Unity in Diversity as Europe’s Vocation and Conflicts Law as Europe’s Constitutional Form

Ordinary Administrative Law as Constitutional Common Law

Henry Monaghan famously argued that much of constitutional interpretation takes the form of what he termed constitutional common law, a body of doctrines and rules that are constitutionally inspired but not constitutionally required and that can be altered or reversed by Congress. This Essay argues that a fair amount of ordinary administrative law qualifies as constitutional common law: Constit...

Sociology as a Vocation

What does it mean to live for sociology, today? In attempting to answer this question I return to Max Weber’s famous lectures delivered toward the end of his life—one on science as a vocation and the other on politics as a vocation. He presented ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ in November 1917 toward the end of World War I and the more pessimistic ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ in January 1919 after Germ...

Psychoanalysis as a Vocation

Diversity and Unity: The Problem with ‘Constitutional Patriotism’

Although Habermas’ sophisticated conception of constitutional patriotism successfully avoids the charge of trying to ground patriotism in a set of principles that is too thin and abstract to sustain a real sense of solidarity and belonging, his optimism regarding the prospect in modern pluralist societies of building a genuinely shared political culture is misplaced. The march of modernisation ...

POlitical theOry as a VOcatiOn

The purpose of this paper is to sketch some of the implications, prospective and retrospective, of the primacy of method in the present study of politics and to do it by way of a contrast, which is deliberately heightened, but hopefully not caricatured, between the vocation of the “methodist”1 and the vocation of the theorist. My discussion will be centered around the kinds of activity involved...