“The apple of my eye”: Carl Sauer and historical geography

Many historical geographers would claim Sauer to be one of them. Yet, with the exception of his Foreword to historical geography (1941) he made no major declaration of his interest in the sub-discipline. This paper attempts to examine Sauer's attitude to the time element in geography through a close appraisal of his published work but particularly through his hitherto unpublished correspondence. It soon becomes evident that Sauer changed his ideas during his long working life, and that it is difficult to disentangle Sauer's philosophy about the time element in geography from his philosophy about life, particularly within university circles in the United States, and within American society in general. Sauer's comment to a student in 1936 that historical geography “is of course the apple of my eye” would seem to be demonstrated amply, but that historical geography was not a conventional methodology so much as a flexible metaphor to encompass the study of man on earth through time. It was also the vehicle for some of his prime concerns; scholarship, independent thought, opposition to bureaucracy, concern for human values and environmental quality, and deep distaste for the technological and scientific “fix”, particularly the solutions offered by the social sciences. It might repay contemporary historical geographers to take a close look at Sauer's academic and intellectual values.     

Thematic Portals: Tools for Research and Making the Archival Heritage Known

Abstract

The authors explain how the newly created thematic portals can be used to facilitate digital research in Italian state archives.     

Carl J. Friedrich's Legacy: Understanding Constitutionalism as a Political System

Carl J. Friedrich (1901–1984) defined constitutionalism as something more than can be expressed by the dominant behavioralist paradigm of modern political science and the typical academic focus on law and courts. A leading but now neglected post-WWII authority on constitutionalism, Friedrich argued that it should be understood as an institutionally-based, interactive system for deliberating the meaning and legal application of the norms of a political community. His approach shares much with the contemporary “historical institutionalist” call to situate law and courts within a broader, more normative, and more interactive conception of constitutionalism. Accordingly, a reconsideration of Friedrich's work may help current efforts to better articulate the full richness and complexity of constitutionalism as a distinctive way of ordering political life.     

Carl Schorske's Theory and Practice

Book reviewed in this article:
Thinking with History. Explorations in the Passage to Modernism , by Carl E. Schorske     

Carl Schmitt on land and sea

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), one of the leading conservative legal thinkers of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, is best known today for his critique of liberalism. Between the late 1930s and mid-1950s, Schmitt wrote numerous articles and two books addressing the mythical and geopolitical significance of land and sea. In recent years, these texts have begun to attract attention from historians as well as theorists. This article reconstructs the origins of Schmitt's theories about land and sea, and shows how they developed in the context of his efforts to delegitimize the British Empire and justify the persecution of Jews. It also explains how Schmitt selectively misread the history of maritime law in order to critique the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Finally, it reveals that the meaning Schmitt ascribed to ‘the opposition of the elements of land and sea’ changed dramatically to suit his political needs. For all their evocative qualities and insights, Schmitt's texts on land and sea do not constitute a coherent theory, but rather a shifting field of polemical positions in search of theoretical support.     

On political theology: A controversy between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt

This article pays special attention to the large number of references to political theology by Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, particularly in the interwar period, and seeks to interpret these references in a new way. While Schmitt's analogies between God and state are to be expected considering his strong Catholic roots, such comparisons are much more surprising for a positivist like Hans Kelsen, who always tried to relieve state and law from transcendental elements. The article concludes that, far from being marginal in the doctrinal dispute between Schmitt and Kelsen, references to political theology express and summarize their major controversy about the relation between state and law, as well as about the sources of the state's unity. The heart of the disputatio between the two jurists concerned the ability of the political power to emancipate itself from the juridical order. The ‘legal miracle’—in this context meaning the occasional autonomization of the state from law—was for Schmitt the manifestation of sovereign power. However, for Kelsen it represented the negation of the state's essence, whose actions must be determined only by the legal order.