CARL SCHMITT, HANS FREYER AND THE

RADICAL CONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE OF

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
Jerry Z. Muller

During the Weimar Republic, Germany was a liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare
state. To be sure, each of these adjectives applied only in some imperfect sense —
but then that can be said about most regimes to which they are applied. The tensions
between these various characteristics of the Weimar Republic helped bring about its
demise — as such tensions have destroyed many other comparable states in inter-war
Europe and beyond Europe in the post-war decades. This essay explores the shared
critique of such a regime developed between 1918 and 1933 by Carl Schmitt and
Hans Freyer, two of the most intellectually accomplished German examples of what
might be called ‘radical conservatism’. The hazard of such a presentation is that it
slights the internal development of the thought of each thinker and understates the
divergences between them. The advantage of such a dual focus is to provide a
stereoscopic view of radical conservatism, which brings into relief the common
themes and concerns sometimes flattened by the peculiar vocabulary or formal
presentation of either Schmitt or Freyer. In the case of Schmitt, much of recent
scholarship in English has overlooked or even denied the radical conservatism of his
Weimar writings. The approach pursued here will, I hope, put his works into more
historically accurate perspective.1 In the case of both Freyer and Schmitt, their

1
Among the significant recent contributions to scholarship on Schmitt is Joseph Bendersky, Carl
Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, 1983), which has done a good deal to clarify Schmitt’s political
connections and legal positions during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Unfortunately (as a
number of sympathetic reviewers have noted in both English and German reviews), the book is weak in
its handling of Schmitt’s ideas, isolating his particular legal positions from the larger context of Schmitt’s
own work, and ignoring the relation of Schmitt’s ideas to those of the wider radical right in Weimar.
Many of these errors are compounded in Bendersky’s essay ‘Carl Schmitt and the Conservative
Revolution’, Telos (Summer, 1987), pp. 27–42. There, for example, Bendersky claims that none of
Schmitt’s writings were published by journals affiliated with the conservative revolution (p. 37), which
he later amends to three minor articles (p. 40), but he neglects the fact that several of Schmitt’s important
essays were published in the radical conservative Europäische Revue. More substantively, Bendersky
writes that Schmitt’s ‘primary point of agreement with Stapel and Günther was the presidential system
and the need to contain the National Socialists. But whereas Stapel and Günther looked to the presidential
system as a transition to a new authoritarian state, Schmitt favored the strengthening of state power within
the existing constitutional framework.’ In fact, Günther hoped to use the National Socialists to bring about
radical conservative goals (see Was wir vom Nationalsozialismus erwarten, ed. Albrecht Erich Günther
(Heilbronn, 1932) ), while ‘a new authoritarian state’ was precisely what Schmitt hoped to achieve through
his interpretation of ‘the existing constitutional framework’.
The claim by Guy Oakes in his introduction to the English translation of Schmitt’s Political Romanti-
cism (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. x–xi, that Schmitt’s legal doctrine of the ‘equal chance’ (according
to which the state did not have to give an equal chance to parties which intended to use their
democratically-obtained power to transform the political order) was aimed at the Communists and
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XII. No. 4. Winter 1991
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
696 J.Z. MULLER

intellectual and rhetorical gifts helped undermine support for liberal democracy in
Germany, and indeed were intended to do so; this paper, however, focuses on their
social and political thought rather than on their influence.2

Radical Conservatism
Before turning to their particular cases, a conceptual delineation of radical conser-
vatism may be useful. Radical conservatism unites several predilections which, in
combination, make it a recognizably distinct and recurrent phenomenon. The radical
conservative shares many of the concerns of more conventional conservatism, such
as the need for institutional authority and continuity with the past, but believes that
the processes characteristic of modernity have destroyed the valuable legacy of the
past for the present, and that a restoration of the virtues of the past therefore demands
radical or revolutionary action. Hence the self-description of one radical conservative
as ‘too conservative not to be radical’, and the credo of another, ‘Conservative means

National Socialists is a distortion, as is the claim that Schmitt’s newspaper article of July 1932 advised
against voting for the Nazis. In fact, Schmitt used his doctrine of the ‘equal chance’ to argue in favour of
the Papen government’s seizure of power from the Social Democratic government of Prussia. The warning
against voting for the Nazis quoted by Oakes comes not from Schmitt’s article but from an afterword
appended to it by the editors of the newspaper in which it appeared. (See Bendersky, Carl Schmitt,
pp. 153–9.)
Among the most useful guides to Schmitt’s thought in recent scholarship is Günther Mashke. A former
radical leftist turned radical rightist, Mashke shares Schmitt’s fundamental anti-liberal sympathies
emphatically and empathetically, which has made him an unusually sensitive reader of Schmitt’s work.
Moreover, the very attention which Mashke has lavished on Schmitt’s writings and their intellectual
sources have made him aware of important characteristics of Schmitt’s work which have eluded many
readers. Mashke notes that Schmitt’s key concepts are striking without being clear; that Schmitt’s key
works and concepts do not fit together into a coherent whole; that his works are not scholarly in the usual
sense and that his writings are influential more for their suggestiveness than for their careful argumentation.
Especially useful, because relatively unpolemical, is Maschke’s essay ‘Drei Motive im Anti-Liberalismus
Carl Schmitts’, in Carl Schmitt und die Liberalismuskritik, ed. Klaus Hansen and Hans Lietzmann
(Opladen, 1988), pp. 55–79. Maschke’s Der Tod des Carl Schmitt. Apologie und Polemik (Vienna, 1987),
while both polemical and apologetic as its title implies, provides a critical overview of recent writing on
Schmitt in several languages.
Of varying but generally high quality are the essays and discussions included in Complexio Opposi-
torum. Über Carl Schmitt, ed. Helmut Quaritsch (Berlin, 1988); the richest essay in terms of biographical
information on Schmitt is Piet Tommissen, ‘Bausteine zu einer wissenschaftlichen Biographie (Periode:
1888–1933)’, pp. 71–100, and the discussion which follows. On the connection between Schmitt’s early
Kulturkritik and his critique of liberalism see Ellen Kennedy, ‘Politischer Expressionismus: Die kulturk-
ritischen und metaphysischen Ursprünge des Begriffs des Politischen von Carl Schmitt’, in Complexio
Oppositorum, ed. Quaritisch, pp. 233–51, and the discussion which follows; as well as her ‘Carl Schmitt
und Hugo Ball: Ein Beitrag zum Thema ‘‘Politischer Expressionismus’’ ’, Zeitschrift für Politik (June
1988), pp. 143–61.
Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt. Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin, 1987), is idiosyncratic and apologetic,
though of some use in tracing Schmitt’s contacts and influence. Bernd Rüthers, Entartetes Recht.
Rechtslehren und Kronjuristen im Dritten Reich (Munich, 1988), pp. 99–175, reviews most of the
secondary literature on Schmitt’s character and career and offers a fair synthesis.
2
For more on Freyer’s influence, see Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the
Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1987), passim.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 697

