Thornhill C. German Political Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Law

London: Routledge, 2006. — 416 p. — ISBN10: 0415586496; ISBN13: 978-0415586498 — (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)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.The Reformation and the loss of law
The early Enlightenment: The laws of which nature?
German idealism: The Enlightenment and the reconstruction of legal metaphysics
Historicism and romanticism: Against liberalism as metaphysics
The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx
Positivism and organic theory: The two faces of early German liberalism
The vitalist interlude: Depersonalization and the law
Neo-Kantianism and its aftermaths
Theories of state in the Weimar Republic
Critical theory and the law
The dialectics of refoundation: The politics of humanism and anti-humanism
Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann: Two rival critiques of metaphysics