Description

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Wilhelm Hennis defends here the idea that politics is a 'practical' science, a moral science belonging to a tradition reaching back to Aristotle and opposed to the empirical science of politics originating in the seventeenth century. Well-known outside Germany for his seminal writings on Max Weber, these essays demonstrate the wider context of his thinking in the constitutional and popular politics of a 'new democracy': the Federal Republic of Germany, created in 1949.

During the 1950s Hennis was first a Bundestag assistant, and then in Frankfurt as academic assistant to Carlo Schmid, a leading constitutionalist who also played a major part in the modernization of the SPD. His critique of 'radical' politics during the 1970s, represented here by two polemical essays on the problems of legitimacy and of democracy, drew upon his acute grasp of political theory, and his practical experience of party and government politics. Three later essays – on Tocqueville, Goya and Max Weber – demonstrate how the skills of political argument can be applied to classical figures.

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Contents

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Introduction; D.Kelly

The Problem of the German Conception of the State

The Idea of Office and the Concept of Democracy

Democratization: Concept and Problematic

Legitimacy: On a Category of Civil Society

Tocqueville's 'New Political Science'

Goya's Reason and the Project of Modernity: Seeking Understanding of 'The Dream of Reason' (Capricho 43)

'Hellenic Intellectual Culture' and the Origins of Weber's Political Thinking

Political Science as a Vocation: A Personal Account

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Authors

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Having in May 1945 survived three sinkings and a pending court-martial, WILHELM HENNIS studied law in Göttingen University, Germany and in 1951 became the Bundestag assistant to the legal adviser of the SPD, and then from 1953 assistant to Carlo Schmid, Professor of Political Science in Frankfurt. After a period in Hamburg, he was in 1967 appointed Professor of Political Theory in Freiburg, a post which he held until his retirement. In 2003 he was awarded the Reuchlin Prize.