131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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tatives, make fractions an indispensable means of government in parliament, and make the
so-called representative principle (article 21 of the Reich constitution states that "the
members are representatives of the whole people, they are only responsible to their own
consciences and not bound to any instructions") meaningless; further, that the real business
takes place, not in the open sessions of a plenum, but in committees and not even necessarily
in parliamentary committees, and that important decisions are taken in secret meetings of
faction leaders or even in extraparliamentary committees so that responsibility is transferred
and even abolished, and in this way the whole parliamentary system finally becomes only a
poor façade concealing the dominance of parties and economic interests. 4 In addition to that
critique there is also a critique of the democratic foundations of this parliamentary system
that was more natural in the middle of the nineteenth century. It developed from the classical
tradition of Western European education and the fear that the educated had of dominance by
the uneducated masses, a fear of democracy whose typical expression one finds in the letters
of Jacob Burckhardt. 5 In its place there has long since developed an investigation of the
methods and techniques with which the parties create electoral propaganda, persuade the
masses, and dominate public opinion. Ostrogorski's work on the parties in modern democracy
is typical of this kind of literature; Belloc and Chesterton's Party System made the critique
popular; sociological investigations of party life, mostly the famous book by Robert Michels,
destroyed numerous parliamentary and democratic illusions without separating one from the
other. 6 Finally, even nonsocialists recognized the collusion of press, party, and capital and
treated politics only as a shadow of economic reality.
One can assume that this literature is generally well known. The scholarly interest of the
following investigation is not intended either to confirm or to refute it; it is rather an attempt
to find the ultimate core of the institution of modern parliament. Accordingly it will be
shown that the systematic basis from which modern parliamentarism
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