Any attempt to survey German political thought in the twentieth century is bound to be influenced by awareness of the turbulence of German political history and especially by the shadow of the Third Reich, the crisis and collapse of the Weimar Republic that preceded it and the division of Germany that followed it for almost half a century. If one considers the historical context of German political thought a little more widely, that impression of turbulence is enhanced, at least for the first half of the century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German political theorists inhabited not only the recently formed German Reich to the north but also the multi-national Habsburg Empire to the south. Many of the theorists prominent in the early chapters of this account were born in or influenced by the peculiar nature of that empire. Its collapse at the end of the First World War left behind a largely homogeneous German Austria that was subsequently incorporated into the Third Reich and then re-established as an independent state at the end of the Second World War. Not surprisingly, this political discontinuity is reflected in many accounts of the development of German political thought.

According to Wilhelm Hennis, despite what he described as the ‘German misery’ of the preceding centuries, the German lands had not seen anything comparable to the crisis of legitimacy experienced in France and England in the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until 1933. Only in the twentieth century did Germany, the ‘belated nation’, experience an analogous crisis ‘with all that goes with it: exile on a massive scale, “internal emigration”, fanaticism, collapse of civil order, finally ethically motivated resistance’.