creating things that are worth preserving’.3 Radical conservatism shares with con-
servatism an emphasis on the role of institutions, but seeks to create new institutions
which will exert a far stronger hold on the individual than do existing ones, which
because of their relative tolerance are perceived by radical conservatives as ‘de-
cayed’. Like other political radicals, radical conservatives look to state power to
reach their goals. These aims typically include the reassertion of collective particu-
larity — of the nation, the Volk, the race, or the community of the faithful — against
a two-fold threat. The internal threat arises from ideas and institutions identified by
radical conservatives as both foreign and incapable of providing worthy goals for
the collectivity and the individuals who comprise it. These threats usually include
the market as the arbiter of expressed preferences, parliamentary democracy, and the
pluralism of value-systems which capitalism and liberal-democracy are thought to
promote. But the ideas and institutions perceived as threatening may also include
those of internationalist socialism, which is similarly perceived as corrosive of
collective particularity. The external threat arises from powerful foreign states which
are perceived as using their power to spread ideas and institutions identified by
radical conservatives as corrosive.
Yet together with its antipathy to such ‘modern’ phenomena as liberalism, Marx-
ism, capitalism and parliamentary democracy, radical conservatism typically advo-
cates technological modernization, in part because a successful challenge to the
power of these external states demands the mastery of technology. The defence
against the cultural and political effects of modernity on the body politic is thus
thought to require a homeopathic absorption of the organizational and technological
hallmarks of modernity.4 Radical conservatism should therefore be distinguished
phenomenologically from both traditionalist conservatism and reaction.

Freyer and Schmitt: Formative Experiences

Despite significant differences in origin, style and temperament, Freyer and Schmitt
shared a number of formative experiences which help to account for their develop-
ment into radical conservative intellectuals.5 Both were born into religiously pious
households, Freyer into a Protestant family in Saxony in 1887, Schmitt into a
Catholic family in Westphalia one year later. Both were expected by their families

3
The self-description stems from Paul de Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften, p. 5, quoted in Rudolph Hermann,
Kulturkritik und konservative Revolution (Tübingen, 1971), p. 241. The credo is from Arthur Moeller van
den Bruck, Das dritte Reich (Hamburg, 3rd edn., 1931), quoted in Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma
des Konservatismus in Deutschland (Munich, 2nd edn., 1977), p. 243.
4
On the affirmation of technology by radical conservatives see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism:
Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984), esp. Chs. 1 and 9.
I have explored the topic of the conceptual barriers to the recognition of National Socialism as ‘radical
conservative’ and its implications for historical research and interpretation in Jerry Z. Muller,
‘Enttäuschung und Zweideutigkeit: Zur Geschichte rechter Sozialwissenschaftler im Dritten Reich’,
Geschichte und Gesellschaft, #3 (1986), pp. 289–316.
5
For biographical information on Freyer, see Muller, Other God, Chs. 1–3; on Schmitt see the works by
Bendersky, Kennedy and Tommissen cited above.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
698 J.Z. MULLER

to pursue clerical careers, but neither did. During and after their years of university
study each were part of cultural circles which were deeply critical of contemporary
bourgeois society: in the case of Freyer this took the form of membership in the
Jugendbewegung; in the case of Schmitt, in expressionist circles in Munich. Both
became members of the Bildungsbürgertum deeply alienated from the bourgeois
culture of the German Reich. For both men the Great War became another formative
experience. Freyer spent most of the war as an officer on the Western Front, while
Schmitt served as a legal counsellor to the German Army. In each case the war
provided models for civilian society: for Freyer, the ‘community of the trenches’;
for Schmitt, the viability of dictatorship in modern society. These war-time experi-
ences took on added significance in view of the events which followed, namely
revolution and civil strife in Leipzig and Munich, where Freyer and Schmitt respec-
tively found themselves at the war’s end. For Schmitt, who had been appointed to a
government post in Strassburg, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was especially painful.
Shortly thereafter, in 1923, as a professor in Bonn, Schmitt experienced first-hand
the French occupation of the Rhineland. These last two events made the question of
national sovereignty and national power central to his concerns.
During the 1920s, Freyer and Schmitt wrote academic works in their respective
disciplines, but also works which combined historical, philosophical and political
reflection and were intended for a larger, non-academic audience. Freyer made his
name as a professor of philosophy in Kiel, and then as professor of sociology in
Leipzig after 1925. Schmitt became a professor of law first in Bonn, and after 1928
in Berlin. The two met in the late 1920s and became friends, their personal friendship
following from and contributing to their intellectual and ideological affinities.
Freyer and Schmitt were both part of the communicative network of the radical
right in Weimar, and Schmitt became part of the coterie around General Schleicher,
but both had friends and influence well beyond these circles. Neither man was a
National Socialist before 1933, but after Hitler’s assumption of power both cooper-
ated closely with the Nazi regime and saw themselves and their students appointed
to important positions in the universities and in the governmental bureaucracy.
Eventually both men were disappointed and disillusioned with the regime they had
supported. Both men lived long lives: Hans Freyer died in 1969, and Carl Schmitt in
1985. After 1945 both remained intellectually active and productive. Freyer’s Theo-
rie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1955) was a widely-read and influential work of
social thought in the Germany of the 1950s, after which his intellectual influence
declined markedly. Schmitt’s influence has waxed and waned, both in Germany and
abroad; in recent decades his work has been most influential in Spain and Italy; there
has also been some interest in his writings in France and Japan, and in recent years
several of his works have been translated into English as well.6 There is thus a large

6
On Schmitt’s influence in and beyond Germany see Maschke, Der Tod des Carl Schmitt, and the essays
in Complexio Oppositorum, ed. Quaritsch. On Schmitt’s influence in Italy from the 1930s to the 1980s
see Wolfgang Schieder, ‘Carl Schmitt und Italien’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (January 1989),
pp. 1–22. On the appropriation of Schmitt by the French Nouvelle Droit see also Manfred Baldus, ‘Carl
Schmitt im Hexagon’, Der Staat, Vol. 26, no. 4 (1987), pp. 566–686.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 699

and growing secondary literature on Schmitt, which varies radically in quality and
accuracy.
Forming a clear picture of Schmitt’s ideas and his place in history presents some
unusual obstacles. First, Schmitt’s own accounts of his past are tendentious and
unreliable: in the four decades after the fall of the Third Reich Schmitt devoted a
good deal of his time and energy to rewriting his past and trying to convince first
Allied investigators, then journalists and historians that he had been intellectually
and politically distant from National Socialism before and after 1933. Second, there
is the problem of the continuity and change in Schmitt’s work. In fact, while there
are continuities (often seamless) between the works written before 1933 and those
written from 1933–45, there are important differences as well, not least the appear-
ance of an open and virulent anti-semitism in the works published during the Third
Reich. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a tendency for the West German literature
on Schmitt to read his earlier work in light of his post-1933 writings and actions,
which presented a somewhat distorted version of Schmitt’s thought of the Weimar
period.7 Much recent literature, by contrast, tends to err in the opposite direction,
accepting Schmitt’s claim that he was a defender of Weimar democracy (which, as
we will see, is true only in a Pickwickian sense). Moreover, Carl Schmitt was a
powerful rhetorician, and his works abound in key terms and definitions which are
often striking, but upon close inspection turn out to be suggestive but ambiguous,
such as democracy as the identification of ruler and ruled, or politics as characterized
by the distinction between friend and enemy. The problem is compounded by the
fact that Schmitt himself sometimes used his key terms in opposite senses over time.8
For all these reasons it is especially important to place Schmitt’s conceptual claims
in their political and cultural context in order to understand their meaning and import.

