131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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of law and justice might replace the rule of naked power. In that Schmitt discovers the
"intellectual center" of modern parliamentarism in this ideology, he reaches the conclusion
that parliamentarism has lost its historical-intellectual basis (p. 49), that it lacks any rationale
today and is therefore dead and ready to collapse. It goes without saying that no rational
person today is so naive and optimistic as to place any hope at all in such wonderful results
from parliamentary debates and a free press.
Other theories opposed to the bourgeois ideal of peaceful negotiation and agreement are
more intellectually alive today, in particular, the concept of a rationalistic dictatorship that
springs from Marxist thought and certain "irrationalist theories of the direct use of force,"
whose most important theorist is Georges Sorel and whose most obvious practitioner today is
Mussolini. Both extol a "myth": For the latter the myth is the nation's victorious tempest; for
the former it is the myth of the general strike and socialism. The theory of a political myth is
''the strongest expression of how much the relative rationalism of parliamentary thought has
lost its persuasiveness" (p. 76).
That these opinions and conclusions end in a muddle scarcely needs to be said. The cause of
the confusion is twofold. First of all the exposition is itself incomplete. If one wants to
examine the foundations of an institution in intellectual history, one cannot confine oneself to
the study of a single ideology that has been used to justify it. All of them must be included,
and in our case one then quickly realizes that there are other and more important intellectual
justifications for an elected representative assembly and for parliamentary government than
Guizot's illusions. I cannot expand on this here, but one only needs to read, for example, the
writings and speeches of Max Weber, Hugo Preuss, and Friedrich Naumann from the year
1917 onward to see that the political arguments with which they demanded a reform of the
Reichstag and a transfer of constitutional power to its advantage were completely different,
and that these are intellectually and in real political terms still very much alive. Instead of
these Schmitt has picked
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