Peter C. Caldwell

Professor of History and German & Slavic Studies
Director of Graduate Studies

Email: caldwell [] rice.edu Phone: X2546 Office: 336 Humanities

Education

• Ph.D., Cornell University, 1993.
• M.A., Cornell University, 1990.
• B.A., New York University, 1987.

Areas of Interest

• Modern Germany
• Comparative European History
• History of Political Thought 
• Modern European Intellectual History

Research and Teaching

Professor Caldwell is Professor of History at Rice University. He is a Humboldt Fellow, and has received grants from the DAAD and the Humboldt Foundation, as well as a residential fellowship at the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University.

Professor Caldwell's scholarly work has focused on the meanings of democracy and constitutionalism in Germany's first republic, conservatism and state theory, legal theory and the welfare state, and the economics and law of planning under state socialism. His first book, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism, appeared with Duke University Press in 1997, and in 2003 Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic appeared with Cambridge University Press. A third book on Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Richard Wagner, and Louise Dittmar, was recently published: Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe.

Professor Caldwell offers courses at both undergraduate and graduate level on comparative political history of Europe, German history and the history of European thought. His HIST 256 offers a survey of Europe 1890-1945: the period of fascism and Nazism, Stalinism, and the world wars. HIST 355 examines German unification in 1871, the first German republic of 1918, its failure, and Nazi despotism. HIST 354 examines the development of German politics, economics, and society from 1648 to unification in 1870.  He has furthermore offered specialized seminars on German intellectual history after 1945; specialized seminars on Karl Marx and Max Weber; and intellectual history courses, including Ethics and Politics after Religion, focusing on Feuerbach, Marx, Wagner, and Nietzsche.

Selected Publications

• "The Citizen and the Republic in Germany, 1918-1935," in Citizenship and National Identity in Germany, ed. Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
• Foreword to Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The "Jewish Question," the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).
• Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• From Liberal Democracy to Fascism: Political and Legal Thought in the Weimar Republic, ed. with William Scheuerman. Boston: Humanities Press, 2000.
• Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

 

Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe (2009)	Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law (1997)	Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (2003)

Curriculum Vitae

CV coming soon