William E Scheuerman
Biographic Data
| ID | 367939 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William E Scheuerman |
| GIVEN NAMES | William E |
| FAMILY NAME | Scheuerman |
| SIGNATURE | SCHEUERMAN W E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University Bloomington |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8054-6481 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 109 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 342 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 107 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy: Genesis, Theory, Legacies
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…
Axel Honneth: The working sovereign: labor and democratic citizenship
Corporate civil disobedience: Be careful what you wish for
Given authoritarianism’s resurgence, defenders of democracy are scrambling to identify political antidotes. Corporate civil disobedience (CCD), or politically motivated lawbreaking by business corporations that is civil (or public-minded), morally conscientious, nonviolent, public, and respectful of the law, seems to offer one useful political tool. This article sketches the strongest case for CCD before moving to consider its normative and polit…
Political theory as democratic underlaboring: The case of property disobedience
The article analyzes politically motivated property damage and destruction, or property disobedience, an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary worldwide protest politics. It then explores the possibility that political theory as democratic underlaboring potentially offers a useful of framework for analysis. One possible advantage to democratic underlaboring is that it calls on us to heed how political participants in protest movements, a…
Weimar's Long Shadow
Weimar casts a long shadow over post-war political thought. The Weimar Republic is used to understand contemporary threats to democracy and to critique or defend modernity. It has generated a series of political lessons that are invoked whenever democracies are challenged. This book questions the historical validity of most of these lessons and their applicability to contemporary political orders. It shows how Weimar lessons are often influenced …
What’s Left? Democratic Theory in Between Facts and Norms After Three Decades
This essay revisits my earlier 1999 critique (Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in Habermas’ ,Between Facts and Norms‘) of Habermas’ most important contribution to political and legal theory. Some of my criticisms stemmed from a failure to address the book’s complicated attempt to navigate between ,facts‘ and ,norms‘, and thus Habermas’ vision of ,rational reconstruction‘. Nonetheless, I argue that key elements of that origina…
Dano à propriedade por motivação política
From Labor Sit-Downs to Civil Rights Sit-Ins: A Genealogy of Liberal Civil Disobedience
Liberal views of civil disobedience that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s can only be properly interpreted with recourse to the complicated history of the early civil rights movement's selective appropriation of the labor sit-downs of the 1930s. This essay addresses the messy but basically successful effort by civil rights sit-inners and the lawyers who defended them to circumvent the repressive state and legal response—especially the US Supreme Cou…
Como resistir ao populismo autoritário
Authoritarian populism poses major challenges to democracy. Yet relatively little systematic political-theoretical or philosophical analysis has focused on how best to oppose or resist it. The present essay focuses on three possible approaches now being tentatively discussed. Some writers emphasize the possible virtues of civil disobedience, others are advocating a related yet broader strategy of civil resistance, and yet others abandon both “civ…
Carl Schmitt and Democratic Backsliding
Carl Schmitt has been an inspiration to theorists and ideologues both on the right and on the left. On the left, for instance, Chantal Mouffe (1997) has been at pains to develop a deradicalized version of Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction to legitimize her agonistic politics of productive and democratic conflict. On the right, conservative voices such as Adrian Vermeule use Schmitt to highlight the limitations of liberalism, proclaim the relevan…
A not‐very‐new structural transformation of the public sphere
Horkheimer's unrealized vision
Political disobedience and the climate emergency”
Climate activists have recently engaged in widely publicized acts of politically motivated lawbreaking. This article identifies and critically analyzes two seemingly overlapping but in fact diverging approaches among present-day activists. Though their illegal acts (e.g., blockades, occupations, and selective property damage) sometimes appear equivalent, the rival approaches place them in contrasting lights; the resulting differences are normativ…
Good-Bye to Nonviolence
John Rawls and other liberals from the 1960s and ’70s are usually interpreted as having refurbished the idea of nonviolent civil disobedience, as practiced by Gandhi, King, and many others. That standard reading has recently provided a launching pad for a growing body of critical theoretical reflection that challenges strictly nonviolent civil disobedience’s privileged normative status. Here I offer a revisionist account of both liberal (and espe…
Resisting Authoritarian Populism
