One hears much today about the relation between culture and politics and, more specifically, about the significance of culture in and for politics. This is true on the side of both theory and practice. The notion of culture increasingly informs mainstream political science, while in many countries, especially Western liberal democracies, the claims of culture (or more frequently cultures) are heard more and more frequently and taken more and more seriously. In the German-speaking world, for example, in what might appear to be a vindication of Kant and Schiller following more recent misuses of the notion of culture, the idea of a Kulturstaat has again become respectable. Culture seems to have done much more than just survive its dubious twentieth-century associations. Having been conceptually refined and purified of ideology by modern social science, culture seems more than ever to be accepted as an essential aspect of political life.
The Limits of Political Culture: An Introduction to G.W.F. Hegel’s Notion of Bildung
JVF Conference Papers
