Lars Vinx
Biographic Data
| ID | 3568210 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lars Vinx |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lars |
| FAMILY NAME | Vinx |
| SIGNATURE | VINX L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bilkent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0973-9613 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy
This volume challenges conventional interpretations by demonstrating that Hans Kelsen was far from being a purely formalist thinker. Instead, it highlights his profound and enduring engagement with the threats facing constitutional democracies. The political and institutional upheavals of interwar Europe significantly influenced Kelsen's evolving vision of democracy, as this volume shows. His contributions to twentieth-century democratic theory i…
The Cambridge Handbook on the Material Constitution
Despite a long and venerable tradition, the material constitution almost disappeared from constitutional scholarship after the Second World War. Its marginalisation saw the rise of a normative and legalistic style in constitutional law that neglected the role of social reality and political economy. This collection not only retrieves the history and development of the concept of the material constitution, but it tests its theoretical and practica…
The Material Constitution of the Dual State
This chapter discusses Ernst Fränkel’s analysis of Nazi Germany as a dual state that combined remnants of legal governance with a practice of permanent dictatorship. It is argued that Fränkel’s dual state thesis sheds a critical light on recent appropriations of the notion of material constitution. This claim is developed by way of an analysis and defence of Fränkel’s critique of Carl Schmitt’s concrete order thought.
Personality, authority, and self-esteem in Hobbes’s Leviathan
This paper offers a novel interpretation of the theory of the personality of the state put forward in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes’s account of political representation does not conceive of the state as a “purely artificial person” or “person by fiction,” as Quentin Skinner and David Runciman have argued. Rather, Hobbes regards the state as an artificial person that is closely analogous to natural persons. The state’s integrity as well as the limit…
Carl Schmitt's Early Legal-Theoretical Writings
Many of Carl Schmitt's major works have by now been translated, with two notable exceptions: Schmitt's two early monographs Statute and Judgment (first published in 1912) and The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual (first published in 1914). In these two works Schmitt presents a theory of adjudication as well as an account of the state's role in the realization of the rule of law, which together form the theoretical basis on…
Carl Schmitt and the authoritarian subversion of democracy
‘Bill Scheuerman’s ‘The End of Law’ offers a compelling case for the claim that Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory is not authentically democratic. This does not entail, however, that Schmitt’s views are of no relevance for understanding the contemporary crisis of democracy. Schmitt’s arguments offer a blueprint for the populist-authoritarian subversion of democracy. Defenders of democracy are therefore well-advised to engage with Schmitt’s ide…
Democratic equality and militant democracy
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and the politics of constituent power
It is often held that the legitimacy of a democratic constitution depends on its production by constituent power. This paper argues that the notion of legitimation by constituent power faces a dilemma: if the authenticity of an exercise of constituent power depends on conformity to existing constitutional law or on requirements of justice that are antecedent to the actual process of constitution-making, the appeal to constituent power must lack t…
The Political Theology of the Secular State in Hobbes and Böckenförde
Standard accounts of the ideological basis of secularization tend to focus on the emergence of non-religious justifications of the authority of the state in early modernity. This article argues that successful secularization also requires a certain political theology, one that leads religious believers to accept that the rules of their religion cannot justifiably claim the status of public law. This thesis is developed through an in-depth account…
Santi Romano against the state
This paper argues that Santi Romano’s legal institutionalism is driven by implicit normative assumptions that stand in tension with Romano’s commitments to legal positivism and legal pluralism. Romano’s approach to the individuation of legal orders is indefensible on purely descriptive grounds, as it rests on a picture of good social order. That picture, in turn, gives more prominence to the state, as an institution of institutions, than one woul…
Weimar als Herausforderung
The book under review collects contributions to an interdisciplinary workshop on the Weimar Republic held in Berlin in 2015. It is also the first volume in a new book series (Weimarer Schriften zur Republik) that is to focus on the contemporary relevance of the Weimar democratic experience. In referring to the Weimar Republic as a challenge, the editors mean to suggest that engagement with the history of the Weimar Republic is still important tod…
The Foundation of the Juridico-Political
116 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2017. noticed that the final pages of Weber’s essay make him into a theorist of Begriffsgeschichte avant la lettre. In another essay, Hübinger again refers to Koselleck and characterises the situation of the historian with six K-words: ‘Kontingenz, Komplexität, Konstellationen, Kontexten, Konflikten und Kontinuitäten’ (266, 199). The tone of this list is entirely Weberian, and perhaps it can be cited as a …
Schmitt, Carl (1888–1985)
Carl Schmitt's defence of sovereignty
