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1996 Spitz Prize Winner

Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law
by William E. Scheuerman

William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law. MIT Press, 1994.

Scheuerman's book is the 1996 winner of the Spitz Prize--the eighth book on liberal-democratic theory to be honored by the CSPT. This masterful study begins with the influence of Carl Schmitt on critiques of liberalism in Weimar Germany by Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, both affiliated with the neo-Marxist Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. By tracing how these two writers sought to preserve the idea of law from the totalitarian implications of Schmittian Marxism, Scheuerman also makes a provocative case for the radically democratic possibilities of the rule of law. If one is committed to realizing "a political order with active and critical publics, freewheeling debate, and a responsive set of political institutions," then the rule of law freed from its problematic premodern and bourgeois presuppositions is essential to that task. The careful scholarship and clear-headed textual analysis recovers the democratic imperative for the rule of law in the modern administrative state and sets the stage for contrasting Neumann's and Kirchheimer's position to that of the American and European left in the 1960s and Critical Legal Studies today. For the social democrats at the time, the views of Neumann and Kirchheimer tragically were "missed opportunities." With the recent revival of interest in Carl Schmitt on both the right and the left, Scheuerman's study reminds us of the intellectual power (and danger) of that perspective and shows how, beginning with a commitment to the rule of law, we might articulate in the setting of the capitalist welfare state values central to both social and liberal democracy.