Heidegger - New Order Politics and De-Divinization

Politics [Politik] no longer has anything to do with the  πόλις [polis, "city-state"] nor with morals and least of all with "becoming a people."  In the age of complete de-divinization, politics is the only appropriate basic form of the forceful gathering of all means of power and ways of violence, i.e., the only form that acknowledges the authority of no court of law and derives everything legitimate from "rights," i.e., from the empowerment of power, indeed such that the talk of "rights" is tolerated only as a vestige of overcome notions of order, so as to reaccustom into the new order those who are ponderous and laden with old prejudices.  "Politics" is the genuine executor of the machination of beings and can only be grasped metaphysically - every other valuation does not reach far enough.  And therefore the talk of "power politics" betrays a misunderstanding in the form of a pleonastic expression, since politics requires power in order to be directed by it to the empowerment of the machination of beings.  This politics is "total" - not because it encompasses everything, but because it by essence is grounded in the execution of the beingness of beings.  Notions such as "nationalism" and "socialism" belong to an age in which modernity still tarried in the preliminary stage of its consummation; now they are simply historiologically employed titles for a quite different process which can no longer be called "political" in the least.




-Martin Heidegger, Uberlegungen XII-XV, 1939-1941.