Friend, foe, traitor? A Genealogy of Treason in Democratic Thinking

• Applicant: Dr. Martin Oppelt
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432108733

The project aims to close a research gap in the field of political theory and the history of ideas and to genealogically elaborate the significance of treason for the theory and practice of democratic thought and modern democracy. In a first step, a "history of political ideas of treason" from the canon of democratic thought will be developed from a diachronic perspective. Subsequently, four exemplary discourses on treason in the history of modern democracy will be analysed in a synchronous access to the respective competing understandings and uses of treason in connection with thematising the threat to and preservation of the democratic political order. Subsequently, the development of the modern democratic treason dispositive in the interplay between social, conceptual and political (idea) history is reconstructed on the basis of a genealogical analysis. Using Claude Lefort's post-fundamentalist theory of democracy and theories of the symbolic, the treason is finally examined for the possibility of being expanded into a contingency theory of democracy with which social relations and political processes in post-fundamentalist democratic societies can be analyzed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants