The Department of Politics at the University of York is delighted to offer one 3-year PhD scholarship (UK / EU tuition fees + stipend at UK research council rates), generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust as part of its Research Leadership Award (2016) to Dr. Timothy Stanton for his project Rethinking Civil Society: History, Theory, Critique. The successful applicant will be one of a team of eight doctoral and postdoctoral researchers working on this five-year project, which is based at York but involves collaboration with the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, The Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. The scholarship is available to outstanding students seeking to conduct research on ideas of civil society and the state in German inter-war debates. It is expected that the scholarship will begin on 1 September 2017.
From the closing decades of the nineteenth-century, a number of eminent writers, from Ranke, Gierke and Burckhardt to Meinecke and Cassirer began to reflect on the origins of the modern state and its character. German historians of the Wilhelmine era in particular had become preoccupied with the study of the state in the wake of the formation first of the Prussian state and then the first unified German state. Reflection extended to criticism of Hegel for what Meinecke called ‘the false deification of the State’ which had continued under Hegel’s aegis since his death. Seeking alternatives, intellectuals in this period went back to the Renaissance, exploring both the ‘myth of the state’ (the title of Cassirer’s posthumous work), and its Renaissance republican alternatives. The successful applicant will study the developing war of minds over these issues during the Weimar Republic. Key thinkers may include not only those already mentioned, but also Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Carl Joachim Friedrich, Otto Hintze and Helmuth Plessner.

Further information can be found here: https://www.york.ac.uk/politics/news-events/news-archive-2017/leverhulmephdstudentship/

The deadline for applications is 31 May 2017. Informal enquiries may be made to
tim.stanton@york.ac.uk