131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Fascism have been treated in just this manner in an essay that is otherwise fascinating for its
wealth of ideas. Although it is rewarding to extract the actual conclusions of this study, it
must also be said at once that this is a very difficult business in which happy agreement and a
negative critique very nearly counterbalance each other. Schmitt's text lacks, it seems to me,
a coherent perspective. So far as a living whole can be divided into two rough halves at all,
one could say this study is on the one hand a purely scientific contribution to our
understanding of certain political ideas and their philosophical connections; the rest of it
appears to be a kind of constitutional-political thesis and prognosis.
(a) This second aspect, which shall be dealt with first here, seems to me unsuccessful and
inadequate. The intention of the author is not to repeat an already well-known and tiresome
catalogue of the failings of modern parliamentary practice (p. 18ff.), but rather to explore
''the ultimate core of the institution of modern parliament," from which it can be seen how far
"this institution has lost its intellectual foundation and only remains standing as an empty
apparatus." To the question (p. 33) "Why has parliament been in fact the ultimum sapientiae
for many generations, and on what has the belief in this institution rested for over a century?"
he gives the answer that the rationale for parliamentary institutions is not to be found in the
familiar argument that the elected committee must function as a surrogate for an assembly of
citizens that is no longer practically possible, as in what Smend has called the "dynamicdialectic":
"public deliberation of argument and counterargument, public debate and public
discussion" in parliament and the free press. (p. 34). That was already expressed by others,
for example, by Forçade (p. 103, note 49) and above all by Guizot. To this there is also
joined the belief that through a free competition of opinions and aims, through discussion and
public opinion, the "truth" can be discovered and parliament would thus be the defender of
justice or at least of relatively better legislation and policies. Thus the "secret practices" of
absolutism could be overcome; thus a government
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