Constitutional Theory is a significant departure from Schmitt’s more polemical Weimar-era works not just in terms of its moderate tone. Through a comparative history of constitutional government in Europe and the United States, Schmitt develops an understanding of liberal constitutionalism that makes room for a strong, independent state. This edition includes an introduction by Jeffrey Seitzer and Christopher Thornhill outlining the cultural, intellectual, and political contexts in which Schmitt wrote Constitutional Theory; they point out what is distinctive about the work, examine its reception in the postwar era, and consider its larger theoretical ramifications. This volume also contains extensive editorial notes and a translation of the Weimar Constitution.

Delving into narrative histories, prose fiction, and social philosophy, Hill analyzes the rhetoric, narrative form, and intellectual genealogy of late-nineteenth-century texts that contributed to the creation of national history in each of the three countries. He discusses the global political economy of the era, the positions of the three countries in it, and the reasons that arguments about history loomed large in debates on political, economic, and social problems. Examining how the writing of national histories in the three countries addressed political transformations and the place of the nation in the world, Hill illuminates the ideological labor national history performed. Its production not only naturalized the division of the world by systems of states and markets, but also asserted the inevitability of the nationalization of human community; displaced dissent to pre-modern, pre-national pasts; and presented the subject’s acceptance of a national identity as an unavoidable part of the passage from youth to adulthood.

In Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill takes up themes that have emerged from a lifetime’s investigation into the causes of the English Revolution. However, Hill does more than analyze the origins of the Revolution.  He examines the ways the seeds of change sown during the revolution, grew into transformative politics in the period following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
    Hill argues that the intellectual heritage of the English Revolution was mixed. While he acknowledges its achievements, he also depicts some of its failings. Consequently, he challenges the view that radical notions faded with the Restoration, suggesting instead, that they continued in pervasive and subtle ways throughout the course of English and American history. The apparent similarity between the England of 1640 and that of 1660 is shown to be illusory. Each period’s institutions survived but the social context had changed. In this way, Hill demonstrates how intellectual consequences cannot be separated from the social and economic factors of the nation that produced them. He concludes that historians should turn their attention to the “unofficial” radical heritage that is less easy to comprehend, though no less important.
    This is a highly readable and provocative account by one of the world’s foremost historians.