SOURCE: "Ernst Cassirer and Political Thought," in The Review of Politics, Vol. 29, No. 2, April, 1967, pp. 180-203.

In the following essay, Schrems discusses the political aspect of Cassirer's work by exploring Cassirer's ideas about culture and freedom.

Ernst Cassirer's renown is the fame of a philosopher, not of a political theorist. Amongst his voluminous writings only The Myth of the State is regarded as a political treatise and its precise political character is problematic. Nevertheless, the rudiments of a Cassirer political philosophy may be derived from an exposition of his understanding of culture and from an examination of his views of freedom, myth, and the state. Cassirer extolled freedom, and he sought to "combat" myth. His own fulfillment of man's "progressive self-liberation," however, presents difficulties which are the subject matter of this essay.

The Crisis of "self-knowledge"

In the first chapter of the Essay on Man Cassirer sketched the...