Solidarity of the Shaken : The Ethical and the Political in the Thought of Jan Patocka

This vital reappraisal of Czech philosopher, Jan Patocka, takes his political thought beyond its traditional place in the realm of Czech dissent, and relates it instead to the contemporary challenges of neoliberal globalization, identity politics and the rise of alt-right movements.

Demonstrating Patocka’s enduring relevance, the book reconstructs the concept of the “solidarity of the shaken” as a profound response to the spiritual, ethical, and political crises of modernity.

Patocka’s argument, that to counter oppressive structures we need to abandon fading liberal moralities in favour of new models of community, carries as much weight in the contemporary political climate as it did when it was formulated in the mid-20th century. In demonstrating this, Belejkanicová connects Patocka’s work on political community to that of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Edmund Husserl, Ernst Jünger and Walter Benjamin, and relates them to the broader sway of Western ethical and political thought. Belejkanicová argues that the models assembled by Patocka here can directly tackle and even transcend the splintering effect of today’s political antagonists by helping us elide their divisive and dissipative effects: Patocka claimed that communities based on opposition to one another will always fail to be rational, grounded and pragmatic.
A timely reposition of Patocka’s work, Solidarity of the Shaken also works towards further understanding of political communities in general – how they are constituted, how they function and how they can answer the pressing questions with which they are faced.