Hermann Heller (1891– 1933) has a fair claim to being the most interesting political,
constitutional and international legal thinker of the Weimar era, but his work
has remained largely obscure, especially in English- language scholarship and as
compared to his contemporaries and antagonists Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt.
A Google Ngram Viewer search confirms this intuition and reveals that mentions
of Heller, both in German and in English books, have remained negligible compared
to Kelsen and in particular to Schmitt— a case where unfortunately intellectual
weight seems inversely proportional to impact. David Dyzenhaus’s present
edition of Heller’s Sovereignty (1927), in a lucid translation by Belinda Cooper, seeks
to change this.