Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Citizenship: Historical Contestations

In his writing, Dieter Gosewinkel skillfully combines legal expertise with meticulous historical analysis. He examines liberal, conservative, and social-democratic schools of thought and then devises new conceptual frameworks that open up fresh perspectives on important actors, on debates about property, on intricate socio-legal phenomena like citizenship, as well as on constitutionalism between past failures and future opportunities. The broad social histories Gosewinkel writes about reach far beyond the narrow confines of the law. They echo various voices from the past and allow readers to understand how things could always have developed otherwise. The texts, assembled here for the first time in English, thus enable a much needed multi-perspective conversation between various liberal-democratic positions of the present.