Meinel has written a long overdue intellectual biography of Ernst Forsthoff, a conservative outsider who helped to shape West German constitutional law and political thought between 1949 and 1974, the year of his death. From an anachronistic position in defense of an idealized Prussian state, he developed fundamental criticisms of the Basic Law, the Federal Constitutional Court, the expanding social welfare state, and finally of the loss of state authority in the technological society—criticisms that resonated not only with some conservatives but also even with some lawyers on the left. Like so many conservatives of his generation, Forsthoff had been a willing propagandist for the Nazi regime from 1933–35; unlike others, such as the jurist Werner Best described so well in Ulrich Herbert's 1996 biography, he distanced himself from the regime. Nonetheless, his past followed him and colored the reception of his work.

One cannot discuss Forsthoff without also discussing his teacher Carl Schmitt. Meinel argues against reducing Forsthoff to a mere disciple, however. Forsthoff was never one of Schmitt's closest students or friends. Furthermore, he broke off contact with Schmitt sometime in 1934-35, presumably over the latter's indefensible apologia for the Nazi regime's 1934 murders and rabid antisemitism. Only in 1947 did Forsthoff reestablish contact with Schmitt, this time apparently out of a sense that both had been victimized by the Allied program of “denazification.” From 1947 to his death in 1974, Forsthoff cited Schmitt repeatedly, brought him into contact with students in the famed Erbach seminars (Schmitt was not allowed to teach after the war)—in short, he tried to make Schmitt part of the normal jurisprudential culture of the Federal Republic. As Meinel shows, even Forsthoff's closest intellectual comrades, such as Arnold Gehlen, were put off by this support for Schmitt.

Meinel convincingly argues that in fact Forsthoff made his most important independent contributions to law only after his break with Schmitt in the mid-1930s. Facing the reality of Nazi rule without constitutional form, Forsthoff described a new role for the state administration apart from the party: to maintain the “provisions for existence” (Daseinsvorsorge) in the modern world of the urban masses. Without the water, electricity, regulations, and so on, that ensured everything from basic services to culture in the cities, modern life would grind to a halt. Forsthoff provided a useful new approach to the complexities of the modern administrative state, a challenge that continues to resonate among German lawyers today. At the same time, he was making a two-pronged political argument, first against the notion that the distinction between state and society of the liberal nineteenth century was still relevant, but second against the notion that a dynamic social movement or party could replace the everyday authority of rational administration. Both Nazism and the Federal Republic threatened the remnants of the administrative state, on his account.

While no resister, Forsthoff did become a conservative opponent of the Nazis, who effectively sidelined him from teaching by the 1940s. But he also opposed the party-based democracy and heightened role of the judiciary in the Federal Republic—effectively carrying forward the conservative critique of Weimar democracy into the 1950s. His harsh opposition in a way helped the founders of the Federal Republic's constitutional culture define their positions. In one famous debate, for example, he declared that the judiciary should only enforce, but should enforce strongly, the formal rights of the individual against legislative infringement (e.g., property rights). To expand the notion of “right” to include the “entitlements” of the interventionist state, he argued, would deformalize the legal system. A “social rule of law” would remove real protections of the individual; to allow the legislature or judiciary to shape society would be to retrace the steps of the Nazis. Second, Forsthoff launched a harsh attack on the attempts to connect constitutional jurisprudence to basic values embedded in the Basic Law—again warning against a slippery slope toward the destruction of freedom. He rejected, in short, the two main approaches to German constitutional democracy that dominated after the disaster of Nazism. For Forsthoff, neither judges nor lawmakers should intervene in the realm of administration.

More than abstract exercises in legal reasoning, these were attempts to develop a modern conservative political philosophy, connected to the thinking of Gehlen, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Freyer. Unlike other conservatives, Forsthoff never made his peace with the Federal Republic; until the end of his life, he bemoaned society's domination of the state and a consequent loss of authority that threatened to bring history itself to an end. His 1971 polemic, The State of Industrial Society, described how the German state would be unable to meet contemporary ecological and social challenges, making it the prisoner of technological change and social forces. Forsthoff's analysis sounds, in retrospect, hollow; it reminds one of the grand pronouncements of conservatism from before 1933. Indeed, by the end of Meinel's book, one starts to wonder: is he narrating a conservative lawyer's adaptation to a new environment, or the obsessions of an ideologue who happened to be well trained in law?

Meinel has consulted some twenty-five archives and personal papers for his book, and in so doing has opened up a series of sources that shed light on many aspects of the political culture of the Federal Republic. He has provided an excellent monograph on the thought of a critical outsider on the right, who was convinced that the Federal Republic was not a grand success in democratization, but a failure, unable to reestablish the authority of the state.