131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Einheit, Freiheit, Gleichheit were there, too, but these general concepts could not channel
specific material demands or reconcile competing claims. The result was a combination of
neutral governmental forms and political aims incompatible with each other; these were left
to the republic's practice to resolve on the basis of the "negotiated truce between the classes"
that had been achieved at Weimar. 45
The crux of Weimar's later—and ultimate—dilemma lay in the ambiguity of the democratic
principle and the frequently unworkable structure of its parliamentary government. 46
Although the democratic principle in article 1—the assertion that all legitimate power comes
from the people—found wide acceptance in Germany after 1919 among political theorists
and lawyers, 47 the debate on parliamentarism turned on the question of how this principle
might be made workable in Weimar.
Although in terms of the alternatives available in 1918–1919, parliamentary democracy was
in fact the conservative solution to Germany's constitutional problem, hostility toward the
parties and parliamentary politics crippled it from the start. Even before the onset of serious
parliamentary crisis, some were already complaining that the Weimar constitution had given
Germany "nothing but a sorry party government." 48 Opposition to parliamentarism in
Weimar came from three sources: traditional-authoritarian critics, who preferred the
monarchical and bureaucratic system of the Kaiserreich; nationalists such as Hitler and the
men around him, who hoped to combine social change with dictatorial government; and the
radical left, for whom the Russian model and a dictatorship of the proletariat were the goal.
In addition to these fundamentally opposed views of parliamentary democracy, there was a
large body of critical academic literature in Europe and America on aspects of
parliamentarism and on the causes of "continuing governmental crises" in many
parliamentary states. 49
European socialists first set out one of the most important theses in. the contemporary
literature on parliamentarism. They claimed that parliamentary politics was merely a shadow
of political reality, an
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