Debating Parliamentarism and Partisanship in Weimar: Parliamentary Representation and Mass Parties in the Political Theory of Carl Schmitt and Gerhard Leibholz

In early twentieth-century Europe, the crisis of both the intellectual and political project of liberalism vis-à-vis the rise of mass politics led to a critical reassessment of the contribution parties and partisanship could eventually bring to parliamentary democracy. In particular, in the fragile context of Weimar, an increasing number of scholars echoed Wilhelmine prejudices against representative government and came to juxtapose the worlds of liberalism and democracy at the political, institutional and intellectual level. This, exactly, is the moment of the history of debates over liberal parliamentarism that this paper investigates through a comparative analysis of the arguments advanced by two prominent political and legal theorists of Weimar: Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and his student Gerhard Leibholz (1901-1982). I shall argue that, for both of them, the crisis of parliamentary government was the consequence of a major transformation in the metaphysics of nineteenth-century liberalism: the dismissal of the ideal of “government by discussion” and the subsequent transformation of Parliament into the locus of bargaining among social interests and partisan views, rather than of the critical exchange of ideas and arguments pro et contra. However, unlike Schmitt, Leibholz’s life-long confrontation with the novelties of mass democracy significantly evolved over time. While throughout the 1920s and 1930s the latter maintained a critical attitude towards the ambiguous role of parties within democratic institutions, in the aftermath of World War II, under the influence of Anglo-American liberalism and Schumpeterian trends, he accepted the mediation of parties as a crucial contribution to the (daily re)making of parliamentary democracy. Nonetheless, similarly to Kelsen, Leibholz suggested a number of institutional reforms specifically meant to strengthen the democratic accountability of representative actors such as parties and deputies within the parliamentary arena, in order to positively combine the idea(l)s of nineteenth-century liberalism with the reality of twentieth-century democracy.