Clara Maier is a political theorist and historian of political thought at Columbia University, New York. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge for her work on 'The German Question', an examination of conceptions of Nazism and German peculiarity in the period 1933-1968. In a forthcoming book on this subject she examines the work of key twentieth century thinkers such as Ernst Troeltsch, Hugo Preuss, Helmuth Plessner, Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin and Franz Neumann, among others, to contextualise their theoretical approaches to Nazism within contemporary understandings of German history and raise fresh questions about the relationship between historical narrative and democratic legitimacy.
She has since worked on the problem of judicialisation and democracy in Europe with a specific focus on Germany and Spain and has published widely on constitutionalism. Her writing on militant democracy, the history of judicial power in modern Germany, Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and the concept of the Rechtsstaat have appeared in The Historical Journal, Modern Intellectual History, History of Political Thought, Jurisprudence as well as Der Staat, Archiv für Rechts-und Sozialphilosophie and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
At Columbia she teaches on the theory of the Frankfurt School, German legal thought as well as the political theory of Hannah Arendt.
Recent work:
https//www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/latest-issue
