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在《共同体的边界》一书中，普莱斯纳对人类共同生活的诸种形式进行追问。在思考范式上，他继承了滕尼斯关于“共同体”（Gemeinschaft）与“社会”（Gesellschaft）的著名区分，但他立足于哲学人类学视域，赋予这种理论图式以不同的价值内涵：共同体秩序作为社会激进主义，对立于现代社会秩序。在他看来，只有社会才给人提供自我与他者、与自身之间必要的空间和距离，正是立足于这种空间和距离，人才能不断地重新对自身进行构想和校验。
《共同体的边界》出版于1924年，时值魏玛共和国的动荡岁月。普莱斯纳的批判目标指向了当时的反魏玛共和国的思想运动：无论是德国右翼青年运动所追求的“血缘共同体”，还是德国左翼运动所构想的“事业共同体”，都是在通过某种激进主义颠覆现代社会关系。在当时的德国知识界，这种理论声音是孤单的。20世纪80年代，这部著作才被重新发现，引起国际理论界的广泛兴趣。
《共同体的边界》出版于1924年，时值魏玛共和国的动荡岁月。普莱斯纳的批判目标指向了当时的反魏玛共和国的思想运动：无论是德国右翼青年运动所追求的“血缘共同体”，还是德国左翼运动所构想的“事业共同体”，都是在通过某种激进主义颠覆现代社会关系。在当时的德国知识界，这种理论声音是孤单的。20世纪80年代，这部著作才被重新发现，引起国际理论界的广泛兴趣。
- GenresPhilosophySociology
249 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1924
4 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
About the author
Helmuth Plessner
53 books20 followersHelmuth Plessner was a German philosopher and sociologist, and a primary advocate of "philosophical anthropology".
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July 5, 2020
Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) is, I think, kind of an obscure philosopher at this point. I came across him reading a book by another thinker from Weimar Germany who was a contemporary of his, Carl Schmitt, whose book The Concept of the Political is essentially a philosophical argument for authoritarianism. Schmitt quotes a line from Plessner, "Man is primarily a being capable of creating distance," and I found this line fascinating, because it seems to me that authoritarian attitudes are closely related to attitudes about intimacy and distance in human relations, and I've been trying to delineate for myself how these ideas are connected.
The relation between Schmitt and Plessner is so interesting to me, because they clearly read and mutually influenced each other, but were pretty much polar opposites in their ideas. Schmitt was a legal scholar who helped establish some of the legislative language that made possible the Nazis' rise to power in the Third Reich, as well as being an anti-Semite and Nazi himself. Plessner's philosophy revolves around moderation and balance and is both anti-fascist and anti-communist. And Plessner ended up having to flee Germany and take refuge in Holland when the Nazis came to power because his father was Jewish, although his writing shows sympathy with Christian theology, and he discusses Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism as representative of various poles of thought in Germany. Now having read this book, I think Plessner deserves to be better known, because he provides some good antidotes to the poisonousness of Schmitt's ideas as well as to the trends toward extremism currently on the rise on both the Right and the Left in U.S. politics.
Plessner's overarching arguments in The Limits of Community are not directly for liberalism or democracy. Most of all he is arguing for a view of the world as complex, nuanced, and full of shades of gray and against the dangers of puritanical and extremist thinking that oversimplifies the world's complexity. This in turn leads him to advocate seeking a healthy golden mean that balances in between the poles of moral rationalistic perfectionism and the amoral exercise of unrestrained power. Translated into terms we might use today, examples of the moral rationalistic perfectionism might be communism or Christian puritanism, or, I could argue, the ideas of the more radical wing of the social justice movement in the U.S. that would seek to turn the country into a socialist utopia purified of all bigotry, injustice, and economic inequality. In short - ideas that certainly are meritorious in their idealism, but could lead to harms and oppression if taken to extremes and if used to justify violence for the sake of achieving their noble ends.
At the other extreme he discusses the nascent fascist movements of his day - analogous to contemporary white nationalist Trumpism in the U.S. and the Christian anti-immigrant far right parties in Europe. Plessner discusses this primarily by way of Nietzsche, a philosopher who of course was taken up enthusiastically by the Nazis as justification for their ideas of fanatical tribal-style loyalty based in "blood and soil," based on Christianity as a nationalist identity rather than as a universalist ethic of love, anti-Semitism, violent conquest, anti-rationalism, the "will to power," and so on.
