Time and Constitutionalism - Constitutional Implications of the Time Regime Change

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Daniel Wolff
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558486849

The starting point of the book is the shift from the time regime of modernity to that of postmodernity as diagnosed in the humanities and social sciences. In the time regime of modernity, the future was the dominant time horizon, which was considered an open space for social and political action. In contrast, the past had lost its guiding role due to the divergence between the realm of experience and the horizon of experience. In the postmodern time regime, the future has become an object of concern and thus also of care in the present. At the same time, the past is omnipresent in the present, as evidenced by new guiding categories such as "collective memory" and "collective identity". The book examines the effects of the changing time regime on democratic politics. The question is answered with the help of the concept of time politics, defined as the reaction of democratic politics to shifts in the time regime. Time polics is made up of history politics and future politics. Future politics refers to the expansion of policy making, which is primarily committed to the present, to include the temporal dimension of the future. It becomes necessary in view of the potential of the present to limit the range of options for individual and political action in the future. It aims to maintain as many options for the future as possible. The concept of history politics stands for the thematization of history as an element of political action. It is broken down into three subfields: Politics of the past, politics of memory and history as an argument. The latter subfield is the focus of the book. It is entered when history is integrated into an argumentative context in an affirmative or delimiting manner. The book analyzes time politics from a constitutional law perspective that integrates historical, comparative, cultural, and theoretical methods. In the future politics chapter, it is argued that, in view of a structural deficit in future politics, securing the future through constitutional law is necessary. Therefore, the study's specific research objective is to outline constitutional doctrines aiming at safeguarding the future. The history politics chapter explores three research questions: (1) What role does constitutional law play in the context of the time regime change, the memory paradigm, the identity discourse and the politics of history? (2) How and where have lessons from the past influenced the German and Israeli constitutional systems? In view of the contrasting commonality of the Holocaust memory in Germany and Israel, the central focus is on lessons from the Holocaust. (3) How can "history as argument" in constitutional law be normatively assessed?

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants