The Myth of the State
Cassirer's 1946 posthumous study — the politics of myth from the ancient state to Nazi totalitarianism
Tradition: Neo-Kantianism / philosophy of symbolic forms / political philosophy
Cassirer's 1946 posthumous study — the politics of myth from Plato to Nazi totalitarianism
Published by Yale University Press in May 1946, one year after Cassirer's death at Columbia University (April 1945), 'The Myth of the State' is Cassirer's final and most political book. Edited from his manuscript and lecture notes by his student Charles W. Hendel, the book was Cassirer's attempt to understand — philosophically, historically, and politically — how the Nazi catastrophe could have happened in mid-twentieth-century Germany. The book is structured in three parts. Part I: The Myth of the State in Antiquity and the Middle Ages — Plato (especially the Republic), Greek and Roman thought, the medieval theological-political tradition. Part II: The Struggle Against Myth in the History of Political Theory — the Renaissance (Machiavelli), seventeenth-century political philosophy (Hobbes, Grotius), Enlightenment political thought (Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau), Kant. Part III: The Myth of the Twentieth Century — the analytical-philosophical centerpiece, treating Carlyle's hero-worship, Hegelian state-philosophy (Cassirer's reading of Hegel is critical but careful), Gobineau's racial mythology, and finally the rise of twentieth-century political myth in Nazi Germany. Cassirer's central thesis: modern political myth is not a primitive survival but a deliberate fabrication, deploying the symbolic-mythical resources Cassirer had analysed in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-29) for explicitly political ends. The book is at once a culminating application of Cassirer's symbolic-forms framework and a personal-political testament from a refugee philosopher who had escaped Nazi Germany and watched it from a distance.
Author
Editions cited
- The Myth of the State (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1946; ed. Charles W. Hendel)
- Reprinted: Yale Anchor Books, 1955
- Critical commentary: Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide (Harvard, 2010); John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (Yale, 1987)
School Embodiments
Late-Cassirer philosophy of political culture.
"Modern political myths are not survivals — they are deliberate fabrications." (Myth of the State, part III, ch. 18)
Marburg-Neo-Kantian framework applied to political myth.
"Myth is one of the symbolic forms in which the human mind shapes its world." (Myth of the State, introduction)
Defence of liberal-democratic rationality against totalitarian myth.
"The Enlightenment ideal of reason must be defended against the politicisation of myth." (Myth of the State, conclusion)
Historicist tracing of the politics of myth from antiquity to the present.
"The history of political thought is in part the history of political myth." (Myth of the State, part I)
Late Cassirer's humanist defence of philosophy as a bulwark against barbarism.
"It has always been one of the principal tasks of philosophy to destroy political myths." (Myth of the State, conclusion)
Structural account of myth as a symbolic form.
"Myth has a structure of its own." (Myth of the State, introduction)
Continental-philosophical tradition.
Internal Tensions
Cassirer's final, posthumous, and most political book — applied symbolic-forms philosophy as anti-totalitarian critique. Cited continuously in subsequent political-philosophical analyses of totalitarianism (Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951; the Frankfurt School's Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947); the book's combination of philosophical method and political urgency made it one of the major mid-twentieth-century philosophical responses to Nazism.
I. Time
1946 publication, posthumous. Cassirer had been working on the book through his American exile years (Yale 1941-44, Columbia 1944-45) until his April 1945 death.
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II. Space
Columbia University (Cassirer's final institutional base) and Yale (where he had taught before Columbia and where the book was published). The intellectual space is the American refugee-academic community of mid-1940s Frankfurt-school émigrés and other European intellectuals.
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III. Matter
Posthumous political-philosophical volume (~300 pages). Form is sustained historical-philosophical essay across three parts; Hendel's editorial apparatus is minimal but visible.
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IV. Observer
Late Cassirer reflecting on the catastrophe of his era. The observer is the German-Jewish philosopher who had been forced to leave Germany in 1933 (he emigrated through Britain and Sweden to America), watching his homeland from a distance and analysing its descent into political myth philosophically.
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V. Energy
Anti-totalitarian critical energies. The book combines Cassirer's lifelong philosophical-historical method with direct political-moral engagement.
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VI. Information
Single book — historical analysis and contemporary critique. The three-part structure (antiquity-medieval / struggle against myth / twentieth-century myth) frames the contemporary political crisis within a longer philosophical-political history.
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How The Myth of the State resolves each dilemma
31 resolved positions across 4 dimensions · 26 unaligned.
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