So then for Plessner, there's a tension between what he calls "community" (Gemeinschaft) and "society" (Gesellschaft). In contemporary terms, community seems to represent the idea of an "in-group," while society is the broader social setting, like a nation for example, where these in-groups are in contact and conflict with each other. Plessner sees two types of community, which he calls "blood-based" and "ideal-based," though an alternate translation for ideal (Sache) here might be "issue-based." The first kind corresponds to the Nietzschean line of thinking, where we essentially care about our in-groups that arise from nature, through things like kinship or shared ethnicity or cultural identity. Basically these in-groups are based on caring about "our own," as it were. The ideal-based community, in contrast, is based in a shared commitment to an ideology or set of ideas or principles, like Christianity or socialism.
It is a key, important idea of Plessner's that both types of community can lend themselves to authoritarian extremism. Both can end up consuming the individual in a drive to unrestrained intimacy, in which the individual is asked to lose her or his identity in the group's will and values and ideas, and submit to a lack of privacy. Plessner sees the remedy for this in the ways that the broader society (Gesellschaft) can give the individual a refuge for keeping at a certain distance from their communities and from others. For this distance to be maintained, society permits individuals to mask themselves behind roles, ceremonies, politeness, social games, sociability, and transactional relationships. To navigate these roles and masks and protect the dignity of individuals, participants in society must use, instead of raw political force, tact, diplomacy, and persuasion. (I found interesting connections in his arguments with Emmanuel Levinas's ideas of "the Other" that flees from the light of dislosure, as well as with psychologist Eric Berne's Games People Play.)
So then Carl Schmitt, the proto-Nazi philosopher, seems to quite misunderstand the whole point of Plessner's arguments (granted, Schmitt isn't quoting from this book, but the germ of the misunderstanding seems visible here). Schmitt sort of takes Plessner's idea of the tensions between the competing demands of good and evil, in the form of self-abnegating puritanical idealism and self-serving blood-based tribalism, and argues that the tension between "us versus them," in-group and out-group, friend versus enemy, is the nature of the political itself, and that the societal realm that mediates and moderates the tensions between such groups has no legitimate political role as such.
And perhaps then what happens with Schmitt - I theorize without having done a deep dive into the scholarship - is, he perverts an idea that Plessner develops from quoting Schmitt in the last chapter of the Limits of Community, namely, the idea that a state needs a leader who can make decisions in emergency situations. For Plessner, such a leader will inevitably be a fallible human being, which creates its own set of difficulties in terms of moderating between intimacy and distance and between good and evil and between the demands of communities and society. Schmitt, I gathered from reading him, was a lover of slippery slopes and a hater of nuance and complexity, so from Plessner Schmitt may have twisted this into the idea that if a leader is needed, and a leader must wield power, and power is inherently kind of evil, therefore evil in the service of in-group interests was okay, and so Germany needed an authoritarian strongman leader like Hitler to rescue it from the wishy-washiness of pluralist liberal democracy.
In the translator's introduction, Plessner's translator Andrew Wallace kind of accuses Plessner of betraying his own principles in talking about need for a strong leader. But I think Wallace, maybe like Carl Schmitt, fails to understand what Plessner is getting at. I think Plessner's point is that political leadership always will entail moral complexity and making mistakes, like when Obama criticized 'woke' culture by saying, "This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”
Basically, like Obama, Plessner is making a point that while ideals and ethics are important, ultimately, trying to make the world a better place through politics is a messy business in which, as he quotes in the epigram to the book, the devil must receive his due. Idealism must be balanced with realism.
