131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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critique of parliamentarism and his preoccupation with the consequences of legal positivism.
Representative versus Plebiscitary Democracy
Richard Thoma's judgment in 1930 that "German democracy is overwhelmingly and
fundamentally liberal and indirect, in contrast to an egalitarian-radical democratism [sic] to
whose demands only very few concessions were given in the Weimar constitution," 67 echoed
his interpretation of the Republic's democratic principle in its first years. His article "Der
Begriff der modernen Demokratie" (1922) 68 identified democracy with "formal democracy"
or the extension of universal suffrage in a state; a democracy is, Thoma argued, the negation,
of an authoritarian state (Obrigkeitsstaat), ''responsible government" as opposed to autocratic
government. But the crucial aspect of Thoma's argument was his denial that democracy
implied any substantial beliefs or politics; rather, in his view, democracy was a matter of
forms and procedures, such as the secrecy of ballots, majority rule, and due process. In terms
of this concept, Thoma argued, the German Republic was a liberal democracy: The parties
were required for its functioning, and its workings as a democratic system depended on
indirect expression of the popular will. Thoma contrasted Weimar's liberal, indirect
democracy to radical democracy based on egalitarianism, plebiscitary elections, and
referenda. Writing in the same year, Rudolf Smend also noted that parliamentary government
was typical of the "bürgerlich-liberal culture of the nineteenth century, originally represented
by the rationalistic belief in the productive power of a political dialectic as the form of the
automatic achievement of political truth—in the classical age of English 'government by
talking,' it was the form in which the political world of a country was represented with more
or less absorption." 69 In such states, Smend concluded, the substantial, real contents of
political life were secondary, except for the general attachment to liberty; the primary
integration factors were elections,
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