Wilhelm hennis biography

TEXT REVIEWED
Stephan Schlak
Wilhelm Hennis.
Szenen einer Ideengeschichte der Bundesrepublik
C. H. Beck Verlag, Munich 2008 pp. 275 + index

Wilhelm Hennis is a radical in the early nineteenth-century sense whose political and intellectual passions predate conceptions of left and right, socialist, liberal and conservative, conceptions that remain stamped on our political culture.

His insistence on the importance of a political culture reaching back to Aristotle and Plato made him seem out of time to his more ‘progressive’ contemporaries during the 1970s; but as Schlak argues, it is the arguments of those former progressives that now seem very dated, and those of Hennis both prescient and contemporary.

Born in 1923, he lived out the early years of the Third Reich in Venezuela; called up into the navy he survived three sinkings and a pending court martial to begin his life again shortly after the war in Göttingen as a student of law.

A member of Schuma