This book draws on the writings of Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas to trace the relationship of law and democracy in three configurations of the European state: the liberal state (or Rechtsstaat), the welfare state (Sozialstaat), and the emerging supranational polity represented by the European Union. John P. McCormick exposes the tendency of social and political theorists to reach back unreflectively to the past and outlines a new, more appropriate normative-empirical model, the supranational Sektoralstaat, for evaluating prospects for constitutional and social democracy in the EU.