Freedom and Homelessness : the Historical Ground of Political Life

Hemming, Laurence Paul (2025) Freedom and Homelessness : the Historical Ground of Political Life. In: The Essence of History :. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy . Routledge, London, pp. 156-171. ISBN 9781032836300

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Abstract

This paper asks about the “ground of history”, and examines how this question is answered by Thomas Mann. The paper positions Mann not only as a novelist but as a self-consciously paradigmatic production of modern liberal consciousness: a subject both constructed by his own times and the technical apparatus of those times (political apparatus, publishing apparatus, and the construction of a willing audience to hear him) Mann is posited as a self-constructing subject who simultaneously reveals the impossibility and necessity of grounding political and historical life through narrative. Liberalism, in this account, is not merely a political doctrine of individual liberty but a historical phenomenon itself: a comprehensive metaphysical stance that organizes the self and the world through representational will, culminating in the emergence of what is now described as a global “world civilisation.” By situating Mann within a broader intellectual genealogy that includes Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, and Heidegger—as well as interlocutors such as Jünger, Strauss, and Strausz-Hupé—the essay articulates a critique of modern liberal political ontology, understood as an incessant production of grounds in response to a constitutive groundlessness. It argues that this metaphysical predicament undergirds the political forms of modernity, from totalitarianisms to liberal democracies, each offering a form of “homecoming” in response to the alienation that is their shared premise. In concluding, Hemming draws upon Heidegger’s notion of letting-be to propose an alternative to the will-to-ground that animates modern political life. Rather than seeking to overcome homelessness through new foundations—political, theological, or aesthetic—the essay suggests that genuine freedom might instead consist in learning to dwell within the clearing of presence itself: to let the past presence without mastery, and to receive the ground not as something posited, but as something given. This ontological shift gestures toward a rethinking of community, history, and politics beyond the liberal metaphysics of the autonomous subject.