Abstract

ExcerptCarl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy is a work of conceptual clarification. The thesis of the book is that democracy and parliamentarism must be differentiated rather than confused and conflated. In the nineteenth century, it may have seemed like a democratic system must have a parliament, but Schmitt contends that democracy and parliamentarism embody distinct and separable principles: “democracy can exist without... parliamentarism and parliamentarism without democracy.”1 Since popular sovereignty and democracy are the most powerful political ideas of the modern western European cultural region—Schmitt speaks of the “victory of democracy”2—this disconnection is a strike against parliamentarism; Schmitt’s definitional work seeks to reduce the belief in the necessity and prestige of parliamentary politics. Writing in the early 1920s, Schmitt also suggests that the parliamentary tradition has lost much of its persuasive force for the contemporary public. From his vantage point, new and vigorous political movements represented by Marxist communism and Italian fascism reject any inclusion into the framework of a parliamentary debate; there is no cause, then, for “parliamentary optimism.”3 The theorists and leaders of the new, uncompromising ideological fronts show no interest in a resumption of an ordered interchange of opinions and policy ideas, which means that the age of discussion will not be sustained or renewed. On this note, Schmitt ends the book.