Abstract

The article intends to propose some guidelines for a re-examination of the traditions of political philosophy in the German cultural world starting from the many reconstructions that have followed one another since 1945, moving from a critical reconsideration of the virtuous circle triggered by the rehabilitation of practical philosophy and the communicative normativism of the Frankfurt School. It was the latter, in the succession of generations, that took the prismatic shattering of critical theory to the extremes of virtuosity. After Habermas’s communicative turn, positions on the relationship between democratic sovereignty and the jurisdictional guarantee of rights progressively diverged. The Frankfurt critique had unified all other previous forms of critique, positioning itself as immanent critique. Now the field is breaking up, once again pressed by the challenges of negative thinking. Particularly on the legal side, the levees that all generations of the school had built up against Schmitt’s theoretical challenge are crumbling.