Each institute will accommodate twenty participants and will meet twice, once in the United States and once in Europe. Participants will present their research and collaborate on new projects at the seminars and between the two meetings. Participants will be expected to attend both meetings. The program will provide stipends and cover travel and lodging costs for both the American and European meetings.

The Political: Law, Culture, Theology

This Institute will seek to recast contemporary thinking about state, law, nation, liberalism, identity, and politics. Beginning from a religiously and philosophically informed idea of culture, we will explore the modern political imagination as it has expressed itself in the ideas of popular sovereignty and the rule of law.

Liberal theory focuses on law in place of sovereignty, on contract instead of sacrifice as the foundation of the political. It fails to see that law is not just a body of rules. Rather, it is a social practice, a way of being in the world. To live under the rule of law is to maintain a set of beliefs about the self and community, time and space, authority and representation. Most importantly, through the concepts of revolution and constitution, the modern nation-state linked popular sovereignty to the rule of law. Popular sovereignty succeeded in and through the rule of law.

Our goal is to develop a cultural approach to the political imagination. We will explore the limits of liberal theory to reconstruct political theory on the basis of a better understanding of the symbolic quality -- the meaning -- of modern political life. To this end, we aim to bring together lawyers, political scientists, theologians, historians, and philosophers to unearth the architecture and genealogy of the modern state, which found a new absolute in the popular sovereign, while committing itself to the rule of law.

Faculty:
Ulrich Haltern, Professor and Chair of German and European State and Administrative Law, University of Hannover, Germany

Paul W. Kahn, Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and Humanities, Director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights, Yale Law School

When & Where: July 25 - August 5, 2005
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Summer 2006
European date and location to be announced

For complete details and applications, visit the web address shown below.

Application Deadline: FEBRUARY 18, 2005

This program is made possible by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.