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The Adequacy of the Canon

The impetus of this essay is the question, Is the canon of political theory adequate to the task of enabling readers in our time to take in and comprehend the awful events of the twentieth century? This question can be broken down into two questions. First, Does the canon up to the end of the nineteenth century make, or help significantly to make, these events intelligible, if not expectable or predictable? Second, Are there any political thinkers in the twentieth century, plausibly eligible for canonization, who offer this kind of help? I incline to the view that the canon up to the nineteenth century does something to help, but probably not enough. The awful events of the twentieth century seem, if only in their scale, to break out of the conceptual net found in the sequence of canonical texts written up to 1900 or so. On the second question, I believe that two prominent Nietzscheans did what Nietzsche himself did not quite do: they made a substantial contribution to our ability to encompass the awful events of the twentieth century. I refer to Heidegger and Arendt. And I refer to Arendt not as one influenced by Heidegger but as a thinker in her own right, inspired by Nietzsche as Heidegger was, but doing her own political thinking to our inestimable benefit. These two thinkers are not alone in offering assistance, but they stand out. Naturally, I do not say that the only value of the canon up to the nineteenth century or of the plausibly canonical writers of the twentieth century is found in helping readers in our time to make sense of the awful events of the twentieth century. Nor do I want to suggest that the only aspect of the twentieth century that is of interest to the student of political theory is the series of atro-