Authoritarian populism poses major challenges to democracy. Yet relatively little systematic political-theoretical or philosophical analysis has focused on how best to oppose or resist it. The present essay focuses on three possible approaches now being tentatively discussed. Some writers emphasize the possible virtues of civil disobedience, others are advocating a related yet broader strategy of civil resistance, and yet others abandon both “civ…
The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience
The theory and practice of civil disobedience has once again taken on import, given recent events. Considering widespread dissatisfaction with normal political mechanisms, even in well-established liberal democracies, civil disobedience remains hugely important, as a growing number of individuals and groups pursue political action. 'Digital disobedients', Black Lives Matter protestors, Extinction Rebellion climate change activists, Hong Kong acti…
Politically Motivated Property Damage
Can politically inspired property damage or destruction be justified? This question is hardly of mere academic interest, in light of recent political protests in Hong Kong, the USA, and elsewhere. Against some contemporary writers, I argue that placing property damage under an open-ended rubric of uncivil disobedience does not generate the necessary conceptual and normative distinctions. Drawing on Martin Luther King, Jr., I instead argue that pr…
Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience
The Revival of Thoreauvian Resistance
Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in Thoreau’s views of political resistance. Eager to transcend liberal (and especially Rawlsian) ideas of civil disobedience, scholars of political obligation are tapping Thoreau to justify a broader understanding of legitimate lawbreaking than Rawls and many others countenanced. Despite some strengths, the Thoreauvian revival among theorists of political obligation relies on a selective interpret…
Recalling and/or Repressing German Marxism? The Case of Ernst Fraenkel
I spent a few unseasonably hot summer days in 1996 digging around in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz for what later became a lengthy essay on Ernst Fraenkel (1898–1975), the neglected German socialist political and legal thinker. I still recall struggling to justify my efforts not simply as an historian of ideas but also as a political theorist who, at least in principle, was expected to make systematic contributions to contemporary debate…
New American Labor Movement
Judith N Shklar as theorist of political obligation
The useful publication of Judith N Shklar's final undergraduate lectures at Harvard provides an opportunity to take a careful look at her reflections on political obligation, a matter always of great interest to Shklar, and one to which she devoted a great deal of energy in her final years. When read alongside her published writings and more formal scholarly presentations from the same period, we can discern three core ideas Shklar was struggling…
Carl Schmitt in the 21st century: A response to critics
The piece responds to critics of Scheuerman’s END OF LAW: CARL SCHMIT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Despite our disagreements, the book’s critics and I share the view that Schmitt speaks to our times, albeit in deeply troubling ways. Precisely how and why Schmitt remains pertinent, however, remains a matter of dispute. Inspired by the un-Schmittian hope that deliberation might buttress our common quest to overcome democracy’s present crisis, my re…
Can Political Institutions Commit Civil Disobedience
A growing number of political activists and scholars defend the idea of state-based or political-institutional civil disobedience: they locate civil disobedience's agency in state rather than civil society–based actors. Diverging from older ideas of civil disobedience as directed against government, the concept of institutional disobedience raises tough questions its exponents have not yet fully answered. Civil disobedience has usually referred t…
Theorizing the Politics of Protest: Contemporary Debates on Civil Disobedience
Survey Article: Emergency Powers and the Rule of Law After 9/11
Recent Theories of Civil Disobedience: An Anti‐Legal Turn
Carl Schmitt and the Road to Abu Ghraib
The unholy alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek
Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed
The concept of "time and space compression," as formulated by a number of prominent social theorists, has far-reaching consequences for democratic theory. The time and space horizons of human activity are undergoing dramatic changes, chiefly because the high-speed character of crucial forms of social and economic activity tends to "annihilate" distance. Simultaneity and instantaneousness increasingly become constitutive features of the human cond…
Whistleblowing as civil disobedience: The case of Edward Snowden
The media hoop-la about Edward Snowden has obscured a less flashy yet more vital – and philosophically relevant – part of the story, namely the moral and political seriousness with which he acted to make the hitherto covert scope and scale of NSA surveillance public knowledge. Here I argue that we should interpret Snowden’s actions as meeting most of the demanding tests outlined in sophisticated political thinking about civil disobedience. Like T…
The realist revival in political philosophy, or: Why new is not always improved
Theorizing the Politics of Protest: Contemporary Debates on Civil Disobedience
Reflexive Law and the Challenges of Globalization
Political disobedience and the climate emergency”
