German Political Philosophy

This book combines philosophical intellectual-historical and political-theoretical methodologies to provide a new synoptic reading of the history of German political philosophy. Incorporating chapters on the political ideas of Luther and Zwingli on the politics of the early Enlightenment on Idealism on Historicism and Lukács on early Twentieth-Century political theology on the Frankfurt School and on Habermas and Luhmann the book sets out both a broad and a detailed discussion of German political reflection from the Reformation to the present. In doing so it explains how the development of German political philosophy is marked by a continual concern with certain unresolved and recurrent problems. It claims that all the major positions address questions relating to the origin of law that all seek to account for the relation between legal validity and metaphysical and theological superstructures and that all are centred on the attempt to conceptualise and reconstruct the character of the legal subject.