Disclosure of Politics

Maria Pia Lara teaches moral and political philosophy at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. She is a renowned and influential public intellectual and has published many articles on the subjects of critical theory, moral philosophy, and politics. She is also the author of Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment and Moral Textures and the editor of Rethinking Evil.

Skillfully employing the tools of 'conceptual history,' Maria Pia Lara maps the convoluted discourse of secularization in Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg, Karl Lowith, Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, and the father of Begriffsgeschichte himself, Reinhart Koselleck. The result is not only a masterful vindication of a method but also a challenge to the glib assumption that we have reached a postsecular era in which politica powerful case for a democratic politics of immanence only disclosed in a modern age facing problems that no restoration of a presecular past can solve.s can be traced back to its allegedly theological roots. Instead, Lara makes -- Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley The Disclosure of Politics is itself disclosive. Counterbalancing the current focus on religion as a semantic resource for politics, Maria Pia Lara shows how political theory and action contribute to the development of powerful political concepts such as publicity, emancipation, and democracy and enables us to see the importance of conceptual innovation in bringing about social change for the better. -- Maeve Cooke, University College Dublin

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change: The Emergence of the Concept of Emancipation 2. The Model of Translation: From Religion to Politics 3. Hans Blumenberg's Reoccupational Model: Conceptual Transformation 4. Blumenberg's Second Model: The Persistence of Mythical Narratives 5. Hannah Arendt's Model of the Autonomy of Politics: Semantic Innovation Through Religious Disclosure 6. Reinhart Koselleck's Model of Secularization: The Enlightenment as Problematic 7. Jurgen Habermas's Innovation Model: Bringing Justice Into the Domain of Politics 8. The Disclosure of Politics Revisited Bibliography Index