This paper uses structural analogies to competing political philosophies of human society as a heuristic tool to differentiate between ecological theories and to bring out new aspects of apparently well-known classics of ecological scholarship. These two different areas of knowledge have in common that their objects are ‘societies’, i.e. units composed of individuals, and that contradictory and competing theories about these supra-individual units exist. The benefit of discussing ecological theories in terms of their ...

The English translation of Helmuth Plessner’s (1892–1985) volume Levels of the Organic Life and the Human. An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (1928; henceforth: LO) finally fills in a long-lamented gap. An English translation already existed of other important essays by Plessner, such as Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behaviour (1941; Eng. 1970); The Limits of Community. A Critique of Social Radicalism (1924; Eng. 1999); and more recently (in 2018) of Political Anthropology (originally ...