• Introduction: The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat


• 1: Behemoth and Beyond: Theories of the Nazi State


• 2: The Making of a Cause Lawyer


• 3: The Debate about the Rechtsstaat in Nazi Germany, 1933-1936


• 4: An Ethnography of Nazi Law: The Gestation of The Dual State, 1936-1941


• 5: "A Rational Core within an Irrational Shell": An Institutional Theory of Dictatorship


• 6: The Decline of a Classic: Explaining the Reception of The Dual State


• Conclusion: Authoritarian Rule of Law

Jens Meierhenrich is Associate Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and previously taught for a decade at Harvard University. His books include The Legacies of Law, which won the American Political Science Association's 2009 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book in politics, government, or international affairs; and, as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt.

This book offers an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's classic The Dual State (1941), recently republished by OUP, and one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. It was the first comprehensive analysis of the nature and rise of Nazism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany.