Democracy and the Rule of Law
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shortest and most incidental of its five translated essays. What this second and retitled edition omits is Tribe’s introduction. What it adds is Hennis’ intellectual autobiography, in which he traces his early career as an academic and a social democrat, and his changing attitude toward Weber, but not his later becoming a major political commentator of the German right. This apparent transformation is, however, readily explicable in terms of the inherent conservatism of German practical philosophy. The second volume by Hennis translates Max Webers Wissenschaft vom Menschen, published in 1995, and also includes a ‘translator’s appendix’. The five constituent essays by Hennis concern various aspects of Weber’s thought, sources and pedagogy. The longest and most synoptic is the first: ‘Max Weber’s Science of Man’. Although all of these are of great interest for scholars of Weber, it must be added that this second volume will be of less interest to specifically political theorists than the first. This not only sets out Hennis’ elemental conception of Weber’s ‘central question’, ‘theme’ and science (or, as Hennis then happily called it, philosophy) of man — that of the relation between ‘personality and life orders’ — but also examines Weber’s relation to the German Historical School of Economics and the relation of his ‘liberalism’ to his practical ‘logic of judgement’. What the two volumes present is neither any new account of Weber as a systematic thinker, because Hennis denies that he was such, nor any systematic account of practical philosophy, because practical philosophy is set against systematization, but a coherent if diffuse account of Weber, which illuminates much about him and, also, about the conservative rationale of practical philosophy’s account of the shaping of personality by social order. References Dostal, R.J. (ed.) (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hahn, L.E. (ed.) (1997) The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Chicago: Open Court. Riedel, M. (ed.) (1972) Rehabilitierung der praktischen Philosophie, 2 vols. Freiburg: Rombach.
Kelvin Knight London Metropolitan University, UK.
Democracy and the Rule of Law Jose Maria Maravall and Adam Przeworski (eds.) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, xii þ 322pp. ISBN: 0 521 53266 3. Contemporary Political Theory (2005) 4, 204–206. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300173 Contemporary Political Theory 2005 4
Book Reviews
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This informative, provocative and often witty collection of essays is the latest in the ‘Studies in the Theory of Democracy’ series from Cambridge, and emerges from a workshop on the rule of law organized by the Juan March Institute in Madrid in 2000. It ranges from Stephen Holmes’ tribute to Machiavelli on the ‘Lineages of the Rule of Law’ through to Biancamaria Fontana on Montaigne, and includes studies of Pinochet’s Chile and Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal as illustrations of ‘the Latin tradition’ in Europe. But the heart of the book — and, I suppose, it’s raison d’etre — lies in
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