Abstract

Jung’s Crisis is an ambitious book written from the dogmatic perspective of a firm believer in the redeeming virtue of phenomenology. Like the works of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurvitsch, on which it often relies, it combines a commitment to phenomenology with a lively interest in social theory. Above all, it claims to be the first treatise systematically to apply the relatively new phenomenological paradigm to the realm of politics. Its undergirding thesis is that philosophical phenomenology is destined to supersede all previous as well as all currently dominant modes of political discourse. Phenomenology is understood throughout not simply as a method, as it is for example in Heidegger’s Being and Time, section 7, but in the Husserlian sense of a complete and rigorous science capable of securing universal assent, of synthesizing theory and practice, and of overcoming the numerous dichotomies that have traditionally plagued the house of philosophy.