Fear Itself (85 page)

29
Stefan Zweig,
The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography
(New York: Viking, 1943), p. 316.

30
Leathes, “Modern Europe,” pp. 1–2.

31
James Harvey Robinson,
The Last Decade of European History and the Great War
(Boston: Ginn and Company, 1918), p. i. This text was a supplement to James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard,
The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History
(Boston: Ginn and Company, 1907–1908).

32
Leathes, “Modern Europe,” pp. 6–7.

33
Cited in Mark Mazower,
Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century
(London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 2.

34
Ibid., p. 2.

35
Cited in Niall Ferguson,
The
War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
(New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 227.

36
For an incisive treatment of this collapse in the context of a larger cultural and social history, see Eric D. Weitz,
Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 331–60; for a powerful contemporaneous account, written in 1933, see Franz L. Neumann, “The Decay of German Democracy,” in
The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer
, ed. William Scheuerman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 29–43.

37
Jonathan Bell,
The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

38
W. Y. Elliott, “Mussolini, Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics,”
Political Science Quarterly
41 (1926): 161. Elliott identified Italian Fascism as a bastard offspring of the pragmatism of William James.

39
“Triumphant in 1918, it was virtually extinct twenty years on.” See Mazower,
Dark Continent,
pp. 2, 3. “Of twenty-eight European countries—using the broadest credible definition of Europe—nearly all had acquired some form of representative government before, during or after the First World War. Yet eight were dictatorships by 1925, and a further five by 1933. Five years later, only ten democracies remained.” See Ferguson,
The War of the World,
p. 228.

40
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,
Germany’s Third Empire
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), pp. 77–114. For a discussion, see Fritz Stern,
The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology
(New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 236–66.

41
Carl E. Schorske, “Politics in a New Key: Schönerer,” in
The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn,
ed. Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 236.

42
Karl Loewenstein, “Autocracy versus Democracy in Contemporary Europe, II,”
American Political Science Review
29 (1935): 755, 769.

43
Dan Diner,
Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), p. 130.

44
Karl Loewenstein, “Autocracy versus Democracy in Contemporary Europe, I,”
American Political Science Review
29 (1935): 571, 574.

45
Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, I,”
American Political Science Review
31 (1937): 417.

46
Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, II,”
American Political Science Review
31 (1937): 657.

47
For a discussion, see Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds.,
Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 21.

48
José Ortega y Gasset,
The Revolt of the Masses
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), p. 11. This book was first published in Madrid in 1930 as
La rebelión de las masas.

49
Cited in Richard Overy,
The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 294–95. The literature on Carl Schmitt is immense. Influential appraisals include John P. McCormick,
Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology
(Cambridge University Press, 1997); William E. Scheuerman,
Carl Schmitt: The End of Law
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Raphael Gross,
Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), showing how Schmitt’s radical democratic illiberalism was entwined with his anti-Semitism; Andreas Kalyvas,
Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

50
Overy,
The Dictators,
p. 175.

51
I take the phrase from Gellately,
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler,
p. 298. A superb account of such consent, and its mechanisms, in Nazi Germany can be found in Peter Fritzsche,
Life and Death in the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially chaps. 1 and 2. Similarly, Richard Overy’s monumental study of the USSR and Germany concluded that “the Stalin and Hitler dictatorships were populist dictatorships, nourished by mass acclamation and mass participation, and by fascination with unrestricted power.” See Overy,
The Dictators,
p. 650. For Italy, see Victoria De Grazia’s fine monograph,
The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

52
Hans J. Morgenthau,
The Purpose of American Politics
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), p. 115.

53
So doing, these dictatorships assertively combined two types of modern states, what the refugee political scientist Ernst Fraenkel labeled a “dual state”—a “normative state” marked by regard for law, rules, and procedures; and an extralegal “prerogative state” that was charged with unfettered and relentless violence, intimidation, terror, and secret police. They thereby made emergency permanent and expanded the scope of moral and political possibility. See Fraenkel,
Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship
(London: Oxford University Press, 1941).

54
Overy,
The Dictators,
p. 58.

55
Konrad Heiden,
Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), p. 579.

56
Cited in Bullock,
Hitler and Stalin
, p. 316; Ian Kershaw,
Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 465–68.

57
Karl Loewenstein, “Dictatorship and the German Constitution,”
University of Chicago Law Review
4 (1937): 544.

58
Cited in Gellately,
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler,
p. 301. An overview of the relationship between the Enabling Acts of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Enabling Act of 1933 can be found in Peter L. Lindseth, “The Paradox of Parliamentary Supremacy: Delegation, Democracy, and Dictatorship in Germany and France, 1920s–1950s,”
Yale Law Journal
113 (2004): 1361–71.

59
Charles S. Maier,
Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization of France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 344.

60
John Locke,
Second Treatise of Government
(1690; reprint, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980), p. 75; cited in Lindseth, “The Paradox of Parliamentary Supremacy,” p. 1356.

61
I draw these distinctions from Andrew Rehfeld, “Representation Rethought: On Trustees, Delegates, and Gyroscopes in the Study of Political Representation and Democracy,”
American Political Science Review
103 (2009): 214–15.

62
In rejecting the idea that the only legitimate power is controlled power, “dictatorial government,” Loewenstein aptly summarized, “facilitates the legislative process in that the legislative will of the state encounters no obstacle from the parliamentary deliberation and compromise involved in parties and in the free functioning of public opinion.” See Karl Loewenstein, “Law in the Third Reich,”
Yale Law Journal
45 (1936): 779, 787.

63
Cited ibid., pp. 803, 815.

64
Karl Loewenstein, “The Balance between Legislative and Executive Power: A Study in Comparative Constitutional Law,”
University of Chicago Law Review
5 (1938): 581.

