Richard Cockett is currently writing a book about the rise of right-wing populism, a global phenomenon that he views as a clash of political dispositions, primarily between liberal internationalists and ethno-nationalists. In this talk for the IWM, Cockett will argue that these two competing worldviews are best exemplified, and, indeed, have been codified, by the two most influential jurists of the 20th century—namely, Vienna’s Hans Kelsen and the German Carl Schmitt. Their crucial intellectual clash a century ago, and the extensive ramifications of that clash, is the subject of this Fellows Colloquium.
Kelsen’s main contribution was his “pure theory of law,” which largely underpins our contemporary concepts of international law and constitutional democracy. Schmitt, by contrast, who joined the Nazi party in 1933, developed a theory of political authority in direct opposition to Kelsen. The self-styled “Crown Jurist” of Hitler’s Germany eventually fell out with the Nazi leadership and, for some decades, fell out of fashion. But his work has since become enormously influential in legitimizing and encouraging authoritarian politics in Europe, Russia, China, America and elsewhere, on the left as well as the right. Cockett suggests that this is the “quarrel of our age,” responsible for much of the political and cultural upheaval of the last 20 years or so.
Richard Cockett is a historian, journalist, and author. He is a senior editor at The Economist in London and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Before joining The Economist, he was a senior lecturer in history and politics at the University of London and a junior fellow at the British Academy. He is the author of Vienna: How the City of Ideas created the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2023) and has written several other books on British and world history and politics.
IWM Permanent Fellow Ludger Hagedorn will moderate the discussion.