once remarked that a sovereign, according to the classical doctrine of sovereignty, is 'as essential a part of a society which possesses law, as a backbone is of a man'. 1 Not least as a result of Hart's own attack on Austin's theory of sovereignty, analytical legal theorists today agree that a sovereign is not just unnecessary for but incompatible with the existence of legal order.To explain the variety and persistence of legal norms, the contin…
Law, Liberty and State
Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt are associated with a conservative reaction to the 'progressive' forces of the twentieth century. Each was an acute analyst of the juristic form of the modern state and the relationship of that form to the idea of liberty under a system of public, general law. Hayek had the highest regard for Schmitt's understanding of the rule of law state despite Schmitt's hostility to it, and he owed the distinction he drew in his …
Carl Schmitt and the problem of constitutional guardianship
Carl Schmitt's constitutional theory argues for strong counter-majoritarian constraints on the powers of legislative majorities. This chapter explores Schmitt's own conception of constitutional guardianship fails to follow through on this apparent commitment to the protection of rights, which exposes his critique of the legislative state to a charge of hypocrisy. The idea of constitutional guardianship can be understood in two different ways: as …
The Guardian of the Constitution
This volume provides the first English translation of Hans Kelsen's and Carl Schmitt's influential Weimar-era debate on constitutional guardianship and the legitimacy of constitutional review. It includes Kelsen's seminal piece, 'The Nature and Development of Constitutional Adjudication', as well as key extracts from the 'Guardian of the Constitution' which present Schmitt's argument against constitutional review. Also included are Kelsen's revie…
The Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt
What does Carl Schmitt have to offer to ongoing debates about sovereignty, globalization, spatiality, the nature of the political, and political theology? Can Schmitt’s positions and concepts offer insights that might help us understand our concrete present-day situation? Works on Schmitt usually limit themselves to historically isolating Schmitt into his Weimar or post-Weimar context, to reading him together with classics of political and legal …
The incoherence of strong popular sovereignty
This paper argues that the strong conception of popular sovereignty employed in the German Federal Constitutional Court's recent decision on the Treaty of Lisbon is incoherent and should not be used as the centerpiece of a democratic constitutional theory. Strong conceptions of popular sovereignty are usually defended on the basis of the claim that an appeal to strong popular sovereignty is necessary to ground the legitimacy of constitutional law…
Carl Schmitt and the analogy between constitutional and international law
According to Carl Schmitt, constitutional law and international law are analogous in that they are both forms of political law. Schmitt concludes that neither is open to legitimate judicial enforcement. This paper critically explores Schmitt’s analogy between constitutional and international law. It argues that the analogy can be turned against Schmitt and contemporary sceptics about international law: Since we no longer have any reason to deny t…
Courtroom to Revolutionary Stage
Discussions of the role of the judicial process in the crisis of the Weimar Republic have typically focused on the ideological dispositions of judges. Judges in the Weimar Republic, according to the conventional account originally put forward by contemporary critics of the Weimar judiciary such as Emil Julius Gumbel, tended to be men of the nationalist Right, who were lukewarm or even openly hostile towards the democratic system. While judges wer…
Constitutional Indifferentism and Republican Freedom
Neo-republicans claim that Hobbes’s constitutional indifferentism (the view that we have no profound reason to prefer one constitutional form over another) is driven exclusively by a reductive understanding of liberty as non-interference. This essay argues that constitutional indifferentism is grounded in an analysis of the institutional presuppositions of well-functioning government that does not depend on a conception of liberty as mere non-int…
Republicanism and Judicial Review
Institutionalizing the Just War? A Critical Comment on Buchanan
I will argue that Buchanan's argument against the principle that war is permissible only in response to an actual or imminent attack rests on a mistaken understanding of the nature and purpose of the JWN. Buchanan abstracts from the fact that the JWN is not just a moral principle but also a legal rule and, as such, part of an already existing institutionalized system for the regulation of the use of force. Due to this abstraction, he fails to tak…
Democratic equality and militant democracy
Carl Schmitt and the authoritarian subversion of democracy
‘Bill Scheuerman’s ‘The End of Law’ offers a compelling case for the claim that Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory is not authentically democratic. This does not entail, however, that Schmitt’s views are of no relevance for understanding the contemporary crisis of democracy. Schmitt’s arguments offer a blueprint for the populist-authoritarian subversion of democracy. Defenders of democracy are therefore well-advised to engage with Schmitt’s ide…
Santi Romano against the state
This paper argues that Santi Romano’s legal institutionalism is driven by implicit normative assumptions that stand in tension with Romano’s commitments to legal positivism and legal pluralism. Romano’s approach to the individuation of legal orders is indefensible on purely descriptive grounds, as it rests on a picture of good social order. That picture, in turn, gives more prominence to the state, as an institution of institutions, than one woul…
