find the source of the romanticism within the notion of community, I look to the writings of the father of modern communal politics: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The first conception of community that Hegel explored was one adapted from the poetry his friend and roommate at the Tubingen Seminary, Friedrich Holderlin, one which Hegel only reluctantly adopted. Soon thereafter, he rejected Holderlin's romantic vision and examined in his Jena writings the possibility of founding community on an economic bond between individuals. In his Berlin writings, Hegel described a community that would unite the unreflective, unconscious bond of Holderlin's romantic community with the individuating forces of the market. The key to bringing together these two apparently contradictory elements was Hegel's rational state, which was only able to do so by appealing, at times, to extraordinary means. The notion of religious community he explored in his Berlin lectures also failed to bridge the gap between individuating forces and communal tendencies, a gap mirrored within religious practice itself. In the early twentieth century, revolutionary thinkers like Georg Lukacs looked to Hegel's theory of community as a guide for their own conceptions of society. Lukacs, unfortunately, removed the elements of Hegel's political vision which restrained the romantic conception of community within his rational state and thus unleashed a type of totalitarian society most often associated with Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. In recent years, Hegel's community has, again, become a guide for grounded new visions of society, like Charles Taylor's among others. At the end of my dissertation, I propose my own notion of community, the synergistic theory, which would provide an alternative to current attempts, that might fall prey to the same romanticism which Hegel rejected in 1800