Freyer’s Critique of Liberalism

Both Hans Freyer and Carl Schmitt tended to equate liberalism with enlightenment,
with rationalism, and with universalism. A key premise of their critique of liberal
democracy was that ultimate meaning in collective life was possible only on the basis
of collective particularity and collective delimitation. These premises and their
contemporary political implications were spelled out in a series of books which
Freyer wrote in the early 1920s: Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft im philosophischen
Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts (1921), Prometheus: Ideen zur Philosophie der Kultur
(1923), Theorie des objektiven Geistes: Eine Einleitung in der Kulturphilosophie
(1923), and concluding with Der Staat (1925), which drew out the implications of
his philosophy of culture and his critique of contemporary society for political
philosophy and political action.
7
This is the case in otherwise worthwhile works of Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der
Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1962), and Christian Graf von Krockow, Die Entscheidung: Eine Unter-
suchung über Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart, 1958).
8
As Freyer pointed out in an admiring review of Schmitt’s collected essays published in 1940. See
Freyer’s review of Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles, in Deutsche
Rechtswissenschaft, Vol. 5 (1940), pp. 261–6, esp. pp. 261–3.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
700 J.Z. MULLER

Freyer’s Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft im philosophischen Denken des 19. Ja-
hrhunderts was an effort to flesh out the notion of a ‘spirit of the nineteenth century’
and to suggest by contrast the spirit of the twentieth.9 In fact the range of attitudes
within nineteenth-century philosophy regarding the relationship of the economy to
the rest of culture was so broad that no common spirit could be distilled inductively.
What Freyer actually did was to assume that a particular social philosophy — roughly
equivalent to Manchesterian liberalism — was the real spirit of the nineteenth
century. Freyer’s portrait of economic liberalism and of classical political economy
was of a system of thought which had resulted in the reification of the economy. It
was the subordination of all realms of existence to the demands of the market
economy and the extension of the modes of thought characteristic of the market to
the realm of ethics which Freyer regarded as the spirit of the nineteenth century.
Freyer’s views on the nature of culture, of politics and of the contemporary human
predicament were based upon a core conception of the nature of man, on what
Germans have come to call a ‘philosophical anthropology’. Freyer often expressed
this core conception of his social thought in metaphorical terms. The controlling
metaphors were of boundedness and unboundedness or of openness and closedness.
Freyer used these metaphors to express his central concern, that of possibility and
limitation. For Freyer it was unbounded possibility which most threatened contem-
porary man. His political philosophy stressed the need for boundaries, and his
political programme was a quest for collective delimitation. The emphasis of Freyer’s
social theory was on the problem of social integration. Behind his theory lay his
conviction that only through membership in stable, well-integrated social groups was
the individual freed from the sense of limitlessness intrinsic in subjective life.
The source of boundaries on the labile self and hence of meaning was culture, a
term which Freyer used in the broadest sense to indicate all the externalized creations
of men, i.e. institutions and beliefs.10 The individual could only escape the limitless
flux of subjective life by internalizing the delimiting purposes provided by culture.
The solution to the problem of individual identity thus lay in the ability of social
groups to convey a set of delimiting purposes to the individual, and this in turn
depended upon the stability of the social groups of which the individual was a part.
Freyer’s theory of social groups was voluntaristic or idealistic:11 men existed as a
group primarily by virtue of sharing some common purpose, some collective end or
goal. They ultimately cohere through the voluntary subordination of the individual
to a collective purpose, and their degree of cohesion reflects the intensity of

9
See Muller, Other God, pp. 78–87.
10
Hans Freyer, Theorie des objektiven Geistes. Eine Einleitung in die Kulturphilosophie (1923), p. 55.
Freyer here follows Hegel’s use of the term in the Phenomenology, in which the culture to be internalized
is not only ‘high culture’ but culture in the anthropological sense of the sum total of institutions and beliefs
of a society. On Hegel’s usage, see Judith Shklar, Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political
Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 144.
11
The terms ‘voluntaristic’ and ‘idealistic’ are drawn from Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action
(2 vols., New York, 1968), passim and esp. pp. 81–2.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 701

commitment to such supra-individual ends.12 The social groups upon which the
individual depended for a sense of stability and delimitation were thus themselves
dependent upon the affirmation of some higher purpose.
Assuming, as Freyer did, that society required some ultimate purpose or collective
aim, from where was this goal to come? Could a society not agree on some ultimate
purpose and a system of institutions and symbols through which to embody such a
purpose? Could such a purpose not be freely and rationally chosen, based on
universal, rational standards? Could man not create such a rational and universal
culture de novo? This was the political project which Freyer identified with the
Enlightenment and of its liberal and socialist successors. Freyer’s response to these
questions was negative. His scepticism was a product of the central premises of his
radical conservative social theory, namely the connection between meaning, tradi-
tion and particularity.
Freyer’s theory of tradition is an outgrowth of his over-riding concern for stability
in the face of the natural flux of life. The role of culture was to provide stability amid
flux. But were culture to change as quickly as life itself, it would fail to fulfil the
stabilizing function which it occupied in Freyer’s social thought. Life lived only in
an awareness of the present, in a system of institutions, values and symbols which
reflected only the needs of contemporary life, could not provide such stability and
continuity. How then did cultural forms acquire ‘depth’, some degree of permanence
amid the changing needs of men over historical time? Freyer’s answer, briefly stated,
was that cultural forms acquire greater emotional resonance for the present by virtue
of their multiple past associations and connotations. Through tradition — the
reappropriation of past culture — contemporary life thus acquires some historical
‘weight’, some continuity with the past which gives ‘depth’ to the culture of the
present and enhances social stability.13
Freyer’s critique of enlightened, rationalist universalism was two-pronged. The
role of tradition, of grounding in the past as the source of cultural ‘weight’ was the
first prong. His conception of the relatioship between meaning and particularity
formed the second prong. Since for Freyer personal meaning was linked to collective
stability, collective integration was linked to collective purpose, and collective
purpose was linked to the renewal of tradition, the question inevitably arose of which
tradition ought to form the basis of collective purpose. Were such a choice truly
arbitrary — were there no overriding criteria for choosing one cultural tradition over
another — the result would be indecision and inaction, accompanied by the sense of
meaninglessness which Freyer’s entire programme was intended to obviate. In such
a case, he wrote, ‘The melancholy of multiple possibilities lays upon us and paralyses
our action’.14 In contradistinction to all philosophies which asserted the existence of
some universal set of norms appropriate for all men on the basis of their common
humanity and accessible to all through reason, Freyer maintained that meaning exists

