Review article: Recent studies in German political thought
| Author | Catherine Colliot-Thélène |
| Published date | 01 January 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885110386009 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review article
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
10(1) 122–135
! The Author(s) 2011
Recent studies in German
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political thought1
DOI: 10.1177/1474885110386009
ept.sagepub.com
Catherine Colliot-The´le`ne
University of Rennes, France
Chris Thornhill German Political Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Law. London and
New York: Routledge, 2007.
Peter M. R. Stirk Twentieth-Century German Political Thought. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Michael Th. Greven, Politisches Denken in Deutschland nach 1945: Erfahrung und
Umgang mit der Kontingenz in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit. Opladen and
Farmington Hills: Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2007.
The three works reviewed here all deal with German political thought. However,
they differ profoundly, particularly in the historical period covered. In his German
Political Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Law, Chris Thornhill presents a synoptic
view of the history of German political theory from the Protestant Reformation to
the present day. Peter M. R. Stirk’s scope is limited to a presentation of the 20th
century, while Michael Th. Greven opts for an even more limited historical scale by
choosing to examine developments between 1945 and 1949. The arguments in each
of these works (the use of sources, contextualization and monographic or concep-
tual handling) are, by necessity, built very differently. In lieu of a comparison of
these three works, a simultaneous reading enables us to assess the advantages and
disadvantages of the authors’ respective choices of scope, as well as to bring into
view the innovations they contribute to the existing academic literature.
I
Based on the period covered, Chris Thornhill’s book is the most ambitious. It is
also the least convincing. It is difficult to summarize five centuries of German
political philosophy in a single volume without making suppositions as to its uni-
fying characteristics. Without explicitly endorsing the Sonderweg thesis, Thornhill
nevertheless asserts that German political philosophy has a thematic uniqueness
Corresponding author:
Catherine Colliot-The´le`ne, University of Rennes, France
Email: catherine.colliot@univ-rennes1.fr
Review article
123
whose origins go back to the theological and political debates of the late 15th
century and which has remained in force until the present day. In the first few
pages of his introduction, under the heading ‘What is German political philoso-
phy?’, the author identifies ten major characteristics of this German tradition.
Remarkably, German political philosophy is characterized here not by what it
affirms, but rather by what it denies or ignores: it does not consider the state to
be an adversary or a limitation to human freedom; it maintains a sceptical stance
vis-a`-vis universal norms; it tends towards a historicism that opposes it to the
contractualist normativism that dominates Anglo-Saxon political philosophy; it
mistrusts capitalism and, more generally, any concept of freedom focused on the
private sphere; and so on. Obviously, all these specificities can appear only in
comparison with a way of thinking about politics and law that is assumed to be
common, or even ‘normal’, yet whose model is clearly inspired by another specific
tradition – the Anglo-Saxon one – and even, we must add, the characteristics
typical of contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy.
In this work, significant emphasis is placed on paradoxes, notably on the way
that German thinkers conceive the relationship between law and the state.
However, the clearest paradox lies in the book’s subtitle, the ‘metaphysics of
law’. For the reader is led to suppose that this metaphysics of law, regardless of
the exact meaning encompassed by this term, is precisely what constitutes the
specific character of the German tradition. Yet according to the introduction
(things grow slightly more complicated later on), hostility to a metaphysics of
law is in fact what sets German political thought apart. Since the time of
Luther, Zwingli and Melanchton, we are told, German philosophers have a recur-
ring tendency to believe that politics begins where metaphysics ends, and to con-
sider politics to be profoundly shaped by the conditions that make up human
existence, such conditions having to be understood entirely independently of
metaphysics.
Unsurprisingly, a project that claims to encompass German thought over such a
long period gives rise to a very unequal handling of the various moments of
thought that are analysed. The contrast is quite striking between the first chapter,
dedicated to the Reformation, in which the relation between the theses of the
theoreticians and their political and social contexts is analysed with great care,
and virtually all those that follow, which are mainly limited to a simple presenta-
tion, with minimal reference to contexts or to the arguments of the thinkers being
studied successively: German idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), historicism
and romanticism, the Young Hegelians and Marx. Once the framework is set up –
the critique of the metaphysics of law, and the paradoxes of a purely positivistic
construction and justification of politics – what follows is a mere succession of
variations on a basically unchanged theme.
A large portion of Thornhill’s argument lies in the imprecise definition of meta-
physics. Initially, he seems to consider ‘metaphysics’ to refer to thought that lays
out absolute norms that confer order to the world in general, and particularly to
the world of human action. However, numerous developments thereafter show that
124
European Journal of Political Theory 10(1)
German philosophers have incessantly sought a substitute for this repudiated meta-
physics. An analysis of these various endeavours reveals that the work’s central
thesis is less rigid than it appears at first glance. But the nuances thus introduced
unfortunately blur the contours of the concept of metaphysics. If all search for a
foundation can be considered metaphysical, not only do rationalist philosophers
fall into this category, but so too do even anti-humanist and/or anti-rationalist
thinkers, among which Thornhill lists Carl Schmitt, Marx, Heidegger, Lukacs, and
even Luhmann. None of these figures escapes the metaphysical classification,
because, in order to criticize the fictitious autonomy of reason, they necessarily
call upon a heteronymous determination of human will: by nature, history, social
class, or whatever else. With such a broad definition of metaphysics, the author
unsurprisingly concludes that it is impossible to conceive of law without metaphys-
ics (p. 342). And the reader is also left to wonder how this impossibility, which
appears to be inscribed in the thing itself (that is, in the inherent paradox of the
necessary and inconceivable foundation of law), can be considered a characteristic
of German political philosophy.
II
In focusing his analysis on the 20th century alone, Peter Stirk is even more inclined
to call into question the Sonderweg thesis. From the introduction, he notes that the
supposed unity and specificity of the German political tradition in this time frame
largely results from a teleological interpretation imposed via the distorting prism of
the failed Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich. This interpretation is
found, in various forms, in the works of both right-wing (or even far-right) and left-
wing writers, and it obscures the continuous internal conflicts that have filled the
history of this ‘tradition’. The Sonderweg thesis itself is a part of these conflicts,
cited as it has been both by those claiming this specificity in order to affirm
the superiority of the German tradition over others, as well as by those – also
German – deploring this claim.
In terms of the types of texts he is interested in using, Stirk, while mentioning
certain philosophers or sociologists (Arendt, Horkheimer and Adorno, Schelsky,
even Habermas and Luhmann), nevertheless clearly favours jurists, and in partic-
ular constitutionalists. The book is divided into seven chapters that correspond to
successive periods of political history: monarchy, Weimar Republic, Third Reich
(where Stirk distinguishes between authors who remained in Germany and those
who went into exile), the period of refounding the democratic order after 1945, the
period from 1968 to the eve of the reunification, and lastly the contemporary period
from reunification to the challenges of globalization. However, unlike Thornhill’s
book, Stirk’s chronological presentation is not a presentation of successive doc-
trines identified with the works of one or more authors. Instead, Stirk chooses to
organize his presentation around a few key themes subject to constant debate, in
changing political contexts, throughout the century: the nature of the state, the
concept of politics, the identity of the people or the nation, the concepts of rule of
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125
law and the social state, the role of political parties, and Germany’s place in the
international order. Each of these themes is examined one after the other in each
chapter, with a few significant variations in the titles.
Of particular note are the variations on the theme of the people. These are
presented under the...
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