Between alienation and relief: Joachim Ritter and the dirempted Institution

• Applicant: Dr. Luke Collison, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524619031

What is an institution? How are institutions constructed or changed? What foundations or sources of legitimacy can be given to institutions? Do institutions limit or guarantee the freedom of individuals? With the end of the second world war, such questions were raised anew by the task of European reconstruction, particularly with the construction of political and social institutions in the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany. For Joachim Ritter (1903-1974), who in 1946 was given the task of reconstructing the philosophy department at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, these questions were posed on both a practical and theoretical level. Although he remains relatively neglected in the history of philosophy, Ritter exercised a wide-reaching influence in philosophy as editor of the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie and through the lives and work of his students and the wider participants of his research circle, the Collegium Philosophicum. Through the latter, Ritter’s influence stretches across a range of spheres, notably, in politics (via Hermann Lübbe) and constitutional law (via Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde). Focusing on Ritter’s work in the 1950s-60s and his exchange with a network of interlocutors, the objectives of the project consist of (i) a systematic analysis of Joachim Ritter’s political philosophy and a reconstruction of his largely implicit theory of the institution; (ii) a contextualisation of Ritter’s recourse to the Hegelian concept of diremption [Entzweiung] against contemporaneous alternatives of alienation [Entfremdung] (Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas) and relief [Entlastung] (Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Schelsky). The project aims to expand on recent studies of Ritter and the Ritter School, by including the following: (i) a close analysis of Ritter’s own theory of the institution and its place in the 20th century reception of Hegel’s philosophy of the state; (ii) a systematic review of the first two decades of the journal Der Staat founded in 1962 by Ritter’s student Böckenförde and to which many of Ritter’s students contributed; (iii) an investigation the archives, housed at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and WWU Münster, of notes and correspondence belonging to a network of figures around Ritter. The results of the project, published in English, will help draw attention to and illuminate this largely overlooked, but important, moment in post-war political philosophy.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position