William Rasch is Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University. He has published extensively on the German intellectual tradition - philosophy, social theory, political theory - concentrating on the work of Niklas Luhmann, Carl Schmitt, and aspects of German Idealism. He is the author of Sovereignty and its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (2004) and Niklas Luhmann's Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation (2000), as well as editor of several volumes.