Climate activists have recently engaged in widely publicized acts of politically motivated lawbreaking. This article identifies and critically analyzes two seemingly overlapping but in fact diverging approaches among present-day activists. Though their illegal acts (e.g., blockades, occupations, and selective property damage) sometimes appear equivalent, the rival approaches place them in contrasting lights; the resulting differences are normativ…
Rethinking Crisis Government
Economic Globalization and the Rule of Law
The (classical) Realist vision of global reform
Most Realists today oppose far-reaching global reform on the grounds that it represents unrealistic and potentially irresponsible ‘utopianism’. An earlier generation of mid-century Realists, however, not only supported serious efforts at radical international reform but also developed a theoretically impressive model for how to bring it about. They considered the possibility of post-national political orders and ultimately a world state as desira…
Busyness and Citizenship
William E. Scheuerman Busyness and Citizenship HOW DOES THE EXPERIENCE OF BUSYNESS AFFECT DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL life? My hunch is that those reading this essay might very well offer the following answer: busyness means that we relegate political activities to the bottom of a long and sometimes tedious laundiy list of “things to get done.”In fact, many of us no longer even bother to include the basic activities of citizenship—becoming informed abou…
Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberal Constitutionalism
Despite growing interest in the ideas of Carl Schmitt, twentieth-century Germany's premier right-wing authoritarian political thinker, most American scholars continue to downplay the centrality of Schmitt's legal thinking to his overall theory. This article attempts to overcome this lacuna by critically scrutinizing Schmitt's influential critique of liberal constitutionalism. However provocative, Schmitt's critique ultimately proves untenable bec…
Why not uncivil disobedience
An impressive body of recent literature posits that traditional notions of civil disobedience prevent us from properly considering potentially legitimate types of ‘uncivil’ political lawbreaking. When might uncivil (covert, legally evasive, morally offensive and potentially violent) lawbreaking prove normatively acceptable? If justifiable, what conditions should its practitioners be reasonably expected to meet? Despite some important insights, de…
American Kingship? Monarchical Origins of Modern Presidentialism
The modern obsession with executive charisma, especially in the context of the presidentialist variety of liberal democracy, is commonplace. This obsession derives from the oftentimes overlooked monarchical origins of the modern presidential executive. The presidential executive is outfitted with some of the awesome powers of European kingship, but it is no longer able to justify those powers on the basis of traditional religious ideas. Charisma …
Recent Frankfurt Critical Theory: Down on Law
Realism and the critique of technology
The ‘classical Realist’ thinkers Hans J Morgenthau and John Herz developed a puissant yet typically overlooked critique of technology. Driven by fears of nuclear warfare, they broke with Realism's inappropriately nonchalant view of technological development. Morgenthau focused on the dangers of a naïve faith in technological growth, arguing that it typically generated an apolitical and potentially irresponsible view of international politics. Eve…
Realism and the Left: The case of Hans J. Morgenthau
The commonplace view that the intellectual roots of Hans J. Morgenthau’s Realist theory lie in conservative central European political traditions (such as Bismarckian Realpolitik) requires modification. The young Morgenthau was a protég é of one of Weimar Germany’s most prominent left-wing legal thinkers and barristers, Hugo Sinzheimer, a committed Social Democrat who influenced many young jurists who hoped to pursue a peaceful, legally-based tra…
Was Morgenthau a Realist? Revisiting Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics
Judith N Shklar as theorist of political obligation
The useful publication of Judith N Shklar's final undergraduate lectures at Harvard provides an opportunity to take a careful look at her reflections on political obligation, a matter always of great interest to Shklar, and one to which she devoted a great deal of energy in her final years. When read alongside her published writings and more formal scholarly presentations from the same period, we can discern three core ideas Shklar was struggling…
International Law as Historical Myth
False humanitarianism: US advocacy of transnational labour protections
The US is now the most important political force on the world scene calling for the establishment of transnational labour protections as a means of 'humanizing' the ongoing globalization of the capitalist economy. This paper raises critical questions about the US advocacy of transnational labour standards and norms by critically examining the existing system of US transnational labour protections. By means of a survey of different forms of transn…
Donald Trump meets Carl Schmitt
By revisiting late-Weimar debates between Carl Schmitt and two left-wing critics, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz L Neumann, we can shed light on the surprising alliance of populist politics with key tenets of economic liberalism, an alliance that vividly manifests itself in the political figure and retrograde policies of Donald Trump. In the process, we can begin to fill a striking lacuna in recent scholarly literature on populism, namely its failure…
