Dolf Sternberger on Conflict, Politics, and ‘the Political’

The paper reassesses Dolf Sternberger’s theory of the political (1960) together with his early views on political conflict (c. 1945–1962) and situates these into the context of Sternberger’s post-war aspirations of stabilizing the foundations of the polity and providing political science with new basic concepts. Reacting against the conceptualization of politics as battle (Schmitt, Clausewitz, Weber), Sternberger proposed a theory of politics as regulated quarrel, comparable to play or game. However, Sternberger also normatively and provocatively represented “peace” as the essence and goal of the political, thereby creating a tension with his idea of parliamentarianism as quarrel, often rather amounting to “latent civil war”. The tension, I argue, is intimately linked with Sternberger’s misreading and mechanical reversal of Schmitt’s (alleged) arguments, which caused Sternberger to operate with actual peace rather than the possibility thereof, which would have better harmonized with his own aims.