Ernst Cassirer: o mito político como técnica do poder no nazismo

Abstract

This dissertation studies the manner Ernst Cassirer has developed the concept of political myth to explain nazism, in his work The Myth of the State. It deals with the analysis of the methodological pathways followed and with what are the presuppositions of his theory as well. Thus, we have begun by his Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, a work in which Cassirer departs from his enlargement of the copernican revolution of Kant aiming to justify the plurality of valid ways to conceive the world by the symbolicum animal that the man is. The theory of the myth, as a primary form of relationship with the world, will be needed in order to explain the modern political myths. However, modern myth differs from primitive myth, being an intentionally made fabrication, as a technical weapon serving the domination of political leaders. So there is a reflection concerning: the elements of the modern industrialized society that made possible the fabrication and the ascendancy of the political myths of nazism; the reasons for the affiliation to nazism by the greater part of the German population; the forms in which other philosophers treated the same phenomenon and what are their proposals to counteract the risk of new barbarisms.