12
Freyer, Theorie, pp. 52–4.
13
Ibid., pp. 94–8.
14
Hans Freyer, Prometheus: Ideen zur Philosophie der Kultur (Jena, 1923), p. 70.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
702 J.Z. MULLER

in history only in multiplicity.15 ‘History’, he wrote, ‘thinks in plurals, and its teaching
is that there is more than one solution for the human equation.’16 The ‘plurals’ were
the various distinct historical cultures, each of which was created and transmitted by
a historical collectivity or ‘Volk’. This assumption, as Freyer often noted, was a
legacy of the German historicist tradition. In the case of Hans Freyer these historicist
assumptions now became the basis of a normative social theory and a prescriptive
plan of political action centred on the concept of the Volk.
During his radical conservative phase Freyer judged the affirmation of collective
historical particularity in the form of the Volk to be the only alternative to the
unbounded society and ephemeral culture of rationalist universalism. The charac-
teristic processes of modernity, according to Freyer, dissolved all connection with a
particular culture of the past which could add depth to the culture of the present,
leaving no bounded collectivity to which the individual could subordinate himself.
For Freyer the main currents of modern history threatened this retention of
collective purpose and hence of individual meaning. A society which lacked a
common collective purpose, Freyer believed, left the lives of its members bereft of
meaning. It might leave them free to pursue their individual interests and vocations,
but without some larger collective goal the pursuit of individual choices would be
arbitrary. Only a society devoted to the affirmation of its particularity could provide
the individual with a sense of purpose. It was this perspective which lay at the heart
of Freyer’s critique of contemporary Germany in the 1920s. In Prometheus, Freyer
expressed his hatred of ‘chaotic ages without any limits’.17 ‘We have a bad conscience
in regard to our age’, he wrote. ‘We feel ourselves to be unconfirmed, lacking in
meaning, unfulfilled, not even obligated.’18 For Freyer an open society was a
meaningless society. His philosophy of history was primarily concerned with ex-
plaining how modern society had become so open, his political philosophy with how
it could be closed again.
Modern society, according to Freyer, was characterized by what his teacher, Georg
Simmel, had called ‘the tragedy of culture’. Each realm of culture takes on a life of
its own: as each realm develops independently it loses its connection to a specific
human group and to a specific historical culture; it thus has a universalistic impetus.
The various realms of objective culture become independent of one another, develop
according to their own logic and lose their connection to a particular historical
subject.19 The realms of such a culture — art, science, scholarship, the economy,
technology — no longer fit together into some meaningful totality, no longer provide
a closed world of shared horizons for its members.
It was the relationship between capitalism and technology which most vexed Hans
Freyer. Freyer’s concern was that the expansion of capitalism, technology and

15
Hans Freyer, Der Staat (Leipzig, 1925), p. 194.
16
Freyer, Prometheus, p. 78.
17
Ibid., p. 57.
18
Ibid., p. 107.
19
Freyer, Der Staat, pp. 66–72.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 703

science would result in the decline of collective purpose and the dissolution of
particular cultures. The intrinsic logic of these fields was trans-national. Left to
flourish according to their intrinsic logic and without political control, they led to
the dissolution of political and cultural barriers.20 The unguided spread of technology
would lead to some global system without a historical or organic connection to any
particular collective culture. All of humanity would eventually be absorbed into ‘a
rationalized order of objective relations, an economic trading company’.21 This
image of a pacified world order based upon peaceful trade between nations pursuing
their collective welfare was close to the vision of the future of nineteenth-century
liberals such as Herbert Spencer. To Hans Freyer and Carl Schmitt, however, this
future was not a dream but a nightmare. For given Freyer’s premise that meaning
arose only from cultural particularity, this prospect was tantamount to universal
meaninglessness.

Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism

Similar themes — of the loss of cultural coherence and the threat of subjectivism —
run through the works written by Carl Schmitt from 1916 to 1929. Freyer’s equation
of the nineteenth century with liberalism, perceived as the economization of exist-
ence, was also a recurrent theme in Carl Schmitt’s writings. The theme of the modern
age as the age of economization and mechanization goes back in Schmitt’s work at
least as far as his book Theodor Däublers ‘Nordlicht’ of 1916.22 In his book Political
Romanticism, published in 1919, Schmitt argued that romanticism ought to be
defined not by the varied institutions to which various romantics were committed,
but by the nature of their commitment. For Schmitt, romanticism was characterized
by its ultimate subjectivism, which made lasting, binding commitments to any
authoritative idea or institution impossible. For the romantic, according to Schmitt,
any given institution is merely the occasion for the romantic’s own subjective,
aesthetic experience.23 This romantic attitude was subversive of all normative
institutions.24
For Schmitt, there was a close historical and sociological link between the
subjectivist aestheticism characteristic of romanticism and the rise of the bourgeoisie
and of liberalism. Once the Roman Catholic Church had provided what Schmitt
called ‘form’ or a clear sense of ultimate authority and structure.25 With the decline
of the theological basis of shared authority after the wars of religion, the only viable
source of ultimate and integrative authority in continental Europe was the newly-

20
Ibid., pp. 174–5.
21
Freyer, Prometheus pp. 55–6.
22
See the analysis of that work in Kennedy, ‘Politische Expressionismus’, esp. p. 243.
23
Page references are to Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Berlin, 2nd edn., 1925), p. 132.
24
Ibid., p. 22.
25
See Carl Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form (Hellerau, 1923).
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
704 J.Z. MULLER

created institution of the modern absolutist state.26 In the course of the nineteenth
century, the new bourgeoisie with its philosophy of liberalism had challenged the
claims of the absolutist state to ultimate authority and sovereignty, only to have its
own authority challenged by new social forces and demands for mass democracy.
Thus older structures of political and cultural authority had been dissolved, but no
new authoritative ‘forms’ had taken their place.27 While romanticism had begun as
an anti-bourgeois movement, the bourgeoisie had itself adopted the subjectivized
aestheticism of romanticism.28
Romanticism was thus the cultural correlate of what Schmitt called the ‘individu-
alistic, disintegrated society’ of a ‘bourgeois world which isolates the individual in
the cultural realm, making the individual his own source of reference’.29 ‘When the
hierarchy of spiritual spheres dissolves, anything can become the center of cultural
life’, wrote Schmitt, which was tantamount to having no centre. As a result, contem-
porary spiritual existence was privatized, uncertain and suspicious of all authority.30
The link between romantic subjectivism and the spread of capitalist relations was
summarized by Schmitt as follows: ‘The path . . . towards economization goes
through the aesthetic, and the path through sublime aesthetic consumption and
satisfaction is the most certain and pleasant path to a general economization of
cultural life and a spiritual constitution which finds the central categories of human
existence in production and consumption’.31 Behind Schmitt’s more concrete
political analysis of Weimar politics, therefore, lay the premise that the domination
26
In his work of the late 1930s Schmitt maintained that a key distinction in modern European history was
between the continental great powers of France and Prussia, which were forced to develop an absolutist
state based on the landed army and the professional bureaucracy on the one hand, versus the English, who
had opted against this model and instead championed the navy, the sea and trade. This historical
dichotomy, which identified Prussia with the absolutist, military model and England as its paradigmatic
antithesis, appears to have been adapted by Schmitt from Otto Hintze, whose own dichotomy was adapted
from Herbert Spencer’s distinction between the military and industrial models of society, but placed greater
emphasis on divergent developments in political representation. Thus, for Schmitt, the struggle between
Germany and England was a struggle for the preservation of ‘the political’, the state and delimited national
culture against the disintegrative forces of liberalism, trade and the Jews. For Schmitt’s dichotomies see
his Leviathan (1938), esp. pp. 119–27; ‘Staat als konkreter, an eine geschichtliche Epoche gebundener
Begriff’ (1941), now in his Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954 (Berlin, 1958),
pp. 375–85; and Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Cologne, 1981;
originally published 1942), pp. 86–102; for the expression of related sentiments in Schmitt’s personal
conversations of the period, see the memoir by Nicolaus Sombart, ‘Spaziergäng mit Carl Schmitt’, in his
Jugend in Berlin, 1933–43 (Munich, 1984), pp. 260–5. On Hintze’s dichotomy and its relationship to
Spencer see Otto Hintze, ‘Military Organization and the Organization of the State’, in The Historical
Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (New York, 1975), pp. 178–215; and also Edward C. Page, ‘The
Political Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy: Otto Hintze’s Conceptual Map of Europe’,
Political Studies, Vol. 38 (1990), pp. 39–55.
27
Schmitt, Politische Romantik, p. 18.
28
Schmitt, ‘Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen’ (first published 1929), page
references here are to the reprint in Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe, pp. 122–4.
29
Schmitt, Politische Romantik, pp. 26–7.
30
Ibid, pp. 17, 21.
31
Schmitt, ‘Zeitalter’, p. 123.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 705

