Martin Heidegger's notion of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) is the core of Being and Time (1927) and stands at the center of his political thought. Despite this significance, much of the literature on Heidegger either ignores the importance of resoluteness, understands it as an ethical concept, or rejects it as a harbinger of his later support for National Socialism. Resoluteness is vitally significant for social and political theory because it accounts for the meaning of political agency as action that aims to transform the world. Presenting resoluteness as a mode of disclosure reveals that resoluteness is not a phenomenon of the individual or will, but rather a condition for the possibility of being a political agent. Part One provides a close reading of Heidegger's notion of resoluteness to show how it can be read as a political concept. In Chapter One, I argue that the predominant conception of Heidegger's thought in Anglo-American philosophy (i.e., by pragmatists like Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty) overlooks the importance of resoluteness by viewing action solely as purposive activity. However, in Heidegger's conception of disclosure, purposive activity occurs within an already established world of significance and therefore, cannot be its own foundation. Resoluteness cannot have a purpose beyond itself, because it grounds the significance of the world within which purposive activity is meaningful. In Chapter Two, I substantiate my claim by developing resoluteness as a mode of world disclosure. In contrast to mainstream interpretations of Being and Time that read resoluteness as an ethical concept (i.e., self-individuation), I argue that for Heidegger, the counter-concept to publicness is not the individual, but community, which requires us to understand world disclosure as shared by a people. Part Two establishes that resoluteness has influenced both social and political thought through an examination of how two of Heidegger's students, Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt, appropriate the concept. Though both Marcuse and Arendt distance themselves from Heidegger's thought, as I show, resoluteness has an indelible influence on each of their theories of action. In Chapter Three, I argue that the early Marcuse's conception of radical social action, which became influential for the New Left movement in the 1960s, is based on his attempt to synthesize Heidegger's notion of resoluteness with a Marxist revolutionary conception of history. Marcuse argues that the possibility of radical action requires Heidegger's analysis to incorporate material factors such as gender and socio-economic status. Arendt counters that because power depends upon the ability of people to act in concert, it transcends the material factors with which Marcuse takes issue. As I show in Chapter Four, Arendt rejects the materialist conception of history Marcuse embraces, yet similarly bases her conception of political action on resoluteness, revealing the foundational significance of Heidegger's thought. However, I argue that Arendt's pluralist notion of political agency highlights a problem with Heidegger's understanding of community as a uniform whole, which fails to consider the communicative process between diverse political agents. Despite this criticism, in Chapter Five, I argue that Heidegger's notion of world disclosure makes a valuable contribution to social and political philosophy by establishing the notion of non-instrumental, world-constitutive action as the basis for political agency.
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