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Intellectual History of the Weimar

Republic Recent Research
David L. Marshall

Kettering University , Flint, Michigan

Published online: 06 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: David L. Marshall (2010) Intellectual History of the Weimar Republic Recent
Research, Intellectual History Review, 20:4, 503-517, DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2010.525915
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Intellectual History Review 20(4) 2010: 503517

LITERATURE SURVEY
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE WEIMAR
REPUBLIC RECENT RESEARCH

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David L. Marshall

Anthony McElligott (ed.), Weimar Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, translated by Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity,
2009).
Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt,
and Hannah Arendt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral
Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of Her Dissertation on Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI and
Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2008).
Josef Kopperschmidt (ed.), Heidegger ber Rhetorik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009).
Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008).
Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, translated by Sophie Hawkes
(New York: Zone, 2004).
Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2009).
A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
0DavidMarshall
dlmarshall@gmail.com
000002010
Taylor
Intellectual
10.1080/17496977.2010.525915
RIHR_A_525915.sgm
1749-6977
Original
International
42010
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and
Article
(print)/1749-6985
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History
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for Intellectual
(online)History

If it is registered at all (that is, if ones attention is drawn to it), the present is experienced as
something like a pressure between particular aspects of the past that are felt to be pertinent and
an array of possible futures, futures that range from the immediate and the almost certain to
those merely contemplated and almost impossible. One of the defining characteristics of the
Weimar Republic was the inescapability of this kind of pressure between pasts and futures.
Junctures pressed in and radical possibilities opened up and passed away with a speed and
frequency that could only inadequately be described as alarming. After the last-ditch successes
of the 1917 offensive, catastrophic defeat followed for Germany in 1918, and civilian authorities were thrust forward as the agents of surrender. Soldiers and Workers councils, Rte impossible to perceive if not through the suddenly victorious Russian soviets, sprang up. Within
hours of each other, Liebknecht and Schneiderman declared the existence of rival republics.
The streets of Berlin and Munich became the battlegrounds of the Left and the Right; a fractious, unconsolidated Centre, playing a dangerous game, used the energies and force of both to
Intellectual History Review
ISSN 1749-6977 print/ISSN 1749-6985 online
2010 International Society for Intellectual History
http://www.informaworld.com/journals
DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2010.525915

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D. L. MARSHALL

win a constitutional moment. That moment dilated into debate Preuss, Weber and a host of
others its interlocutors and then coalesced into a document that itself was fixed only on the
page, for its various articles brought into being a kaleidoscope of long-term, shifting possibilities. All of this in less than a year.
Little wonder, then, that the writers and thinkers of Weimar Germany were so often preoccupied with how to grapple with this space of the present. For them, this present was both a vice
and a vacuum: not only the increased pressure of forces and events building up but also the
suddenly decreased pressure of radically new openings. Thus, Thomas Mann spoke in 1918 of
the magnitude, the weight and the limitlessness of the times while casting his Betrachtungen,
his anything but detached Reflections, into a conservative statement likely to further democratic
progress.1 Friedrich Meinecke, in his conversation of autumn 1919, inquired into the nature of
the rupture between Kaiserreich and Republik.2 Rosa Luxemburg argued for a historical and
political theory of a spontaneity that might be inserted into this rupture.3 Carl Schmitt
transformed his prewar exposition of legal judgement into a theory of decisionism, where the
power to ignore a rule, and thereby break with tradition, became the mark of sovereignty.4 Walter
Benjamin and Ernst Bloch explored the politicaltheological dimensions of messianism, while
Paul Tillich devoted his energies to the concept of Kairos, the moment of crisis, decision,
advent.5 Martin Heidegger developed an analytic of historicity forged out of the concepts of
possibility, Mglichkeit, and temporal manifold.6

