Leviathans unbound: irrationalist political thought in interwar United States and Germany

ABSTRACT

This comparative ideological history considers why interwar America produced less prominent thought threatening parliamentarism and the rule of law than Germany. Despite different traditions, thinkers in Progressive Era America and Weimar Germany shared two commitments. Both scorned political parties and yearned for national unity. Both were also hostile to the restraints of legal formalism. Both efforts to deploy unbounded states to realize unity failed, but differently. Progressivism’s eclipse by World War I tempered confidence in democratic fulfilment and experts’ moral leadership. By contrast, appeals in post-war Weimar to national unity and the reliance on state authority – both integral to the search for constitutional legitimacy – radicalized amidst crisis thinking. Exemplary thinkers Carl Schmitt and Thurman Arnold agreed that crisis demanded transformative action based on unifying myths and administrations liberated from legal rationalism. Anti-liberal Schmitt aimed to destroy political heterogeneity and unshackle decree from statutory legality. Writing after Progressivism’s disillusionment, the New Dealer Arnold sought to use myth to conceal endemic plurality and employ law’s own irrationality to deliver to ‘technicians’ the discretion necessary for haphazard economic experimentation. Difference in timing helped make similar commitments develop differently in interaction with crisis thinking, and helps explain Arnold’s irrationalist defence of liberal democracy.