of modern life by economic considerations was culturally degrading, that it was

tantamount to the trivialization of existence.
Among the implicit aims of Political Romanticism was to restore the plausibility
of non-rational sources of authority by severing the link between romanticism on the
one hand and the particular commitments of the romantics to the Catholic Church,
the state and the historically-evolved Volk on the other.32
A central contention in the work of Schmitt (as well as of Freyer) was that the
contemporary loss of unified cultural and political authority had its roots in the
central process of the nineteenth century, which Schmitt called ‘economization’ and
Freyer the rise of bourgeois society. Their philosophy of history and contemporary
political programme was based upon a shared belief that the process of economiza-
tion in the nineteenth century had brought about what Schmitt termed the decline of
form or what Freyer (following Saint-Simon) termed a negative or inorganic epoch.

Positive Alternatives:
The Political Assertion of Collective Purpose and Particularity
For both Freyer and Schmitt, then, the nineteenth century was as much a spiritual as
a chronological designation, identified with the economization of existence, the
subjectivization of authority, and the dissolution of a shared culture and shared
ultimate purpose. Their alternative was the recreation of collective purpose which
would lift men out of their private concerns. That collective purpose was the
reassertion of the power of the German Volk and the creation of a state powerful
enough to make Germany a player on the stage of world history.
It was Freyer’s contention that his prospect of a dawning age devoid of meaning
was not an inexorable consequence of the development of technology. Technology
might lack intrinsic meaning and purpose, but general purposelessness and an
absence of ‘totality’ threatened modern society not because it was dominated by
technology but rather by capitalism. The development of technology in modern
Europe had until now gone hand-in-hand with that of capitalism, a system based
upon the maximization of individual profit. It was capitalism, not technology, which
was responsible for the loss of common goals in modern society. The challenge
facing his contemporaries, Freyer believed, was to dissolve the connection between
technology and capitalism. The political task at hand was the reintegration of
technology into the ‘totality of life of the European nations’.33 In a similar vein,
Schmitt wrote that technology was not politically neutral: it was an instrument and
a weapon, and the question facing the present was the political use of technology.34
Writing in 1925, Freyer maintained that Europe now stood at the threshold of a
new historical era, which would maintain the cultural and especially technological
32
See esp. Politische Romantik, pp. 88–101, where Schmitt distinguishes the political philosophy of the
counter-revolutionary conservatives such as Burke, Bonald and Haller, from the fleeting commitments
of the romantics to these institutions.
33
Hans Freyer, ‘Zur Philosophie der Technik’, Blätter für die deutsche Philosophie (1929–30), pp. 200–
1. On the attitudes of thinkers of the Weimar right towards technology, see Herf, Reactionary Modernism.
34
Schmitt, ‘Zeitalter’, pp. 128–31.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
706 J.Z. MULLER

achievements of the nineteenth century, but integrate them into a closed totality based
upon the reassertion of collective particularity, in a manner which recaptured the
community of shared purpose. The reassertion of the transcendent value of one’s
particular Volk was to be the essence of the faith which would reintegrate society,
and the preservation of the Volk was to serve as the transcendent goal to which all
aspects of culture, the economy and technology were to be subordinated. The agency
which would guarantee and control this subordination was the state. Freyer termed
the structure that the Volk and the State would create the ‘Reich’. The Reich
represented a condition in which the alienation and fragmentation of the present had
been overcome. The diversity of pursuits characteristic of the present would continue,
but each occupation would now be oriented by the state to the purposes of the Reich.
Thus each occupation would now become a calling, its occupant aware that his
development of technical means served the ultimate end of the preservation of the
Reich.35
In keeping with his neo-Hegelian perspective, Freyer described the state as the
ultimate objectification of Geist, its most concrete, institutional expression. As with
the economy and technology, so too were all other realms of human endeavour to be
guided by the state in the interests of the Volk. The role of the state, Freyer wrote,
was to politicize all elements of culture. He scoffed at the liberal, ‘negative’ view of
freedom which sought to secure ‘so-called individual freedom’ from the ‘so-called
coercion of the law’. True freedom, he wrote, is positive freedom, ‘freedom not from
the state, but through the state; not in contrast to law, but in the law itself’. Freedom
in this sense meant the freedom to participate in the self-realization of the Volksgeist,
the freedom to subordinate oneself to the goal of collective self-assertion.36
What did Freyer mean by the Volk? He used the term in two senses, the first
historicist-romantic, the second in the Machiavellian or civic republican sense.
Freyer drew on Hegel, Dilthey and Spengler in an attempt to reformulate the concept
of Volksgeist in a systematic, scientific manner, but even the most systematic of his
expositions remains little more than suggestive. Each historical culture, he wrote, is
the expression of a basic group attitude ‘which is thoroughly pre-rational, unformu-
lated, and non-conscious’. The entire culture of each group (which he equated with
Volk) is the realization or development of this particular ‘primordial attitude toward
the world’.37 Each culture therefore places a different accent on the characteristic
features of human life.38 Freyer provided few specific examples of the manner in
which such collective particularities were expressed in culture. He regarded language
as the most important expression of the Volksgeist and the major constitutive element
of the Volk.
When writing for a non-scientific audience drawn from the Jugendbewegung and
the intellectual right Freyer wrote of the organic origins of the Volk in race or blood.39
Writing for the same audience he would elsewhere refer to Volk as the result of the
historical interaction of a particular race with a particular landscape — as a product
35
Freyer, Der Staat, p. 126.
36 38
Ibid, pp. 165–7. Ibid., p. 119.
37 39
Freyer, Theorie, pp. 111–13. Freyer, Prometheus, pp. 58, 89.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 707

of Blut and Heimat.40 Yet whenever Freyer sought to define these terms he did so
not according to their literal meaning but to their social or psychological function.
Thus blood was ‘that which comprises our essence, and from which we cannot
separate ourselves without degenerating’. Heimat was ‘that place from which we
come and which we cannot abandon without becoming sick’.41 The key terms in
Freyer’s programmatic thought were thus tautological metaphors: to write of blood
as the ultimate source of collective identity and then to define blood as the ultimate
source of collective identity is to have added nothing to our knowledge of the actual
origin of collective identity. What remains is the affirmation of an image of emotive
power, an image which evoked the importance of collective particularity. The
various uses of the term Volk in Freyer’s work of the early 1920s shows it to have
denoted very little, but to have connoted a good deal, namely the myth of common
origin and common cultural substance.
In the second, Machiavellian sense, the Volk designated a politicized entity united
in common purpose. It was Machiavelli who had first distinguished between those
peoples who possessed virtù and hence were capable of collective self-defence, and
those who lacked this quality and were at the mercy of others.42 At least since the
time of Fichte and Hegel, Machiavelli’s work in general and the concept of historical
versus unhistorical peoples in particular had been a source of fascination for German
intellectuals. Like others in this tradition, Freyer regarded war as an indispensable
element in the creation and preservation of the intense political consciousness which
he believed ought to characterize the state. The constant need to prepare for war
provided the intensity of emotional commitment which for Freyer is characteristic
of politics, the constant reminder of the primacy of political over particular inter-
ests.43
For Schmitt too, the alternative to bourgeois existence with its privatized, eco-
nomic concerns lay in the realm of what he called ‘the political’, which itself was
defined by the potential conflict between states.
Among Schmitt’s most important works of the Weimar era was ‘The Concept of
the Political’, which began as an essay in 1927 and was published in expanded form
as a book in 1932. A key confusion runs through the book: on the one hand, Schmitt
sought to define ‘the political’ in purely formal terms, as characterized not by the

