Hermann Heller

Hermann Heller (born July 17, 1891, Teschen, Austria—died Nov. 5, 1933, Madrid, Spain.) was a German political scientist who was responsible for the revival of political theory in Germany.

Heller taught at the universities of Kiel, Leipzig, Berlin, and Frankfurt and left Germany in 1933 after the advent to power of the National Socialist Party of Adolf Hitler. An eclectic thinker, he utilized aspects of the thought of Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Hans Kelsen without accepting their principal conclusions. Heller stressed the need for a conscious balance between the will of society and man’s utopian ideals-norms and championed the authority of the state in the name of order. Heller revived political theory as sociological in method. He taught that the higher law of the state and the state itself, though shaped by historical civilizations, remain above nature.

Deeply concerned about the political crisis of the West, he perceived the potential of Nazism in Germany and as an active member of the Social Democratic Party opposed the federal takeover of Prussia in 1932 as unconstitutional. As a Socialist he criticized the bourgeoisie for bringing about the psychology of strong-man rule in the face of disorder. Heller also favoured European unification as a means of safeguarding national cultures.

Heller was the author of Sozialismus und Nation (1925), Staatslehre (1934), Die Souveränität (1927), and Europa und der Faschismus (1929).