The relation between Schmitt and Plessner is so interesting to me, because they clearly read and mutually influenced each other, but were pretty much polar opposites in their ideas. Schmitt was a legal scholar who helped establish some of the legislative language that made possible the Nazis' rise to power in the Third Reich, as well as being an anti-Semite and Nazi himself. Plessner's philosophy revolves around moderation and balance and is both anti-fascist and anti-communist. And Plessner ended up having to flee Germany and take refuge in Holland when the Nazis came to power because his father was Jewish, although his writing shows sympathy with Christian theology, and he discusses Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism as representative of various poles of thought in Germany. Now having read this book, I think Plessner deserves to be better known, because he provides some good antidotes to the poisonousness of Schmitt's ideas as well as to the trends toward extremism currently on the rise on both the Right and the Left in U.S. politics.
Plessner's overarching arguments in The Limits of Community are not directly for liberalism or democracy. Most of all he is arguing for a view of the world as complex, nuanced, and full of shades of gray and against the dangers of puritanical and extremist thinking that oversimplifies the world's complexity. This in turn leads him to advocate seeking a healthy golden mean that balances in between the poles of moral rationalistic perfectionism and the amoral exercise of unrestrained power. Translated into terms we might use today, examples of the moral rationalistic perfectionism might be communism or Christian puritanism, or, I could argue, the ideas of the more radical wing of the social justice movement in the U.S. that would seek to turn the country into a socialist utopia purified of all bigotry, injustice, and economic inequality. In short - ideas that certainly are meritorious in their idealism, but could lead to harms and oppression if taken to extremes and if used to justify violence for the sake of achieving their noble ends.
At the other extreme he discusses the nascent fascist movements of his day - analogous to contemporary white nationalist Trumpism in the U.S. and the Christian anti-immigrant far right parties in Europe. Plessner discusses this primarily by way of Nietzsche, a philosopher who of course was taken up enthusiastically by the Nazis as justification for their ideas of fanatical tribal-style loyalty based in "blood and soil," based on Christianity as a nationalist identity rather than as a universalist ethic of love, anti-Semitism, violent conquest, anti-rationalism, the "will to power," and so on.
So then for Plessner, there's a tension between what he calls "community" (Gemeinschaft) and "society" (Gesellschaft). In contemporary terms, community seems to represent the idea of an "in-group," while society is the broader social setting, like a nation for example, where these in-groups are in contact and conflict with each other. Plessner sees two types of community, which he calls "blood-based" and "ideal-based," though an alternate translation for ideal (Sache) here might be "issue-based." The first kind corresponds to the Nietzschean line of thinking, where we essentially care about our in-groups that arise from nature, through things like kinship or shared ethnicity or cultural identity. Basically these in-groups are based on caring about "our own," as it were. The ideal-based community, in contrast, is based in a shared commitment to an ideology or set of ideas or principles, like Christianity or socialism.
It is a key, important idea of Plessner's that both types of community can lend themselves to authoritarian extremism. Both can end up consuming the individual in a drive to unrestrained intimacy, in which the individual is asked to lose her or his identity in the group's will and values and ideas, and submit to a lack of privacy. Plessner sees the remedy for this in the ways that the broader society (Gesellschaft) can give the individual a refuge for keeping at a certain distance from their communities and from others. For this distance to be maintained, society permits individuals to mask themselves behind roles, ceremonies, politeness, social games, sociability, and transactional relationships. To navigate these roles and masks and protect the dignity of individuals, participants in society must use, instead of raw political force, tact, diplomacy, and persuasion. (I found interesting connections in his arguments with Emmanuel Levinas's ideas of "the Other" that flees from the light of dislosure, as well as with psychologist Eric Berne's Games People Play.)
So then Carl Schmitt, the proto-Nazi philosopher, seems to quite misunderstand the whole point of Plessner's arguments (granted, Schmitt isn't quoting from this book, but the germ of the misunderstanding seems visible here). Schmitt sort of takes Plessner's idea of the tensions between the competing demands of good and evil, in the form of self-abnegating puritanical idealism and self-serving blood-based tribalism, and argues that the tension between "us versus them," in-group and out-group, friend versus enemy, is the nature of the political itself, and that the societal realm that mediates and moderates the tensions between such groups has no legitimate political role as such.
