When Joseph de Maistre took the word Metapolitik from German philosophers1 into French, he understood it in terms of the metaphysics of politics2.
Aldo La Fata’s panorama of metapolitics3 is much broader, going back to a Christian usage in canon law 4 and has spread, in line with current usage in various Western cultures (Spain, Italy, Prussia, France, Poland, America, Argentina, Mexico… ), in fields as heterogeneous as the philosophy of law, political philosophy (from Communist ideology to that of the New Right), a metaphysics of politics or sociopolitics or action, even a mysticism of politics, and, above all, the metapolitics of Silvano Panunzio, appearing as a civil eschatology and prophetic announcement.
The metapolitics or metaphysics of politics that we intend to develop here is more modestly -and fundamentally- a metaphysics of the polis, in the Greek sense of a community of free and autonomous citizens, be they currently subservient to economic power. This approach will therefore necessarily be socio-political, and the outline of a metaphysics of the economy will be essential.
Footnotes
- Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762-1836), August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809).[↩]
- “I hear that German philosophers have invented the word metapolitik, to be to that of politics what the word metaphysics is to that of physics. It seems that this new expression is very well invented to express the metaphysics of politics, for there is one, and this science deserves all the attention of observers”; Considérations sur la France, suivi de l’Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions, 1797, éd. Complexe 2006, p. 227.[↩]
- see his article “Genealogy of metapolitics”.[↩]
- By the Cistercian monk Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz in 1650. [↩]
