Rieke Trimçev, Politik als Spiel. Zur Geschichte einer Kontingenzmetapher im politischen Denken des 20. Jahrhunderts. Baden-Baden: Nomos 2018, 398 p. ISBN 978-3-8487-4469-5

The author’s focus lies in the Spiel as a ‘figure of political order’ (24–26), from a perspective that domesticates the problematic to the reduction of contingency through the experience of contingency in the works of the authors discussed (358). On the horizontal axis, she divides the Spiele on the basis of the justification of the freedom between those of a subjective Stimmung and of the dynamics of the Spiel, whereas the vertical axis reflects the question of whether the rules of the game are internal to the Spiel or challenge the regular order. All the authors can be counted as critics of the established forms of political representation, or at least for the Schumpeterian form that sounds like a parody. Slightly surprising is her view that Rancière, with his disruption of the traditional theatrical division between the stage and the audience, in a sense rehabilitates the rather consensual civilising model (see the summary on p. 354).