(iPoster) Hermann Heller and the Methodenstreit of Weimar State Theory

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory I

Abstract

Hermann Heller has been called the father of political science in Germany. Yet Heller remains largely unknown in the English-speaking world. This paper seeks to recover Heller’s contribution to the Methodenstreit or “strife over methods” in Weimar state theory, where Heller sought a middle way between Hans Kelsen’s legal normativism and Carl Schmitt’s political existentialism. The methodology that Heller developed throughout the course of the debate has been described by scholars as either neo-Aristotelian, neo-Hegelian, Weberian, institutionalist, anti-positivist, historicist, or anti-historicist. To clarify the contours of Heller’s approach to political science, the paper begins with a brief overview of the 19th century debate between positivists and anti-positivists in Germany before delving into Heller’s appropriations from—and transformations of—the anti-positivist tradition. The paper concludes that Heller’s methodology was a form of anti-positivist realism.

Author

• Joseph Clarkson, University of Texas at Tyler