Journal of the History of Ideas

Abstract:

This article aims to clarify the stakes of the reading of Dante that concludes Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 book The King’s Two Bodies. It does so by reconstructing the relevant argumentative contexts for appraising it, starting from the account of the sovereign individual that Kantorowicz developed in his 1940s lecture courses at the University of California, Berkeley. It argues that, for Kantorowicz, Dante’s articulation of an exclusively human dignity constitutes a decisive chapter in the larger genealogy of the “superman” idea he begins to trace in that forum.