Introduction to a democratic populist proposal from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger

Abstract

Any theorisation of Heidegger and politics leads one to think of the latter's ascription to National Socialism as one of the darkest episodes in the history of philosophy. The evidence of his ascription to the NSDAP is there. But it is not so clear whether there really is an ascription to the National Socialist ideology. Rather, the assumptions of this work indicate that Heidegger was swept up in the revolutionary spirit of the Volkisch movements of the 1930s, and that he really left unfinished political approaches of an eminently practical nature when he became disenchanted with the policies pursued by the National Socialists. We are far from knowing what the political materialisation of Heidegger's philosophy really was. However, it is possible to extract a series of ideas that equate it with a kind of conservative populism, in the same way as occurs in the Volkisch approaches. From this perspective, the aim of this study is to establish a kind of democratic populism from Heidegger, turning it around, as Marx did with Hegel, in order to unify it with an authentic populism, which, in the words of Laclau, another author of reference for this work, can only be left-wing.