Crisis of the subject and contemporary political philosophy

Abstract

This article analyzes the conception of subjectivity present in the contemporary political philosophy, locating it in the general context of the existing polemics on the subject in the metaphysics and the philosophical anthropology. After doing a first reference to the Kantian idea of subjectivity present in John Rawls, the author exposes the critical positions that on this point maintain liberals as Nozick, Dworkin, Posner and Becker, comunitarists like Sandel, MacIntyre and Taylor and the German thinker Jürgen Habermas. Subsequently it is analyzed the discussion that on the matter of subjectivity maintain among themselves -now in an anthropological and metaphysical area- Habermas, Gadamer, Ricoeur and Levinas and the way in which their solutions are at the same time questioned by some postmodern philosophers as Vattimo. Relating both debates, the article concludes that the existing discussion in contemporary political philosophy has part of its root in the crisis of the metaphysical concept of subjectivity whose resolution would situate, according to the author, in a rescue of a personalist idea of the subject.