Weimar: Theory of a Crisis

What is sovereignty? What role do basic rights play in modern democracy? Should democracy be based in commonly shared values? Is there an essential difference between liberalism and democratic politics? And if so, how can modern liberal democracies function?

The Weimar period gave rise to some of the most important and consequential debates in political theory and constitutional thought since the eighteenth century. Lawyers and political theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller, Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer tackled in particular the challenges that democracies face in an age of mass society, of unbounded capitalist dynamics, and of rising anti-democratic forces.

This lecture course introduces students to key debates in political and constitutional theory of the Weimar period. It contextualises them in the social and political world of Germany’s first, failed, democratic state by looking at cultural and economic theory as well as political thought. Many of the texts discussed in this class have only recently become available in the English language. As such, they offer fresh perspectives on concrete political theoretical problems such as the function and legitimation of modern constitutional courts, of basic rights and the role of the party. At the same time this course offers a deep insight into the vagaries and complexities of European constitutionalism in the first half of the twentieth century, and the consequences of its failure for the political world which came after it.