Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology An Anthology

Moving from the adoption of the "post-Stalin" Constitution of 1977 through its subsequent implementation under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko to the radical legal "restructuring" of the Gorbachev years, Robert Sharlet traces the gradual evolution of a nascent constitutionalism in the erstwhile USSR. Sharlet, a noted authority on Soviet law and constitutional development, demonstrates the gradual transformation of law from an instrument of Communist Party rule into the new "rules of the game" for nonauthoritarian political development. In effect, he argues, one of Gorbachev's most durable achievements may be his redefinition of Soviet politics into a legal idiom along with his relocation of policymaking from behind the closed doors of Party conclaves into the more open, emergent arena of constitutional government. In analyzing the politics of law from the Brezhnev era to the rise of Yeltsin, the author takes account of the "war of laws", the symbolic uses of the Soviet constitution, and even the fact that the leaders of the failed coup attempted to justify their seizure of power on constitutional grounds. Constitutionalism has sufficiently suffused Soviet public life, the book concludes, that most of the sovereign republics as successors to the former USSR, have begun designing their futures - to varying degrees - in constitutional forms.

Biography

Hans Adler received his Dr. phil. degree in 1978 and his habilitation degree in 1987 from the Ruhr-University at Bochum, Germany, where he taught in the German department from 1978 to 1990. He has held visiting professorships in Germany, Canada, and the United States. Since 1990, he has been teaching in the Department of German of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he is professor of German. He has published several books and numerous articles on German literature, philosophy, and the history of aesthetics from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. At present, he is president of the International Herder Society.,
Ernest A. Menze (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Professor Emeritus at Iona College (New Rochelle, New York), where he taught history for thirty-five years. He served as Iona’s Dean of Arts and Science from 1987 until 1994 and is currently Adjunct Professor of History at Edison Community College (Fort Myers, Florida). His numerous publications have focused on modern Germany, with particular emphasis on the works of Johann Gottfried Herder. A former Woodrow Wilson Fellow, he has been a visiting professor at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg and has held a senior Fulbright Research Fellowship at the Free University, Berlin. He has also been the recipient of Thyssen Foundation and NEH Awards and is a founding member of the International Herder Society and the World History Association, having served as an officer of the latter.,
Michael Palma has published The Egg Shape (poems) and translations of Guido Gozzano (The Man I Pretend to Be, Princeton, 1981) and Diego Valeri (My Name on the Wind, Princeton, 1989). He coedited New Italian Poets (Story Line, 1991) with Dana Gioia. His poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Grand Street, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including Unsettling America (Viking Penguin).