Author Description

Hero worship is culturally hardwired into our psyche and cultivated in our early development by our experience of our parents – a daddy and mommy who are all powerful, all beautiful, all everything. Our eventual awakening to their frailty only intensifies our searches elsewhere for other heroes – both in private and public life. And so it is, too, in our intellectual life: St Sigmund, St Karl, St Jurgen et cetera – Chacun a son Saint... For many, history is still a story of kings, and prime ministers, and generals, and statesmen (and stateswomen). And so it is, too, in our little puddle of European law. For many it is a story of a hero, the European Court of Justice: A St George, armed with constitutional hermeneutics, who slaughtered the dragon of national protectionism, pettiness and what else. The spillover from all of this is that awful, ubiquitous culture of celebrityship which has also invaded, indeed conquered, the long-desecrated halls of academia.