131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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on condition that this should not delay the book's appearance. 9 Feuchtwanger's preference
for moral instead of intellectual-historical was spelled out in a letter to Schmitt on May 14,
1926: "In spite of being well-worn, moral says more in this connection than intellectual and
almost anticipates the result. The word allows the endangered prestige of contemporary
parliamentarism to shine through already. If we speak about the 'moral' situation of a public
institution—and that as a title, too—then where the journey takes us is very clearly said.
geistesgeschichtlich [intellectual-historical] is too thin, and as you say, it has been
compromised by literary historians." 10
Schmitt's Parlamentarismus belongs to an early phase of his work in which he was
preoccupied with a cultural critique of modern society and the history of political ideas, yet
turning points on the way to "decisionism" can already be seen in this essay. The series of
books appearing between 1919 and 1926 allows these to be traced with some specificity.
There was, first of all, Schmitt's critique of political romanticism as an ewige Gespräch
(endless conversation) in his Politische Romantik (1919), a study of the political ideas of the
German romantics and the career of Adam Müller, which became a standard work on the
subject. 11 This was followed by Die Diktatur (1921), which expanded the work Schmitt had
done during the First World War on the concepts of "a state of siege" and "emergency'' in a
history of the political theory of dictatorship in modern Europe. 12 His Politische Theologie
(1922) took up aspects of both earlier works and contained an indictment of the weakness of
the bourgeoisie whose political representation Schmitt found in liberals and liberalism. 13 Just
as the romantic avoids taking decisions, so too the liberal; faced with the question, "Christ or
Barabbas, the liberal answers with a motion to adjourn the meeting or set up an investigative
committee." 14 An essay on the institution most characteristic of liberalism, parliament, was
thus a logical development in Schmitt's thought. So too were the reply to Thoma 15 and the
treatise on the plebiscitary provisions of the Weimar constitution, Volksentscheid und
Volksbegehren (1926, 1927). 16
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