The Weimar Moment Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law

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.

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.