1. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 15.
2. For recent, post-1945 research on the Weimar syndrome, see Dirk Moses, “The Weimar Syndrome in the Federal Republic of Germany: Carl Schmitt and the Forty-Fiver Generation of Intellectuals,” in Holer Zaborowski and Stephan Loos, eds., Leben, Tod und Entscheidung: Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2003), pp. 187–207.
3. For the Weimar complex, see Sebastian Ullrich, Der Weimar-Komplex: Das Scheitern der ersten deutschen Demokratie und die politische Kultur der frühen Bundesrepublik 1945–1959 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009).
4. Lebensphilosophie is usually understood as both life philosophy and vitalism. As Peter Hanns Reill demonstrated, the two concepts were put together during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, the first from the context of the German romantic nature philosophy, the second from the French vitalistic biology. A few historians and thinkers tried—in vain—to differentiate the two, but the identification has lasted to our own day. Lebensphilosophie, as will be shown below, is also taken to mean or signify life force, living experience, or wholeness. For comprehensive discussions of the terminology, see Gudrun Kühne-Bertram, Aus dem Leben- zum Leben: Entstehung, Wesen und Bedeutung populär Lebensphilosophien in der Geistesgeschichte des 10. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Lang Verlag, 1987).
5. See also more specific discussions in Hans Freyer, Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Kiel: Kommissionsverlag Lipsius and Tischer, 1951), p. 19;