65
A year after Hitler’s ascent to power, on January 30, 1934, the Reichstag passed the Reconstruction Act, declaring that “the government of the Reich may enact new constitutional law,” thus eliminating any remaining distinction between ordinary legislation and constitutional amendments.

66
Richard J. Evans,
The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939
(New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 13.

67
Fritzsche,
Life and Death in the Third Reich,
p. 122.

68
Cited in Stephen A. Norwood,
The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 75.

69
Ferguson,
The War of the World,
p. 241; Knox,
To the Threshold of Power,
p. 404.

70
Mussolini,
Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions
(New York: Howard Fertig, 1935), pp. 93–94. See also Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991
(New York: Pantheon, 1994), pp. 109–41.

71
“Nineteenth-century thought, the principle of government by consent, of decision by the expressed will of the majority was being subordinated. . . . Within a few years after the peace it was already fair to raise the question whether democracy as a principle and an institution could survive. . . . The parliamentary system, which was both its embodiment and symbol, was losing the faith of men in most of Europe. At best, it was on the defensive. Certainly it was being steadily beaten back. Mostly it seemed futile. . . . More and more it was becoming associated with reaction. It was becoming associated with the status quo, just when the status quo was unbearable to more and more people. . . . At the same time and for the same reason, the idea of dictatorship, whether of the Left or of the Right, was steadily advancing.” See Nathanial Peffer, “Democracy Losing by Default,”
Political Science Quarterly
63 (1948): 324, 326, 325.

72
“From 1920 through 1925, the liberals’ attempt to make use of fascism as a force for order, as they traditionally conceived it, formed a major theme of Italian politics.” See Maier,
Recasting Bourgeois Europe,
p. 322.

73
For a discussion, see R. J. B. Bosworth, “The English, the Historians, and the Età Gioliggiana,”
Historical Journal
12 (1969): 353–67. For an excellent overview, see Donald Sassoon,
Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism
(London: Harper Press, 2008).

74
Knox,
To the Threshold of Power
, pp. 78, 230, 233, 257, 281.

75
Various German Writers,
Modern Germany in Relation to the Great War
(New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1916), pp. 10, 14–15.

76
Sanford Levinson and Jack M. Balkin, “Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design,” paper presented at the American Political Science Association Meeting, September 2009, p. 12. Article 48 further stipulated that the president could “suspend, in whole or in part, the fundamental rights provided in [various] Articles” of the Constitution, “intervening if need be with the assistance of the armed forces.”

77
For a discussion of these trends, see Carl J. Friedrich, “The Development of the Executive Power in Germany,”
American Political Science Review
27 (1933): 185–203. This is a particularly poignant essay by an émigré scholar, who ended by projecting, in prose written just before Hitler had come to power, how “in any case, Germany will remain a constitutional, democratic state with strong socializing tendencies whose backbone will continue to be its professional civil service” (p. 203).

78
Mussolini,
Fascism,
p. 10. For a discussion of Mussolini’s search for an alternative to parliamentarianism, see R. J. B. Bosworth,
Mussolini
(London: Arnold, 2002), pp. 180–83.

79
Josef Stalin, “On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R.,” November 25, 1936, in Josef Stalin,
Problems of Leninism
(Moscow: International Publishers, 1947), p. 557.

80
Cited in Knox,
To the Threshold of Power
, p. 335.

81
Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939
(New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), p. 427. The talk took place on April 5, 1933.

82
These aspects of his career emerge even in the (too) balanced and sympathetic assessment by Joseph W. Bendersky, “Carl Schmitt’s Path to Nuremberg: A Sixty-Year Reassessment,”
Telos
139 (2007): 6–34; see also Bendersky’s
Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

83
James Bryce, “The Decline of Legislatures,” in
Modern Parliaments: Change or Decline?
ed. Gerhard Loewenberg (1921; reprint, Chicago: Aldine Press, 1971), pp. 21–32; Carl Schmitt,
The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
(1923; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988 [the translation is based on the revised 1926 edition]); Carl Schmitt,
The Concept of the Political
(1927; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1976). In these works, as one commentator notes, liberalism is “problematic. It is the ideology behind which bourgeois capitalist nations conceal their hegemony. . . . Its duplicity regarding the political allows Allies to dominate nations, like Germany, that wish to be honest about the political. International liberalism uses universal morality, pacifism, perpetual peace, and human rights to subdue nations that are just being honest about their concrete specificity.” See John P. McCormick, “Irrational Choice and Mortal Combat as Political Destiny: The Essential Carl Schmitt,”
Annual Review of Political Science
10 (2007): 333. In addition to the works cited in note 49, the large literature on Schmitt and his assault on liberalism and parliamentarism includes Otto Kirchheimer’s 1933 essay, “Remarks on Carl Schmitt’s
Legality and Legitimacy
,” in Scheuerman, ed.,
The
Rule of Law under Siege,
pp. 69–98; Paul Edward Gottfried,
Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990); David Dyzenhaus, ed.,
Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Chantal Mouffe,
The Challenge of Carl Schmitt
(London: Verso, 1999); Jeffrey Seitzer,
Comparative History and Legal Theory: Carl Schmitt in the First German Democracy
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001); Gopal Balakrishnan,
The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of
Carl Schmitt
(London: Verso, 2002); Jan-Werner Muller,
A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Ellen Kennedy,
Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). The decay of parliamentary democracy became a theme, too, in contemporary Marxist works, notably including Frankfurt School theorists in the 1930s. For an example, see Franz Neumann,
The Democratic and the Authoritarian State
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), pp. 101–41.