Reassessing Friedrich Meinecke and German Politics, 1906-1946

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The distinctive aim of my thesis is to reassess the political thought of Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954). A distinguishedhistorian and philosopher of history, Meinecke was one of the most significant public intellectuals in the WilhelmineReich, Weimar Republic, to a slightly lesser degree the Third Reich, and West Germany. My working hypothesis arguesthat Meinecke should be viewed as a central figure in the history of German republican thought. Scholarly works onMeinecke's political thought have to date largely ignored the context within which he formulated his ideas. By contrast,my dissertation, employing the methodologies of the Cambridge School of Intellectual History, would argue that thesecontexts were essential for understanding his intellectual development. Such a sustained contextual analysis ofMeinecke would constitute an original contribution not just to the scholarship of the history of political thought but wouldalso help to shine light on the complexities of the German intellectual tradition in the twentieth century. I hope not just toexamine how an ultimately liberal intellectual, a 'republican of reason' (Vernunftrepublikaner), responded to theextremities of the twentieth century, but to argue that Meinecke should be viewed as one of the greatest representativesof a particularly German variant of neo-republican thoug