Peter Graf Kielmansegg im Gespräch

This book paints an intellectual portrait of Peter Graf Kielmansegg as a historian, political scientist and German intellectual, and rounds off his previous oeuvre. It focuses on a long conversation about his life and work, in which Graf Kielmansegg is as visible as a person as in no other text. Texts of various types from four decades supplement the conversation, some of which are published here for the first time: to begin with, there are five essays on intellectual history, more precisely on The Federalist Papers, Tocqueville’s theory of democracy, Kant’s influential essay ‘Towards perpetual peace’, Hannah Arendt’s book on revolution and the influence of European political thought in the world, followed by three portraits of Graf Kielmansegg’s companions Eugen Kogon, Wilhelm Hennis and Dolf Sternberger and an essay on the language of the social sciences. Finally, there is a selection of his public statements and interventions on current questions and problems of democracy.