The Weimar Moment Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law

by Kaplan, Leonard V.; Koshar, Rudy; Caldwell, Peter C.; Chalamet, Christophe; Chacón, Rodrigo; Dorrien, Gary; Gibbs, Robert; Gordon, Peter E.; Greenberg, Udi; Herf, Jeffrey C.; Hollerich, Michael; Jennings, Michael W.; Kaplan, Gregory; McCormick, John P.; M

• ISBN13: 9780739140727
• ISBN10: 0739140728
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-26
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

The Weimar Moment's evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and community - or, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, race - cannot but appeal to us today. This appeal - its historical grounding and content, its complexities and tensions, its variegated expressions across the networks of power and thought - is the essential context of the present volume, whose basic premise is unhappiness with Hegel's remark that we learn no more from history than we cannot learn from it. The challenge of the papers in this volume is to provide the material to confront the present effectively drawing from what we can and do understand.

Author Biography

Leonard V. Kaplan is Mortimer M. Jackson Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Rudy Koshar is George L. Mosse WARE Professor of History, German, and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xi
Political Theologies
Protestant Revolt Against Modernity	p. 3
Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar: Political Theology and its Critics	p. 17
"Together a Step Towards the Messianic Goal": Jewish-Protestant Encounter in the Weimar Republic	p. 47
Hannah Arendt in Weimar: Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament?	p. 73
Walter Benjamin, Religion, and a Theological Politics, ca. 1922	p. 109
The Creaturely Limits of Knowledge: Martin Heidegger's Theological Critique of Immanuel Kant	p. 123
Politics, Theology, Race, and Religion: The 1916-1924 Dialogue of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy	p. 145
Authority Beyond the Bounds of Mere Reason: Political-Theological Sketch of the Schmitt-Strauss Exchange	p. 171A
The Political: From Weimar to the Present	p. 185
Karl Barth
Barthian Dialectics: "Yes" and "No" on the Barthian Revolt and its Legacy	p. 217
Karl Barth and the Weimar Republic	p. 241
Theology's Weimar Moment: History before the Eschatological Limit	p. 269
Barth Among Anselm and Augustine: Realism in Karl Barth's Anselm Commentary	p. 289
Demythologizing the Secular: Karl Barth and the Politics of the Weimar Republic	p. 313
Liberalism, Law, Politics
German Idealism and German Liberalism in the 1920s: Remarks on Ernst Cassirer and the Historicity of Interpretation	p. 337
Sovereignty, Constitutionalism, and the Myth of the State: Article Four of the Weimar Constitution	p. 345
The Grammar of Laws	p. 371
Haunted by the Ghost of Weimar: Leo Strauss Critique of Hans Kelsen	p. 393
Displacement, Abstraction and Historical Specificity: Comments on the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory	p. 409
The Ideological Struggle for the German Soul in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain	p. 421
The Limits of Dictatorship and the Origins of Democracy: The Political Theory of Carl J. Friedrich from Weimar to the Cold War	p. 443
Conclusion: Notes toward a Theory of Political and Legal Resistance	p. 465
Index	p. 515
Contributors	p. 523
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