The Crisis in Humanist Political Theory

<p>The author Herman Dooyeweerd a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences taught legal theory and philosophy at the Free University of Amsterdam from 1926 to 1965. </p><p>Analogous to the way in which Leonard Nelson alluded to a<em> science of law without law</em> Dooyeweerd highlights the crisis in humanist political theory as a <em>theory of the state without a state</em>. His seminal ideas about the nature of the state as a public legal institution delimited by its jural function extend far beyond the modest size of this book. Above all it demonstrates albeit in a provisional and tentative way the shortcomings prevalent within modern humanistic theories of the state as well as the direction in which a Christian theory of the state ought to be articulated - a task to which he made a considerable contribution both in the third volume of his <em>A New Critique of Theoretical Thought</em> and in his multi-volume <em>Encyclopedia of the Science of Law</em>.</p>