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This book provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the major political thinkers of modern Germany. It includes chapters on the works of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. These works are examined in their social and historical contexts, ranging from the period of Bismarck to the present day. A clear picture is presented of the connections between individual theoretical positions and the general political conditions of modern Germany. Areas of political history covered in particular depth include nineteenth-c

This article engages critically with sociological interpretations of constitutional law, which tend to view constitutions as an internal aspect of state sovereignty that serves the rational integration of citizens and promotes the civilization of national political cultures, separate from inter-state conflicts. Variants on this view run through much of modern sociology, including, in distinct form, the work of Norbert Elias. In contrast to such outlooks, the article argues that constitutions form complex links between the internal and the external domains of state action, and they are typically created by external military pressures, usually resulting from imperialism. It expands on this claim by first assessing how, in different examples, constitutions have been used to consolidate the means of military violence in settings defined by imperialism, typically establishing rights for citizens as instruments to mobilize outwardly directed military force. On this basis, this article continues by assessing how constitutions have also engendered forms of violence within national societies. Overall, it is claimed that constitutions often instilled a tendency towards the uncontrollable production of violence in the states that they framed. Through their foundation in the administration of military force, constitutionally designed states have typically internalized deep conflicts (ethnic and socio-economic) between groups of citizens, which their military emphasis has intensified. At different junctures, then, states have struggled to mollify such violence, and they usually relied on more violence - internal and external - to accomplish this. The article concludes with some reflections on the ways in which constitutions eventually managed to pacify national societies, stressing the role of international law in this process.

AbstractThis article adds to the emergent body of constitutional-theoretical research on populist government. It argues that constitutional analysis has specific importance in explaining the hostility to global legal norms that characterizes many populist or neo-nationalist polities. However, it argues that more classical perspectives in constitutional theory have not provided adequate explanations for this phenomenon. This is because constitutionalism itself misunderstands the sociological foundations of constitutional democracy and it promotes normative models of democracy, based in theories of popular sovereignty and constituent power, which create a legitimational space in which populism can flourish. In contrast, this article sets out a historical-sociological account of national democracy, explaining how democracy has been formed through processes of global norm construction. As a result, the basic subjects imputed to democracy by both constitutionalism and populism only became real on global normative foundations. In advancing these claims, this article presents a global-sociological critique of populism, explaining that populism evolves where the realities of democratic formation enter conflict with the norms of constitutional theory. In so doing, it offers a sociological theory of constitutional democracy that might help to avert democratic self-subversion.

First published in Studies in Social and Political Thought 5, 2001.

First published in Studies in Social and Political Thought 5, 2001.

Abstract:This article proposes an alternative to more standard, neoclassical theories concerned with the proceduralisation of constituent power. It argues that more established theories of proceduralisation are insufficiently aligned to the sociological realities in which constituent power is located and expressed, and their residual fixation on the premises of classical constitutionalism impedes adequate understanding of constituent power in the global constitutional order of contemporary society. On this basis, the article offers a sociological examination of constituent power, which attempts to grasp constituent power in its objectively existing procedural form. In particular, it claims that constituent power now exists as an inner-legal function, activated through procedures within an increasingly differentiated legal system: whereas in classical theory constituent power was a primary political source of constitutional norms, it now appears only as a secondary expression of norms already contained within the global legal system. Rather than renouncing the idea of constituent power, however, the article uses its sociological focus to observe new procedural openings for the activation of constituent agency, adapted to the material/sociological fabric of contemporary society.

This article critically examines the importance of Hauke Brunkhorst's work for the sociology of law, arguing that it provides new bearings for contemporary legal–sociological research. It pays particular attention to his methodological fusion of Systems Theory and Critical Theory and to the analysis of the correlation between national and cosmopolitan political structures in his theory of legal normativity. The article concludes by offering an alternative framework for observing the sociolegal processes at the center of Brunkhorst's work.

AbstractThis article examines the changing status of constituent power in contemporary constitutionalism. It considers how, at face value, contemporary constitutional law reflects a post-constituent constitutional order, which is defined by a rupture with classical constitutional principles, such that the extra-legal source of constitutional order is diminished. However, it argues that the common perception of a decline in constituent power in constitutional norm construction is marked by an excessively literalistic understanding of the origins of constitutional norms and practices. As an alternative, drawing on systems-theoretical methodologies, the article proposes a functionalist, sociologically attuned reconstruction of the historical content of constitutional concepts, including the concept of constituent power. Through this perspective, it explains that constituent power, in conjunction with constitutional rights, always acted, not as an externally founding source of political agency, but as an inner projection of the political system, which served the internal organization of the political system as a distinct societal domain. The article concludes that the transnational constitutional models which are widespread in contemporary society, far from negating constituent power, re-articulate its primary functions, and they realize potentials for preserving the autonomy of the political system which constituent power always contained.