Republicanism and Judicial Review
Personality, authority, and self-esteem in Hobbes’s Leviathan
This paper offers a novel interpretation of the theory of the personality of the state put forward in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes’s account of political representation does not conceive of the state as a “purely artificial person” or “person by fiction,” as Quentin Skinner and David Runciman have argued. Rather, Hobbes regards the state as an artificial person that is closely analogous to natural persons. The state’s integrity as well as the limit…
Constitutional Indifferentism and Republican Freedom
Neo-republicans claim that Hobbes’s constitutional indifferentism (the view that we have no profound reason to prefer one constitutional form over another) is driven exclusively by a reductive understanding of liberty as non-interference. This essay argues that constitutional indifferentism is grounded in an analysis of the institutional presuppositions of well-functioning government that does not depend on a conception of liberty as mere non-int…
Institutionalizing the Just War? A Critical Comment on Buchanan
I will argue that Buchanan's argument against the principle that war is permissible only in response to an actual or imminent attack rests on a mistaken understanding of the nature and purpose of the JWN. Buchanan abstracts from the fact that the JWN is not just a moral principle but also a legal rule and, as such, part of an already existing institutionalized system for the regulation of the use of force. Due to this abstraction, he fails to tak…
Republicanism and Judicial Review
Constitutional Indifferentism and Republican Freedom
Neo-republicans claim that Hobbes’s constitutional indifferentism (the view that we have no profound reason to prefer one constitutional form over another) is driven exclusively by a reductive understanding of liberty as non-interference. This essay argues that constitutional indifferentism is grounded in an analysis of the institutional presuppositions of well-functioning government that does not depend on a conception of liberty as mere non-int…
The incoherence of strong popular sovereignty
This paper argues that the strong conception of popular sovereignty employed in the German Federal Constitutional Court's recent decision on the Treaty of Lisbon is incoherent and should not be used as the centerpiece of a democratic constitutional theory. Strong conceptions of popular sovereignty are usually defended on the basis of the claim that an appeal to strong popular sovereignty is necessary to ground the legitimacy of constitutional law…
Carl Schmitt and the analogy between constitutional and international law
According to Carl Schmitt, constitutional law and international law are analogous in that they are both forms of political law. Schmitt concludes that neither is open to legitimate judicial enforcement. This paper critically explores Schmitt’s analogy between constitutional and international law. It argues that the analogy can be turned against Schmitt and contemporary sceptics about international law: Since we no longer have any reason to deny t…
Courtroom to Revolutionary Stage
Discussions of the role of the judicial process in the crisis of the Weimar Republic have typically focused on the ideological dispositions of judges. Judges in the Weimar Republic, according to the conventional account originally put forward by contemporary critics of the Weimar judiciary such as Emil Julius Gumbel, tended to be men of the nationalist Right, who were lukewarm or even openly hostile towards the democratic system. While judges wer…
Schmitt, Carl (1888–1985)
Carl Schmitt's defence of sovereignty
once remarked that a sovereign, according to the classical doctrine of sovereignty, is 'as essential a part of a society which possesses law, as a backbone is of a man'. 1 Not least as a result of Hart's own attack on Austin's theory of sovereignty, analytical legal theorists today agree that a sovereign is not just unnecessary for but incompatible with the existence of legal order.To explain the variety and persistence of legal norms, the contin…
Law, Liberty and State
Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt are associated with a conservative reaction to the 'progressive' forces of the twentieth century. Each was an acute analyst of the juristic form of the modern state and the relationship of that form to the idea of liberty under a system of public, general law. Hayek had the highest regard for Schmitt's understanding of the rule of law state despite Schmitt's hostility to it, and he owed the distinction he drew in his …
Carl Schmitt and the problem of constitutional guardianship
Carl Schmitt's constitutional theory argues for strong counter-majoritarian constraints on the powers of legislative majorities. This chapter explores Schmitt's own conception of constitutional guardianship fails to follow through on this apparent commitment to the protection of rights, which exposes his critique of the legislative state to a charge of hypocrisy. The idea of constitutional guardianship can be understood in two different ways: as …
The Guardian of the Constitution
This volume provides the first English translation of Hans Kelsen's and Carl Schmitt's influential Weimar-era debate on constitutional guardianship and the legitimacy of constitutional review. It includes Kelsen's seminal piece, 'The Nature and Development of Constitutional Adjudication', as well as key extracts from the 'Guardian of the Constitution' which present Schmitt's argument against constitutional review. Also included are Kelsen's revie…
The Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt
What does Carl Schmitt have to offer to ongoing debates about sovereignty, globalization, spatiality, the nature of the political, and political theology? Can Schmitt’s positions and concepts offer insights that might help us understand our concrete present-day situation? Works on Schmitt usually limit themselves to historically isolating Schmitt into his Weimar or post-Weimar context, to reading him together with classics of political and legal …