40
Freyer, Der Staat, p. 151.
41
Ibid.
42
On the concept of virtù in Machiavelli, see esp. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton,
1975), Chs. 6–7; and Jerrold Seigel, ‘Virtù in and since the Renaissance’, Dictionary of the History of
Ideas (New York, 1974); Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1981), pp. 53 ff.; Jeff A. Weintraub,
‘Virtue, Community and the Sociology of Liberty: The Notion of Republican Virtue and Its Impact on
Modern Western Social Thought’, Ph.D. diss., Berkeley, 1979, Ch. 3. The concept of liberty as popular
control which recent Anglo-American writers have emphasized in their exploration of Machiavelli’s
thought was virtually absent from Freyer’s discussion. Freyer read Machiavelli as most German thinkers
in the nineteenth century had read him, namely as a prophet of national liberation from foreign domination.
On the German reading of Machiavelli see Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson (1924).
43
Freyer, Der Staat, pp. 142–9.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
708 J.Z. MULLER

substance of human relations, but by their intensity. ‘The political’ so defined was
based upon the intensity of friend/enemy relations, of relations of association
(friendship) versus those of disassociation. Yet in fact the book was motivated by a
concern for a particular kind of relationship, the relationship of antagonism between
peoples, the willingness of members of Volk to kill and be killed for the sake of their
collective preservation of the Volk. The political was defined in contradistinction to
the economic and to the realm of economic needs (Gesellschaft).44 The political could
not be legitimated on economic grounds. It was ‘the most profound assertion of one’s
own form of collective existence against the negation of this form’. A key passage
in Schmitt’s essay maintained that ‘the fact that a Volk no longer has the power or
the will to maintain itself in the realm of the political does not mean the disappearance
of the political from the world. It means the disappearance of a weak Volk’.45
Now this statement, narrowly construed, does express the basic truth that the
population of a state in a condition of enmity can maintain its political independence
only if it is willing to kill and be killed. Given Schmitt’s understanding of the
international position of Weimar Germany, however, the statement takes on a more
bellicose significance. According to Schmitt, the demilitarization of the Rhineland
required by the Versailles Treaties, by leaving the Rhineland open to French invasion
made the fourteen million German residents of the Rhineland into ‘the victims of
possible war measures’ and ‘an atrocious sort of hostage’.46 The real effects of the
Versailles sanctions were to leave Germany vulnerable to imminent destruction by
its enemies.47 The ‘existential question’ facing the German Reich was whether it
would tolerate such a situation, which was tantamount to the end of its political
existence. Since modern technology was ‘making the earth smaller’, in the future
only large political units would survive. Either the German Volk would demonstrate
the political will to remain a world-power, Schmitt wrote, or ‘its flesh and blood’
would be consumed by its enemies.48 Elsewhere, Schmitt portrayed the League of
Nations as a pseudo-moral entity which uses economistic language to maintain
German subjection and the economic imperialism of the western powers.49
To appreciate the resonances of Schmitt’s conception of the political in its
historical context, one must thus consider that Schmitt conceived of the Versailles
system if not as the physical genocide of the Germans, then at least as their extinction
as a great power, i.e as a political Volk on the stage of world history, which for him
was almost as bad. The views of Freyer and Schmitt on these matters were quite
typical of the German political right and even centre, namely the refusal to accept

44
Carl Schmitt, ‘Der Begriff des Politischen’ (1927) in his Positionen und Begriffe, pp. 67–74, here p. 71.
45
Schmitt, ‘Begriff’, p. 72.
46
Schmitt, ‘Völkerrechtliche Probleme im Rheingebiet’ (1928), reprinted in Positionen, pp. 97–108, here
p. 101.
47
Ibid., p. 103.
48
Ibid., pp. 106–7.
49
Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien
(Berlin, 1963), pp. 77–8. This part of the text was published in 1932.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 709

the defeat of 1918, the ongoing belief in the need for Germany to remain a great
power in Europe and in the world at large, and the ongoing memory of the
‘Hunger-Blockade’ of the war years and the spectre of its return.50
Schmitt’s critique of parliamentarianism, then, must be understood against the
background of his assumptions about the relationship between politics, society and
foreign policy. Put succinctly, authentic politics was about the ability of the Volk to
assert itself in the international arena. A normal state was one in which relations of
enmity were directed outward, in which the ‘enemy’ was foreign.51 The deficiencies
of parliamentary politics in Weimar were of acute concern not because they threat-
ened civil disorder or economic growth, but because in the face of the Versailles
system the lack of a strong central government threatened the political existence of
the German Volk, which Schmitt often elided with collective physical existence as
such.52
The novelty of Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary democracy — expressed in a
number of his works, beginning with Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen
Parliamentarismus of 1923 — is often misjudged, and focuses on his contention
that the practice of contemporary politics negated arguments made for representative
government by nineteenth-century liberals. Those arguments, Schmitt claimed cor-
rectly but one-sidedly, had been based on the rationalist belief that open discussion
among elected representatives would lead parliamentarians to choose the public
good.53 Contemporary politics, on the other hand, was based upon disciplined,
organized parties which sought to appeal to voters through propaganda, which
appealed to economic self-interest and passions. Deputies, bound by party discipline,
did not make their decisions based on a rational weighing of the public good, and
decisions were therefore no longer made in parliament but ‘behind closed doors’ in
committees, between leaders of party factions.54
This critique was in fact hardly new, having been propounded for years by Maurras
and Sorel (both of whom influenced Schmitt). In fact, the critique of parliamentary
democracy was common coin among central European social theorists by the time
Schmitt propounded it; in 1920 (three years before Schmitt’s book) it was cited as

50
Andreas Hillgruber, ‘Unter dem Schatten von Versailles — Die aussenpolitische Belastung der
Weimarer Republik: Realität und Perzeption bei den Deutschen’, in Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer
Demokratie, ed. K.D. Erdmann and Hagen Schulze (Düsseldorf, 1980), pp. 54–5. It is worth recalling
that Schmitt served in a legal capacity in the German army at a time when a German empire in the east
seemed a possibility; in 1918 he began work on a constitution for Lithuania, which would have formed
part of that empire. See, Tommissen, ‘Bausteine’, p. 76.
51
Carl Schmitt, Hugo Preuss: sein Staatsbegriff und seine Stellung in der deutschen Staatslehre
(Tübingen, 1930), p. 26, n1.
52
See for example, in Carl Schmitt, ‘Das Problem der innenpolitischen Neutralität des Staates’ (April
1930), reprinted in Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze, pp. 41–62, here pp. 56–8.
53
Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985), pp. 34–5. This translation includes a useful introduction by Ellen Kennedy, which helps to place
Schmitt’s work in the context of legal debates in Weimar Germany.
54
Ibid., pp. 5–8, 49–50.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
710 J.Z. MULLER

common wisdom by Joseph Schumpeter in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und

