131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Thus democracy appeared to have the self-evidence of an irresistible advancing and
expanding force. So long as it was essentially a polemical concept (that is, the negation of
established monarchy), democratic convictions could be joined to and reconciled with
various other political aspirations. But to the extent that it was realized, democracy was seen
to serve many masters and not in any way to have a substantial, clear goal. As its most
important opponent, the monarchical principle, disappeared, democracy itself lost its
substantive precision and shared the fate of every polemical concept. At first, democracy
appeared in an entirely obvious alliance, even identity, with liberalism and freedom. In social
democracy it joined with socialism. The success of Napoleon III and the results of Swiss
referenda demonstrate that it could actually be conservative and reactionary, just as Proudhon
prophesied. 7 If all political tendencies could make use of democracy, then this proved that it
had no political content and was only an organizational form; and if one regarded it from the
perspective of some political program that one hoped to achieve with the help of democracy,
then one had to ask oneself what value democracy itself had merely as a form. The attempt to
give democracy a content by transferring it from the political to the economic sphere did not
answer the question. Such transferences from the political into the economic are to be found
in numerous publications. English guild socialism calls itself economic democracy; a wellknown
analogy of the constitutional state with constitutional factories has been extended in
every possible direction. 8 In truth this signifies an essential change in the concept of
democracy because a political point of view cannot be transferred into economic
relationships as long as freedom of contract and civil law hold sway in the economy. Max
Weber had already argued in his article "Parliament und Regierung im neugeordneten
Deutschland" (1918) that the state was sociologically just another large business and that an
economic administrative system, a factory, and the state are today no longer essentially
different. 9 From that Kelsen drew the conclusion, perhaps too soon, in his work Wesen und
Wert der Demokratie (1921) that "for
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