131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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for the understanding of the intellectual center of modern parliamentarism will be considered
here.
1—
Openness
The belief in public opinion has its roots in a conception that has not been properly
emphasized in the enormous literature on public opinion, not even in Tönnies's great work. 9
It is less a question of public opinion than a question about the openness of opinions. This
becomes clear when one identifies the historical contradiction from which these demands
arise and have arisen, namely, the theory of state secrets, Arcana rei publicae, that dominates
much of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. This theory of a great practice began
with the literature on Staatsraison, the ratio status of which it is actually the core; its literary
beginning is in Machiavelli and its high point in Paolo Sarpi. For a systematic and
methodological treatment by German scholars, Arnold Clapmar's book can be mentioned as
an example. 10 It is, generally speaking, a theory that treats the state and politics only as
techniques for the assertion of power and its expansion. Against its Machiavellianism there
arose a great anti-Machiavellian literature, which, shocked by the St. Bartholomew's
Massacre (1572), boiled with indignation at the immorality of such principles. It answered
the power ideal of political technique with the concept of law and justice. This was above all
the argument of the Monarchomachian authors against princely absolutism. 11 In intellectual
history this controversy is first of all only an example of the old struggle between might and
right: The Machiavellian use of power is combated with a moral and legal ethos. But this
description is incomplete because specific counterdemands gradually develop: precisely
those two postulates of openness and the division of powers. These try to neutralize the
concentration of power contained in absolutism through a system of the division of powers.
The postulate of openness finds its specific opponent in the idea that Arcana belong to every
kind of politics, political-technical secrets which
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