Sozialpolitik, the most prestigious journal of social science in German-speaking
Europe.55 What was peculiar about Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary democracy
was first that it proceeded by measuring contemporary parliamentary practice by the
standards of nineteenth-century liberalism, for which Schmitt had no high regard in
the first place.56 What was most significant about his analysis was his emphasis on
the conflict between liberalism and democracy, his definition of democracy, and the
contemporary political ramifications of his analysis.
Schmitt insisted that he was a ‘democrat’, opposed to the superannuated ‘liberal-
ism’ of the nineteenth century. But both his definition of democracy and his
conception of appropriate means for its expression were peculiar. Democracy he
defined as ‘the identity of those who govern with those who are governed’.57 Its key
value was not numerical equality (since it did not regard those who were outside the
polity as equal), but equality in the sense of shared substance, or what Schmitt called
‘homogeneity’. In the modern period, this homogeneity took the form of membership
in a particular nation, in national homogeneity. ‘A democracy demonstrates its
political power by knowing how to refuse or keep at bay something foreign that
threatens its homogeneity’.58 In the abstract, there is much to be said for this
definition: in context and in practice, it must be remembered that Schmitt believed
and repeatedly asserted that the Versailles system prevented Germany from possess-
ing just this sort of political power.
Democracy, for Schmitt, was a political form, based upon the shared sense of
belonging together. Real democracy, as Schmitt understood it, did away with the
‘disintegrating’ pursuit of private interest which were encouraged by competitive
elections. By Schmitt’s reckoning, the Italian Fascist election of 1928 in which the
voter could choose for or against a single list of candidates was more democratic,
since it allowed the ‘unity of the Volk’ to express itself in the electoral process.59
Time and again Schmitt claimed that the liberal institution of the secret ballot was
anti-democratic, since it allowed and encouraged the individual to express his private
interest, while dictatorship and caesarism allowed for the ‘immediate expression of
the democratic substance and power’ of the Volk.60

55
Joseph Schumpeter, ‘Sozialistische Möglichkeiten von heute’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik, Vol. 48 (1920–1), pp. 305–60, here pp. 328–31.
56
As noted by Maschke, ‘Drei Motive’, p. 63.
57
Carl Schmitt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Berlin, 2nd edn., 1926),
p. 20. I have departed slightly from the translation by Ellen Kennedy on p. 14 of the English edition.
58
Schmitt, Crisis, p. 9.
59
Carl Schmitt, ‘Wesen und Werden des fascistischen Staates’, Schmollers Jahrbuch, Vol. 53, no. 1
(1929), pp. 107–13, here p. 109.
60
Schmitt, Geistesgeschichtliche Lage, pp. 22–3, 50; Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Munich, 1928),
pp. 244–6, though elsewhere in his Verfassungslehre — one of the more scholarly and balanced of
Schmitt’s works — he could also make the case for parties as the necessary representatives of ‘public
opinion’ in a democracy.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 711

The analysis and critique of Weimar democracy, in the writings of both Freyer
and Schmitt, drew upon Rousseau’s recasting of the civic republican tradition in
terms of the distinction between citoyen and bourgeois, which both Freyer and
Schmitt correlated with the Hegelian distinction between state and society. Both
regarded the state as the realm of the political, in which the key public interest was
the expansion of German power, while society was the private realm of production
and consumption. Their analysis of Weimar politics owed much to a Hegelian
tradition which criticized contemporary politics for the encroachment of the eco-
nomic interests of civil society upon the state, a tradition which reached back to
Lorenz von Stein and to Marx.61
In 1931, Schmitt published The Protector of the Constitution, a book in which he
brought together a series of arguments which he had made in essay form during the
previous three years. The Weimar state, he argued, had become subordinated to the
pluralistic social interests of civil society, thus robbing it of its unity and sover-
eignty.62 This reflected what Schmitt took to be a false understanding of pluralism:
legitimate pluralism existed not in the domination of the state by competing socio-
economic interest groups, but in the competition among the cultures of the Völker,
each embodied in its own state.63 The contemporary state was ‘neo-feudal’: it
reflected the pluralistic interests of civil society as represented in parliamentary
parties.64 As a consequence, Schmitt wrote, the state was becoming a ‘total state’,
forced by politically organized social interests to intervene in ever-more areas of
society. Here the term ‘total state’ had an opprobrious connotation.65 It was inevitable
that the state would have a large role in the economy, Schmitt agreed, yet the Weimar
state was incapable of exercising the legislative authority demanded by this new
reality, because parliament now served to divide the state’s power among politically
organized social interests.66
In Schmitt’s writings of the late 1920s and early 1930s his earlier criticism of the
contemporary state on moral and political grounds (in the sense of its inability to
rally the Volk for a more activist foreign policy) gave way to an emphasis on the
absolute paralysis of decision-making in the face of a splintered party system which
reflected so wide a divergence of economic, religious and political interests. Writing
in the final weeks before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Schmitt contrasted the
contemporary weak, indecisive total state ‘in the purely quantitative sense’, to the
ideal of the total state ‘in the qualitative sense’:

61
Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, p. 253.
62
Carl Schmitt, ‘Staatsethik und Pluralistischer Staat’, Kantstudien, Vol. 35 (1930), pp. 28–42, here
pp. 28–31; and Carl Schmitt, Der Hüter der Verfassung (Berlin, 1931), pp. 71–88.
63
Schmitt, ‘Staatsethik’, pp. 37–40.
64
Schmitt, Hugo Preuss, p. 21; and Schmitt, Hüter, pp. 84–8.
65
Carl Schmitt, ‘Die Wendung zum totalen Staat’, Europäische Revue (April, 1931), pp. 241–50, here
pp. 242–3, and Schmitt, Hüter, pp. 78–88.
66
Schmitt, ‘Wendung’, p. 247; and Schmitt, Hüter, pp. 108 ff.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
712 J.Z. MULLER

