Otto Kirchheimer Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Otto Kirchheimer (1905–1965) is considered one of the most important constitutional theorists of the twentieth century. He received his doctorate from the University of Bonn where he was a student of political theor ist Carl Schmitt. Kirchheimer joined the Socialist Party of Germany and from 1930 to 1933, while employed as a professor of political science, he edited the party magazine Society. Dur ing the Weimar Republic, in 1930, he published a groundbreaking study of the Weimar constitution entitled Weimar and Then What? Formation and the Presence of the Weimar Constitution. In 1932, he published a seminal article on fascism entitled “Legality and Legitimacy” in the socialist journal The Company.

After the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1932, Kirchheimer became an outcast both as a Jew and as a socialist. He spent the next seven years in Paris at the French office of the International Institute of Social Research. Here he worked with George Rusches on Punishment and Social Structure, which was published in 1939. Kirchheimer emigrated to the United States in 1937 but continued his work for the institute, both as a research assistant and as a lecturer for its Columbia University program. In 1943 he moved to Washington D.C., working from 1944 to 1952 in the Research and Analysis Branch of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and from 1952 to 1956 he worked for the U.S. State Department. Kirchheimer was also a visiting professor of sociology at Wellesley College in 1943, a lecturer at the American University from 1951 to 1952 and a lecturer at Howard University from 1952 to 1954. In 1954, he joined the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research, and he was professor of political science at Columbia University from 1961 to 1965.

Kirchheimer published only one other major book in his lifetime, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedures for Political Ends (1961). His collected essays were published in Politics, Law and Social Change (1969). Never engaging in system building, his great achievement was to uncover the basic mechanisms of political order and disorder. He had an extraordinary ability to sort through massive quantities of data and derive significant and original insights. His work had a central theme of political tension resulting from legal order and economic power. Democratic consensus, Kirchheimer held, was precluded by class struggles, as Weimar proved.

Kirchheimer shifted his focus to fascism after the Nazis took power in Germany. He became an opponent of the Frankfurt school and its economic theories, believing that under the Third Reich the state had become a monopoly that suppressed all opposition. After World War II (1939–1945), Kirchheimer turned his attention to political justice and the role of political parties in postwar development. He formulated the concept of catch-all parties, which would displace confessional parties. Catch-all parties—more commonly known in the twenty-first century as big tent parties—do not insist on ideological conformity, choosing instead to include individuals who embrace differing points of view. In his work on political justice, Kirchheimer condemned the use of the court system to exclude certain political parties on the basis of their ideology. His concept of the catch-all party was part of his more comprehensive theory of party transformation. It characterized opposition parties as the principal check against the unbridled growth of an authoritarian state.

Kirchheimer’s other works include Boundaries of Expropriation (1930), The Government of Eastern Germany (1950), and Politics and the Constitution (1964). Three collections of his essays were published posthumously: Political Domination (1967), Functions of the State and Constitution (1972), and From the Weimar Republic to Fascism (1976).

Bibliography:

Luthardt,Wolfgang, and Alfrons Sollner. State, Constitution, Sovereignty, Pluralism: Essays in Memory of Otto Kirchheimer. Opladen, Ger.:Westdt. Verlag, 1989.
Shell, Frank. Between Commitment and Skepticism: A Study of the Writings of Otto Kirchheimer. Baden-Baden: German University Press, 2006.
Stiefel, Ernst C., and Frank Mecklenburg. German Jurists in Exile in America 1933–1950. Tuebingen, Ger.: Mohr, 1991.

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