1 T. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, translated by W. D. Morris (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 6. Manns
self-consciously paradoxical assertion of the progressive implications of his conservative statement connoted two fundamental Weimar ironies namely, the dialectical proximity of left-wing and right-wing arguments and the Frankensteins
monster of romantic technology fetish. What was so striking in the case of Carl Schmitt (who was highly influential at
both ends of the political spectrum before 1933) has been observed more generally too, in, for example, Intellektuellendiskurse in der Weimarer Republik: Zur politischen Kultur eine Gemengelage, edited by M. Gangl and G. Raulet
(Frankfurt: Campus, 1994), 20. Likewise, Jeffrey Herfs Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in
Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) was an attempt to understand the
compossibility of atavism and hypermodernism.
2 F. Meinecke, Ein Gesprche aus dem Herbste 1919, in Nach der Revolution: Geschichtliche Betrachtungen ber
unsere Lage (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1919). Thus, in his Deutscher Historismus und der bergang zur
Parlamentarischen Demokratie: Untersuchungen zu den Politischen Gedanken von Meinecke, Troeltsch, Max Weber
(Lbeck: Matthiesen, 1964), Gustav Schmidt depicted Meinecke as one of a number of German thinkers who had
been deeply invested in a form of historicism that prized continuity of development and yet sought to identify ways in
which the break of 1918/19 could be sutured (37). Robert A. Pois agreed that this had been Meineckes intellectual
task, but concluded that Meineckes eventual turning [away from nationalism] towards the Goethean cosmopolitanism he had once rejected indicated either an avoidance of, or an inability to comprehend, the basic issue of twentiethcentury German history: the politicization, in terms of mass politics, of certain aspects of German Kultur (R. A. Pois,
Friedrich Meinecke and German Politics in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1972), 2).
3 R. Luxemburg, Schriften zur Theorie der Spontaneitt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970).
4 C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souvernitt (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1922).
5 E. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918); W. Benjamin, Theologisch-politisches Fragment, in
Gesammelte Schriften, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 19721989),
vol. 2, 2034; Kairos: Zur Geisteslage und Geisteswendung, edited by P. Tillich (Darmstadt: Reichl, 1926).
6
M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Halle: Niemeyer, 1927). With regard to the significance of temporal manifold for Heidegger, see, in particular, W. D. Blattner, Heideggers Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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The historians who have written about the fourteen short, dense years of the Weimar Republic
have been as conscious of this issue of options and decisions as those who lived them.7 However,
a shift in Weimar historiography has recently become palpable, even de rigueur. Whereas it was
once common, in the wake of the Second World War, to speak of the sense in which Weimar was
fated to failure, it has now become important to stress the role of chance, contingency and
openness in the various chapters of Weimar history. Thus, in his introduction to the new Weimar
component of the Shorter Oxford History of Germany, Anthony McElligott wishes to invert the
trope of the doomed republic by arguing at once that it is a wonder that the Weimar Republic,
besieged from the outset by hostile forces, should have lasted for as long as it did.8 In this
redescription, fourteen years was an achievement not a failure, and the aim is to challenge the
logic of the apparent moral imperative to narrate the history of Weimar from the vantage point
of 1933, thereby reasserting the standard historical injunction that the past ought not to be read
backwards. McElligott also directly challenges the longstanding topos that Weimar was a
republic without republicans. Three quarters of the electorate voted for republican parties on
19 January 1919; and even in 1932, at the height of the electoral crisis, a third of the electorate
still effectively stood behind the Republic.9 It may be that, like its inverse, a preference for
contingency rather than necessity is a metahistorical choice that can structure narratives but not
be demonstrated by them. If so, one might still support McElligotts commitment on political
theoretical grounds, for among the opposites of a morose determinism is not only blithe hopefulness but also the perspicacious delineation of particular possibilities pertaining to particular
difficulties.
McElligotts emphasis on contingency has its precedents. As he indicates, he is following
Detlev Peukerts classic work on Weimar as the crisis of classical modernity, which was
originally published in German in 1987 and remains the default English-language textbook.10
Rejecting the necessity of a Sonderweg thesis to characterize German historicity, Peukert stressed
what amounted to the modal category of Weimar instability, which he saw as the result of rapid
and multiform modernization. Periods of instability were to be thought of as simply those periods

