131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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were represented, the king could preserve his worth only as the representative of the
people (as in the French constitution of 1791). Where absolute monarchy asserted itself, it
had to contest the possibility or even the admissibility of popular representation and tried
for that reason to make parliament into a body for the representation of corporate interests
(as, for example, in Germany during 1815–1848). When a "free" in contrast to an
"imperative" mandate is identified as the particular characteristic of a "representative''
assembly, then this is explicable in terms of a practically important peculiarity. In truth
parliament is not the representative of the whole people simply because it is dependent on
the voters, for the voters are not the whole people. Only gradually in the course of the
nineteenth century, as one could no longer imagine the concept of a person and it became
something objective, did one confuse the sum of current voters (or their majority) for the
overriding total person of the people or nation, and thus one lost the sense of the
representation of the people and of representation altogether. In the struggle for
representation in Germany during 1815–1848, this confusion is already indescribable;
and it can scarcely be determined whether parliament should represent the people before
the king (so that two are represented in the state, the king and the people), or whether
parliament in addition to the king is a representative of the nation (for instance in France,
where according to the constitution of 1791 there were two representatives). The
historical description of the French National Assembly of 1789 and of the German
struggle for a "representative constitution" suffers from the misunderstanding of a
concept so important as representation. That is true even of a book that is as valuable and
as important as Karl Löwenstein, Volk und Parlament nach der Staatstheorie der
französischen Nationalversammlung von 1789 (Munich, 1922) On the concept of
representation in German literature between 1815 and 1848, see Emil Gerber's Bonn
dissertation, 1926.
6. Robert von Mohl, Staatsrecht, Völkerrecht und Politik. Monographien vol. 1
(Tübingen: Verlag der H. Laupp'schen Buchhandlung, 1860–62), 5.
7. [Tr.] See Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Munich & Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot,
1919).
8. Wilhelm von Hasbach, Die moderne Demokratie (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1913, 1921),
and Die parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung (1919); see also Hasbach's article
"Gewaltenteilung, Gewaltentrennung und gemischte Staatsform," Vierteljahrsschrift für
Sozial und Wirtschafts geschichte, 13 (1916), 562.
9. Ferdinand Tönnies, Kritik der öffentliche Meinung (1922), 100.
10. There is more on this in my book on dictatorship, Die Diktatur (1921), 14ff.; see also
Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson (Munich & Berlin: Oldenburg, 1924), and
my review in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 56 (1926), 226–234.
[Schmitt refers here to Arnold Clapmar, De Arcanis rerum publicarum (Bremen, 1605).
Schmitt's review of Meinecke was reprinted in Schmitt's Positionen und Begriffe im
Kampf mit Weimar, Genf, Versailles, 1923–39 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlag, 1940).
Meinecke's Staatsräson has been translated as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison
d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1957). —tr.]
11. [Tr.] On the Monarchomachians see Harold Laski's introduction to the English
translation of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos of Junius Brutus: A Defence of Liberty
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