The total state in this sense is an especially strong state. It is total in the sense
of its quality and of its energy, of what the fascist state calls the ‘stato
totalitario’, by which it means primarily that the new means of power belong
exclusively to the state and serve the purpose of augmenting its power. Such
a state allows no forces to arise within it which might be inimical to it, limit it,
or fragment it. It does not think of surrendering the new means of power to its
enemies and destroyers and allowing its power to be undermined by categories
such as liberalism, ‘Rechtsstaat’, or whatever. Such a state can distinguish
friend from foe.67
The institutional locus of this strong state was to be the Reich’s president, ruling
through the bureaucracy, with the support of the army, and legitimated in some
never-clearly-defined sense through acclamation.68 This was the intellectual basis of
Schmitt’s political role as a member of the circle around General Kurt von Schleicher.
In an essay published in late 1929, Carl Schmitt wrote that beneath the facade of
contemporary political exhaustion a new élite was forming which, relinquishing the
security of the status quo, would appear in the form of a return to basic principles.
From the perspective of the existing status quo, this regenerative élite would appear
‘as a cultural or social nothing’.69 Early in 1931, Freyer published Revolution von
rechts, which was devoted to an analysis of what he too, in a deliberate paraphrase
of Abbé Sièyes’, contended was ‘nothing’ in the political order of the present, but
would become ‘everything’ in the new political order. What lay between Schmitt’s
cryptic suggestion of late 1929 and Freyer’s political pamphlet were of course the
elections of September 1930, in which the National Socialists emerged as a major
electoral force. Though never mentioned explicitly, it was the potential transforma-
tion of German politics represented by this movement which was the pamphlet’s
central point of reference.
For Freyer the movement represented the rising forces of the twentieth century
against the ossified forces of the nineteenth; and of the politicized Volk, finally ready
to reject a social and political order based upon the pursuit of self-interest. ‘The
nineteenth century’, in Freyer’s usage, was not a chronological designation but
referred instead to the mind-set appropriate to capitalist, industrial society. Individual
and collective action in industrial society, according to Freyer, was based on
‘interest’, the pursuit of individual or group self-advantage.70 The natural social units
of industrial society were therefore classes, groups organized for the pursuit of
collective interests. Industrial society was thus in a permanent state of revolution
from below, of chronic or acute class conflict.71

67
Carl Schmitt, ‘Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staats in Deutschland’, Europäische Revue (February
1933), reprinted in Carl Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze, pp. 359–65, here p. 361.
68
Schmitt, Hüter, pp. 108–59; ‘Weiterentwicklung’, p. 365.
69
Schmitt, ‘Das Zeitalter’, p. 131.
70
Hans Freyer, Revolution von rechts (Jena, l93l), pp. l9, 34, 38.
71
Ibid., pp. 9, l5.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 713

In historical materialism, Freyer saw the mode of thought most appropriate to

industrial society, and he saw the Marxist movement as the most significant political
phenomenon of ‘the nineteenth century’ considered in both its chronological and
cultural sense. With its recognition of the dominant role of economic interests in
modern society, Marxism made explicit the real dynamics of industrial society in
the nineteenth century.72
In Revolution von rechts, Freyer first analysed what he called ‘The Self-
Liquidation of the Nineteenth Century’. Freyer asserted that the socialist movement
of the working class — the embodiment of the hope for a revolution of the left which
would transcend industrial society — had been definitively and irrevocably absorbed
into capitalist, industrial society. In response to the successful political organization
of the proletariat, politics had been transformed into a struggle over material welfare:
through the development of governmentally enacted social provisions, industrial
society had moved from the era of laissez-faire to the new era of industrial society
in its socially expanded form. In this new era the material condition of the proletariat
was ameliorated sufficiently to lift it above the absolute misery which Marx — quite
rightly in Freyer’s estimation — had deemed necessary for socialist revolution to
occur. Thus, Freyer wrote, the revisionist socialists of the turn of the century had
merely been speaking the truth about what their movement had become, a non-
revolutionary movement which sought an expansion of rights and benefits within
industrial society.73 The essential elements of capitalism had remained intact.74
Freyer’s emphasis then was on the unexpectedly successful capacity of welfare-
state capitalism to co-opt its opposition and hence diffuse revolutionary challenges.
It was this disappearance of realistic hopes for a revolution from the left which Freyer
dubbed ‘the self-liquidation of the nineteenth century’.
Much of Revolution von rechts was devoted to a dissection of the role of the state
in industrial society. Echoing Carl Schmitt, Freyer claimed that the state had become
nothing but the broker between organized social interests.75 The rise of the socialist
movement and its integration into industrial society through government social
policy (Sozialpolitik) had made the state itself into the battleground of organized
social and economic interests. Parliamentary democracy meant nothing more — or
less — than the surrender of the state to the umbrella organizations of interest
groups.76 Such a state, Freyer wrote, lacked the essential attributes of a real state,
namely sovereign power over industrial society, a ‘binding collective conscious-
ness’, and continuity of purpose. ‘It is the sum of all that is unpolitical’, he
concluded.77
Since, in Freyer’s view, industrial society treated man as nothing but a producer
and consumer, it had failed to provide the individual with a sense of belonging to a
larger whole. It was this pent-up discontent with the inability of industrial society to

72 75
Ibid., p. l9. Ibid., pp. 23, 58–60.
73 76
Ibid., pp. 26–8, 33. Ibid., pp. 39, 59–60.
74 77
Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 60.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
714 J.Z. MULLER

provide a higher meaning or collective purpose to its members which Freyer saw as
the real source of the new revolution of the right.78
The Volk in Revolution von rechts was used in the neo-Machiavellian sense, to
characterize all those who refused to define themselves in terms of their social class
and economic self-interest. The source of Freyer’s enthusiasm for the gathering
momentum of National Socialism is not difficult to discover. He saw in it a mass
embodiment of that cultural critique of modernity which had been developed by
earlier generations of German social theorists and which lay at the heart of his own
work.79 He devoted the final chapter of Revolution von rechts to an invocation of the
new order which the revolution would create. The new state was to be ‘freed’ from
the egoistical demands of industrial society in order to engage in real history, namely
the integration of the Volk for the sake of collective self-assertion and the acquisition
of temporal power.80 This was the higher collective purpose to which all were to be
subordinated. The capitalist economy with its logic of production for profit was to
be replaced by state socialism (Staatssozialismus), in which production would occur
for the sake of collective historical self-assertion.81 The new state would continue
and expand what Freyer regarded as the two greatest accomplishments of industrial
society — namely the development of technology and of governmental social policy
(Sozialpolitik). Yet the significance of each would be transformed. Technological
modes of thought would now be clearly subordinated to those of politics.82 Govern-
ment social measures would continue not because of the struggles of social groups
acting according to egoistic self-interest, but by virtue of a truly collective ethos
which would pervade the new state.83 The role of the state would be one of ongoing
intervention in order to shape the social order.84 The new state brought about by the
revolution from the right would thus combine technology and social organization
with the ‘endlessly deep roots’ of the Volk.85 It would solve the problem to which
Freyer’s work had been devoted: the reconciliation of modern technology with a
sense of collective identity and individual meaning rooted in the particularist past.
Freyer saw in the revolution from the right a real, mass political embodiment of his
own Kulturkritik and the possibility, at least, of realizing the total state which he had
long advocated.
That is how the revolution from the right looked to Hans Freyer in theory. The
practice would look rather different.86
Carl Schmitt and Hans Freyer were both men of great intelligence and wide
learning. Like other moral diagnosticians whose radical critiques have helped to
delegitimate past liberal-capitalist democracies, they stressed the cost of such
societies with little awareness of their benefits; they judged such societies wanting
by measuring them against romanticized models from the past, while remaining so
78
Ibid., pp. 47–9.
79 83
Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., pp. 67–70.
80 84
Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 70.
81 85
Ibid., pp. 66–7. Ibid., p. 72.
82 86
Ibid., p. 66. See Muller, Other God, Chs. 7–8.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
 SCHMITT, FREYER AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 715

vague about future alternatives that it became impossible to weigh the costs and
benefits of the existent against their proposed alternative. The danger from such
critics is that their unbalanced assessment may attract them to a political cure that is
worse than the disease itself. That is what happened to Hans Freyer and Carl Schmitt,
and to countless other members of the German educated classes who, influenced by
such critiques, were lured towards another god that was to fail.

Jerry Z. Muller CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010

For personal use only -- not for reproduction