Economic Power in the United States: The Case of Steel
United States International Economic Policy in Action: Diversity of Decision Making. Stephen D. Cohen , Ronald I. Meltzer
The Politics of Protest: The Great Steel Strike Of 1919–20 In Lackawanna, New York
On November 4, 1919, six weeks into the Great Steel Strike, the citizens of Lackawanna, New York, elected John H. Gibbons as their Mayor. Gibbons' victory was a major upset. He defeated John Toomey, the incumbent who had the support of the steel firm after which this quintessential company town was named, by forging a loosely knit coalition of native and Eastern European immigrant workers during the height of the xenophobia of the ongoing Red Sca…
Politics and the Public Sector: Strategies for Public Sector Unions
Teaching American Government
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The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer
In the pathbreaking essays collected here, Neumann and Kirchheimer demonstrate that the death of democracy and the rise of fascism during the first half of the twentieth century suggest crucial lessons for contemporary political and legal scholars. The volume includes writings on constitutionalism, political freedom, Nazism, sovereignty, and both Nazi and liberal law. Most important, the Frankfurt authors point to the continuing efficacy of the r…
Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law
The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and a Hidden God. Mitchell Cohen
Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberal Constitutionalism
Despite growing interest in the ideas of Carl Schmitt, twentieth-century Germany's premier right-wing authoritarian political thinker, most American scholars continue to downplay the centrality of Schmitt's legal thinking to his overall theory. This article attempts to overcome this lacuna by critically scrutinizing Schmitt's influential critique of liberal constitutionalism. However provocative, Schmitt's critique ultimately proves untenable bec…
The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer
In the pathbreaking essays collected here, Neumann and Kirchheimer demonstrate that the death of democracy and the rise of fascism during the first half of the twentieth century suggest crucial lessons for contemporary political and legal scholars. The volume includes writings on constitutionalism, political freedom, Nazism, sovereignty, and both Nazi and liberal law. Most important, the Frankfurt authors point to the continuing efficacy of the r…
Constitutionalism and Difference
Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik, by Ira Katznelson
The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer
Journal Article The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer Get access Scheuerman William E., ED., The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. vii, 268 pp. $40.00. Lawrence D. Stokes Lawrence D. Stokes Dalhousie University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ameri…
The Rule of Law at Century's End
The unholy alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek
Economic Globalization and the Rule of Law
Kenneth Starr’s Rule of law – and Ours
From Liberal Democracy to Fascism: Legal and Political Thought in the Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic – from 1919 until 1933, when Hitler came into power – witnessed crucial debates on law and politics. These debates are reexamined in this book. Were, for example, democratic rules and procedures an adequate basis for democracy, as Hugo Preuss and Hans Kelsen suggested? Or should constitutional law elaborate the deeper, basic principles embedded in the democratic constitution itself, as Hermann Heller argued? Was the president …
The Twilight of Legality: Globalisation and American Democracy
(2000). The Twilight of Legality?: Globalisation and American Democracy. Global Society: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 53-78
Globalization and Democratic Theory Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy . By Daniele Archibugi , David Held , and Martin Koehler Democracy's Edges . By Ian Shapiro and …
False humanitarianism: US advocacy of transnational labour protections
The US is now the most important political force on the world scene calling for the establishment of transnational labour protections as a means of 'humanizing' the ongoing globalization of the capitalist economy. This paper raises critical questions about the US advocacy of transnational labour standards and norms by critically examining the existing system of US transnational labour protections. By means of a survey of different forms of transn…
Reflexive Law and the Challenges of Globalization
Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed
The concept of "time and space compression," as formulated by a number of prominent social theorists, has far-reaching consequences for democratic theory. The time and space horizons of human activity are undergoing dramatic changes, chiefly because the high-speed character of crucial forms of social and economic activity tends to "annihilate" distance. Simultaneity and instantaneousness increasingly become constitutive features of the human cond…
Franz Neumann: Legal Theorist of Globalization
From Liberal Democracy to Fascism: Legal and Political Thought in the Weimar Republic
Political science (94 works) · Law (84 works) · Politics (74 works) · Sociology (73 works) · Law (67 works) · Philosophy (48 works) · Democracy (37 works) · Law and economics (29 works) · Philosophy (29 works) · Epistemology (27 works)