Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 02 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines Soren Kierkegaard's views on society, politics, and modernity as a practitioner of ideology critique, explaining that ideology critique is a special case of the hermeneutics of suspicion focused on exposing self-deceptions. It analyses the relevant views of Kierkegaard as contained in some of his works, including , , and .

Keywords: Soren Kierkegaard, society, politics, modernity, ideology critique, hermeneutics of suspicion, self-deceptions, Concept of Irony, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling

Merold Westphal

Merold Westphal is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Fordham University; Adjunct Professor at Australian Catholic University; and Guest Professor at Wuhan University, China. He is the author of two books on Hegel and two on Kierkegaard, he also works on continental philosophy of religion in the contexts of existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, ideology critique, and deconstruction. Recent books include Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Fordham University Press, 1998), Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (Fordham, 2001), Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Indiana University Press, 2004), Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (Indiana, 2008), and Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Baker Academic, 2009).

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.