131214840-Carl-Schmitt

of a representative assembly and its endowment with legislative powers as the choice of a
government does so today for completely different constitutional, social-ethical
considerations, hopes, and resignation than those found in Guizot and Forçade.
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Further the syndicalist (class conflict) and Fascist (national) theory of myth is not "the
strongest expression" that this obviousness has disappeared. The strongest expression of this
is much more: In practice representatives intentionally belong to parties of the sort that
enable election results to decide the most important policy of the nation in the first place, not
parliament; also the theoretical perspective that political decisions are always voluntaristic,
never intellectual, has now won general acceptance in intellectual history. The step from a
belief in discussion to "decisionism" was taken long ago. The problem of our time is whether
the decision should remain in the hands of a stable minority (the authoritarian state, or in the
extreme, a dictatorship) or with a volatile, temporary minority (the party state); or whether
certain social classes, be they proletarian or bourgeois, should be excluded or advantaged
(the privilege state). It has by no means been proven that Europe is confronted by the
dilemma: parliamentarism or dictatorship. Democracy has many other organizational
possibilities than parliamentarism—though certainly not a monarchical one, just as certainly
the republican one—if parliamentarism really should fail and could not regenerate itself. But
a judgment about this is completely impossible today, even in England and France, not to
mention Germany, where a youthful parliamentarism has scarcely learned to walk yet. The
same is not true of the undemocratic state. Naturally it is possible that the constitutional
politics of Europe will one day face the single alternative: democratic parliamentarism or a
violent dictatorship. But that this is generally actual, I wager to deny in spite of Lenin,
Mussolini, and Primo de Rivera.
(b) If I reject Schmitt's argument insofar as it declares the death of parliamentarism in
intellectual terms, I can still speak of it as a clarification of relationships and connections in
intellectual history with all the more admiration and agreement.
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