131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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speaker as the greatest danger to the parliamentary system because syndicalism springs, not
from doctrines and feelings, but from the economic organization of modern society. Henry
Berthélemy, by contrast, who expressed himself on the matter in his preface to the tenth
edition of his Traité élémentaire de droit administratif, does not consider syndicalism worth
talking about. He believes that it is sufficient if parliamentarians recognize the danger in a
confusion of powers, give up their party business, and provide for a certain stability in
administration. Finally, he views regionalism as well as industrialism (the application of the
methods of economic life to politics) as a danger to the state, while saying about syndicalism
that one could not take seriously a theory that believed that everything would fall into order
"if authority comes from those over whom it is exercised, and if the control is entrusted
precisely to those who must be controlled." 3 From the standpoint of a good bureaucratic
administration this is quite right, but what does it imply for democratic theory, the theory that
all governmental authority derives from the governed?
In Germany there has long been a tradition of corporatist ideas and currents for which the
critique of modern parliamentarism is nothing new. A literature has developed parallel to it in
the last few years concerned with everyday experiences since 1919. In numerous brochures
and newspaper articles, the most prominent deficiencies and mistakes of the parliamentary
enterprise have been pointed out: the dominance of parties, their unprofessional politics of
personalities, "the government of amateurs," continuing governmental crises, the
purposelessness and banality of parliamentary debate, the declining standard of
parliamentary customs, the destructive methods of parliamentary obstruction, the misuse of
parliamentary immunities and privileges by a radical opposition which is contemptuous of
parliamentarism itself, the undignified daily order of business, the poor attendance in the
House. The impression based on long familiar observations has gradually spread: that
proportional representation and the list system destroy the relationship between voters and
represen-
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