Cassirer's last work The Myth of the State (1946) was published posthumously. It traces the idea of a totalitarian state back to ideas promoted by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hegel. He claimed that in the 20th century politics there was a return back, with the active encouragement of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, to the irrationality of myth, and in particular to a belief that there is such a thing as destiny.
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Famous quotes containing the words myth and/or state:
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
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