Rights and Constitutional Theory in Weimar Germany: Debates in Historical, Political and Institution

The language of rights plays a central role in contemporary constitutional and political thought and is one of the predominant modes of political argumentation in democracies around the world. In spite of the fact that rights are seen as tokens of democratic political life, their implications often promote the cause of abstract individualism which has detrimental consequences for viable democratic political communities. Weimar constitutional scholarship offers a number of theoretical solutions for including into the language of rights perspectives that engage the political and social dimension of values, ideals, institutions and other forms of social life that are not reducible to the individual. Füzér's book offers a hitherto missing comprehensive reconstruction of Weimar rights theories in the context of two institutional settings, both of which reveal models of constitutional interpretation that grant legal scholarship a vital role in the life of constitutional democracies. This reconstruction of rights theories presents today's scholars, judges and the interested citizens of democracies with a theoretical reservoir to draw on.