And perhaps then what happens with Schmitt - I theorize without having done a deep dive into the scholarship - is, he perverts an idea that Plessner develops from quoting Schmitt in the last chapter of the Limits of Community, namely, the idea that a state needs a leader who can make decisions in emergency situations. For Plessner, such a leader will inevitably be a fallible human being, which creates its own set of difficulties in terms of moderating between intimacy and distance and between good and evil and between the demands of communities and society. Schmitt, I gathered from reading him, was a lover of slippery slopes and a hater of nuance and complexity, so from Plessner Schmitt may have twisted this into the idea that if a leader is needed, and a leader must wield power, and power is inherently kind of evil, therefore evil in the service of in-group interests was okay, and so Germany needed an authoritarian strongman leader like Hitler to rescue it from the wishy-washiness of pluralist liberal democracy.
In the translator's introduction, Plessner's translator Andrew Wallace kind of accuses Plessner of betraying his own principles in talking about need for a strong leader. But I think Wallace, maybe like Carl Schmitt, fails to understand what Plessner is getting at. I think Plessner's point is that political leadership always will entail moral complexity and making mistakes, like when Obama criticized 'woke' culture by saying, "This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”
Basically, like Obama, Plessner is making a point that while ideals and ethics are important, ultimately, trying to make the world a better place through politics is a messy business in which, as he quotes in the epigram to the book, the devil must receive his due. Idealism must be balanced with realism.
January 2, 2026
Hätte nicht gedacht, dass ich das nochmal sagen würde, aber: unnötig kompliziert. Gegen die Utopie der sozialen Radikalismen, die alle Menschen allein durch Liebe und Überzeugung gewaltlos aneinanderbinden wollen, wird hier die unpersönliche, distanzierte Sphäre der Öffentlichkeit verteidigt. Ich teile diese Stoßrichtung uneingeschränkt, aber schon die schmalen 134 Seiten sind mir mindestens 100 zu viel gewesen.
Ja, die Seele steht im Zwiespalt von Anerkennungsbedürfnis und Schamfurcht. Ja, Gemeinschaft kann in eine Tyrannei der Intimität kippen. Ja, deshalb sind gesellschaftliche Formen der höflichen Distanz eine gute Sache. Unn weida? Schweres Graben für diese trivialen Ideen… Wirklich interessant ist hingegen, dass öffentliche Verhaltenheit, ordnungsstiftende Politik, ökonomischer Egoismus nicht nur als notwendiges Übel gerechtfertigt wird, sondern selbst als Positivum, das inneren Bedürfnissen dient und zur Höherwertigkeit der Seelenregungen führt. So erscheint der soziale Radikalismus nicht als eigentlich gute Idee, die nur unpraktisch ist und auf die man also guten Gewissens hoffen kann - sondern diese umfassenden Nähe-Utopien widersprechen der menschlichen Konstitution und müssen deshalb eingehegt werden.
Also: inhaltlich top, aber das durchzukauen war kein Vergnügen. Dabei durchaus glänzende Formulierungen, zB: „Der Schrei nach korsettloser Tracht verdient nur bei sehr guten Figuren ein Echo zu finden. Warum sollte es im Psychischen anders sein?“
Ja, die Seele steht im Zwiespalt von Anerkennungsbedürfnis und Schamfurcht. Ja, Gemeinschaft kann in eine Tyrannei der Intimität kippen. Ja, deshalb sind gesellschaftliche Formen der höflichen Distanz eine gute Sache. Unn weida? Schweres Graben für diese trivialen Ideen… Wirklich interessant ist hingegen, dass öffentliche Verhaltenheit, ordnungsstiftende Politik, ökonomischer Egoismus nicht nur als notwendiges Übel gerechtfertigt wird, sondern selbst als Positivum, das inneren Bedürfnissen dient und zur Höherwertigkeit der Seelenregungen führt. So erscheint der soziale Radikalismus nicht als eigentlich gute Idee, die nur unpraktisch ist und auf die man also guten Gewissens hoffen kann - sondern diese umfassenden Nähe-Utopien widersprechen der menschlichen Konstitution und müssen deshalb eingehegt werden.
Also: inhaltlich top, aber das durchzukauen war kein Vergnügen. Dabei durchaus glänzende Formulierungen, zB: „Der Schrei nach korsettloser Tracht verdient nur bei sehr guten Figuren ein Echo zu finden. Warum sollte es im Psychischen anders sein?“
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