The Foundation of the Juridico-Political
116 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2017. noticed that the final pages of Weber’s essay make him into a theorist of Begriffsgeschichte avant la lettre. In another essay, Hübinger again refers to Koselleck and characterises the situation of the historian with six K-words: ‘Kontingenz, Komplexität, Konstellationen, Kontexten, Konflikten und Kontinuitäten’ (266, 199). The tone of this list is entirely Weberian, and perhaps it can be cited as a …
The Political Theology of the Secular State in Hobbes and Böckenförde
Standard accounts of the ideological basis of secularization tend to focus on the emergence of non-religious justifications of the authority of the state in early modernity. This article argues that successful secularization also requires a certain political theology, one that leads religious believers to accept that the rules of their religion cannot justifiably claim the status of public law. This thesis is developed through an in-depth account…
Santi Romano against the state
This paper argues that Santi Romano’s legal institutionalism is driven by implicit normative assumptions that stand in tension with Romano’s commitments to legal positivism and legal pluralism. Romano’s approach to the individuation of legal orders is indefensible on purely descriptive grounds, as it rests on a picture of good social order. That picture, in turn, gives more prominence to the state, as an institution of institutions, than one woul…
Weimar als Herausforderung
The book under review collects contributions to an interdisciplinary workshop on the Weimar Republic held in Berlin in 2015. It is also the first volume in a new book series (Weimarer Schriften zur Republik) that is to focus on the contemporary relevance of the Weimar democratic experience. In referring to the Weimar Republic as a challenge, the editors mean to suggest that engagement with the history of the Weimar Republic is still important tod…
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and the politics of constituent power
It is often held that the legitimacy of a democratic constitution depends on its production by constituent power. This paper argues that the notion of legitimation by constituent power faces a dilemma: if the authenticity of an exercise of constituent power depends on conformity to existing constitutional law or on requirements of justice that are antecedent to the actual process of constitution-making, the appeal to constituent power must lack t…
Democratic equality and militant democracy
Carl Schmitt's Early Legal-Theoretical Writings
Many of Carl Schmitt's major works have by now been translated, with two notable exceptions: Schmitt's two early monographs Statute and Judgment (first published in 1912) and The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual (first published in 1914). In these two works Schmitt presents a theory of adjudication as well as an account of the state's role in the realization of the rule of law, which together form the theoretical basis on…
Carl Schmitt and the authoritarian subversion of democracy
‘Bill Scheuerman’s ‘The End of Law’ offers a compelling case for the claim that Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory is not authentically democratic. This does not entail, however, that Schmitt’s views are of no relevance for understanding the contemporary crisis of democracy. Schmitt’s arguments offer a blueprint for the populist-authoritarian subversion of democracy. Defenders of democracy are therefore well-advised to engage with Schmitt’s ide…
Personality, authority, and self-esteem in Hobbes’s Leviathan
This paper offers a novel interpretation of the theory of the personality of the state put forward in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes’s account of political representation does not conceive of the state as a “purely artificial person” or “person by fiction,” as Quentin Skinner and David Runciman have argued. Rather, Hobbes regards the state as an artificial person that is closely analogous to natural persons. The state’s integrity as well as the limit…
The Cambridge Handbook on the Material Constitution
Despite a long and venerable tradition, the material constitution almost disappeared from constitutional scholarship after the Second World War. Its marginalisation saw the rise of a normative and legalistic style in constitutional law that neglected the role of social reality and political economy. This collection not only retrieves the history and development of the concept of the material constitution, but it tests its theoretical and practica…
The Material Constitution of the Dual State
This chapter discusses Ernst Fränkel’s analysis of Nazi Germany as a dual state that combined remnants of legal governance with a practice of permanent dictatorship. It is argued that Fränkel’s dual state thesis sheds a critical light on recent appropriations of the notion of material constitution. This claim is developed by way of an analysis and defence of Fränkel’s critique of Carl Schmitt’s concrete order thought.
Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy
This volume challenges conventional interpretations by demonstrating that Hans Kelsen was far from being a purely formalist thinker. Instead, it highlights his profound and enduring engagement with the threats facing constitutional democracies. The political and institutional upheavals of interwar Europe significantly influenced Kelsen's evolving vision of democracy, as this volume shows. His contributions to twentieth-century democratic theory i…
Political science (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Political Theology and Sovereignty (15 works) · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought (12 works) · Democracy (10 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Law and economics (10 works)