Law and Politics: Continental Perspectives
About the Book Series
A core legacy of the Continental juridico-political tradition is the methodological commitment to the idea that law and politics are inextricably tied to one another. On the one hand, law has to be studied in the light of the concrete political dynamics, social forces, and societal movements that make law what it is. On the other hand, the analysis of political processes should be coupled with the study of the legal techniques through which politics exerts its effects on social reality.
The series aspires to promote works that use the nexus 'law & politics' as a prism that allows understanding societal dynamics beyond the deep-seated borders separating purely legal from purely political methodologies. It welcomes theoretically informed and empirically grounded analyses that foster the development of theory in the study of juridico-political processes.
The qualifier 'Continental' signifies not so much a geographical or socio-historical feature as a methodological one. The approach that the series aims to promote, regardless of the nationality of prospective authors, materializes at the intersection between the vocabularies and methodologies of legal and political theories. In other words, the starting point of this approach is that the interplay between legal and political processes provides a precious lens to observe and comprehend contemporary societal phenomena.
More specifically, submissions exploring the following themes are welcomed:
- The relationship between the legal and the political spheres from a theoretical, historical and/or empirical point of view.
- The transformation of sovereignty.
- The transformation of the state and the rise of non-state political and organizational structures that break the ties with modern statehood.
- Exceptionalism and emergency at the domestic and/or the global level.
- The downfall of conventional juridico-political binaries: public/private, state/civil society, domestic/international, religious/secular and others.
- Current transformations of formal constitutions and the separation of powers.
- Issues related to the increasing spread of legal pluralism and global legal pluralism.
- Strategies and politics of legal elites and the new role of judicial bodies both nationally and internationally.
- Analyses of key Continental authors who have brought to light the materiality of the law, such as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Marcel Gauchet, Antonio Gramsci, Jurgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Antonio Negri, Carl Schmitt and others.
- Analyses of key Continental "classics" whose voice is unheard or underrepresented in the Anglophone academic and publishing environment, such as Walter Benjamin, Leon Duguit, Georges Gurvitch, Maurice Hauriou, Hermann Heller, Georg Jellinek, Ernst Junger, Costantino Mortati, Georges Renard, Santi Romano, Rudolf Smend, Simone Weil and others.
This interdisciplinary series welcomes monographs and edited volumes that engage with the conceptual and empirical questions detailed above and discussions of how the contamination of jurisprudential and theoretical-political approaches helps illuminate current national and global processes.
Legal and Political Thinking Against Sovereignty: A European Intellectual History
1st Edition
By Hugo Canihac
September 17, 2025
At the intersection of the history of constitutional ideas and of political theory, this book offers a new genealogy of the constitutional thought of the European Union. Centrally, the book traces the emergence and transformation of the ‘post-sovereign thesis’ – an argument that seeks to move ...
Law, Democracy and the Crisis of Foundation: Deconstructive and Constructive Perspectives
1st Edition
Edited
By Giuditta Bissiato
April 03, 2025
This book addresses the crisis of the juridical-political foundation within contemporary democracies. Although modernity is the age of foundation, it is marked by what Carl Schmitt referred to as a peculiar ‘dialectic of presence and absence’ – and this is true even for those theories that seem to ...
Ordoliberalism, State and Society: A Political Theory of Social Order
1st Edition
By Olimpia Malatesta
January 31, 2025
This book provides a new interpretation of ordoliberalism – the influential German version of neoliberalism – by exploring the political, legal and social context of its emergence. Ordoliberal scholars regarded sociology, juridical science and economics as concrete policy-making instruments ...
Law, Necessity, and the Crisis of the State: The Early Writings of Santi Romano
1st Edition
Edited
By Mariano Croce
October 09, 2024
This book contains the first English translations of Santi Romano’s important essays, ‘On the Decree Laws and the State of Siege During the Earthquakes in Messina and Reggio Calabria’ (1909) and ‘The Modern State and its Crisis’ (1910). Before Santi Romano wrote his masterpiece The Legal Order in ...
Living Law: Politics and Legality Beyond the State
1st Edition
By Sandro Chignola
July 17, 2024
This book offers a radical new understanding of law, beyond the confines of its formalization by the state. The book takes off from the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, for whom law and its institutions came to be liberated from an ideological perspective that had treated them as ...
Inheritance and the Right to Bequeath: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives
1st Edition
Edited
By Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch, Daniel Halliday, Thomas Gutmann
May 27, 2024
In every Western democracy today, inheritances have a very profound influence on people’s lives. This motivates renewed scholarship on inheritance law by philosophy and the legal sciences. The present volume aims to contribute to some ongoing areas of inquiry while also filling some gaps in ...
Political Theology and Law
1st Edition
By Geminello Preterossi
May 27, 2024
This book addresses two main questions. Can political theology be overcome? And, is what today – in referring to neoliberalism and its genealogy – many define as "economic theology" truly an alternative to political theology, as Foucault has claimed and as Agamben does today? As a first step, the ...
The Struggle over Law in Europe
1st Edition
By Aldo Sandulli
April 29, 2024
This book examines the role of law in Europe at a time when economic policies have become dominant not only on this continent but globally. Can law be seen as a mere infrastructure? Or does it contribute to defining the social and legal order through its own inherent rules? If the second hypothesis...
The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law
1st Edition
By Johan Van Der Walt
January 29, 2024
Addressing the influential analysis of law and literature, this book offers a new perspective on their relationship. The law and literature movement that has gained global prominence in the course of last decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries has provided the ...
Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life: Agamben and Levinas
1st Edition
By Tom Frost
May 31, 2023
This first book-length study into the influence of Emmanuel Levinas on the thought and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life, demonstrates how Agamben’s immanent thought can be read as presenting a compelling, albeit flawed, alternative to Levinas’s ethics of the ...
Hermeneutics as a General Methodology of the Sciences of the Spirit
1st Edition
By Emilio Betti
September 26, 2022
With a Foreword by Lars Vinx, this book is the first complete English translation of the Italian jurist, Emilio Betti’s classic work Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften, originally published in 1962. Betti’s hermeneutical theory is presented here as a ‘general ...
States of Exception: Law, History, Theory
1st Edition
Edited
By Cosmin Cercel, Gian Giacomo Fusco, Simon Lavis
February 24, 2022
This book addresses the relevance of the state of exception for the analysis of law, while reflecting on the deeper symbolic and jurisprudential significance of the coalescence between law and force. The concept of the state of exception has become a central topos in political and legal philosophy ...