7 Anson

Rabinbachs In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997) was, of course, focused on books written in the direct aftershock
of the event that attempted to translate that experience into a philosophical language (2). Influenced in part by Reinhart
Kosellecks Vergangene Zukunft (which itself linked its consciousness of the simultaneity of past, present, and future in
experience to Heideggers Sein und Zeit and, in turn, the rhetorical tradition as it surfaced in Augustines Confessions),
historians such as Rdiger Graf have been interested in conceptions of the future in Weimar, and indeed that work is
embedded in broader investigations into interwar utopianism. See R. Graf, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen
und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland, 19181933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008) as well as Utopie und politische
Herrschaft im Europa der Zwischenkriegzeit, edited by W. Hardtwig (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003).
8 Weimar Germany, edited by A. McElligott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1.
9 McElligott, Weimar Germany, 29. There have been a number of recent works that challenge the commonplace that
Weimar went undefended. Thus, in Politische Philosophie in der Weimarer Republik: Staatsverstndnis zwischen
Fhrerdemokratie und Brokratischem Sozialismus (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1989), Norbert J. Schrgers argued that
criticisms of the Republic could also be understood as attempts to differentiate what in Weimar was deemed worth
fighting for and what was not (275). Similarly, in Weimar Die Wehrlose Republik? Verfassungsschutzrecht und
Verfassungsschutz in der Weimarer Republik (Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991), Christoph Gusy took issue with the notion
that the republican constitution had no defenders (370). Then, in Demokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik
(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000), Gusy and his collaborators responded to Sontheimers classic text by arguing that, in fact,
Weimar made a significant contribution to the re-theorization of democracy for diverse, non-homogeneous populations
(596). Again, Andreas Wirsching, Jrgen Eder et al. go far beyond the oft-cited commonplaces in order to present a much
more complicated impression in Vernunftrepublikanismus in der Weimarer Republik: Politik, Literatur, Wissenschaft
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008).
10 McElligott, Weimar Germany, 7.

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in which a greater number of more radical developments became real possibilities.11 Such
sensitivity to the modalities of possibility and necessity is likewise conspicuous in Fritz Sterns
recent Five Germanys I Have Known, in which he contends that decades of study and experience
have persuaded me that the German roads to perdition, including National Socialism, were
neither accidental nor inevitable. In Stern more than in McElligott, one should understand, this
is a polemic: to Stern all the tomes and slogans about Germanys inevitable path from Luther
to Hitler seemed puerile and wrongheaded.12 In a different key, but with similar concerns,
Eberhard Kolb has also struck a balance between the two modal extremes, arguing that even to
the very last there was room for alternative methods and decisions, though the choice became
steadily narrower.13
Such capacities to perceive not merely choices and alternatives but also irony, paradox and
dialectic are essential skills for the historian, for they are all capacities to grapple with extreme
or unexpected forms of compossibility that particular kind of possibility that asserts the compatibility of two or more phenomena. These, indeed, are precisely the skills both tactful and forthright that are so conspicuous in Joachim Radkaus much praised biography of Max Weber. To
the image of Weber the cool sociologist, we now have counterposed the image of Weber the
masochist. The extraordinarily tactful achievement of Radkaus biography consists in its ability
not only to inform readers of the letters to Else Jaff-Richthofen that shed new light on Webers
sexuality, but also to use these revelations in order to interpret Webers writings on the sociology
of power, and yet to do both of these things without dismissing the seriousness of Webers
thought or writing the biography in the manner of an expos. Nowhere is this capacity to
portray such doubleness so precise as in Radkaus depiction of a scene related by Weber to JaffRichthofen in a letter dated 15 January 1919:
once at a lecture, when he was again attacking the revolutionaries and chairs were flying across the
room, he relished the situation by thinking of the "dark gleaming eyes" of Else, whose assaults he also
allowed to wash over him.14

The superimposition of sexuality upon politics is neither prurient nor salacious, because neither
sexuality nor politics is occluded here and both gloss each other. The slave has a certain power
over the master, and the speaker has a special status for the crowd he has incensed.
Radkau contends that there is a connection to be made between Webers characterization of
scenes such as this and his account of charismatic rule. Circumventing the dispute over whether
charisma is primarily a characteristic of the leader or the follower, Radkau argues that, for Weber,
not only the sensual pleasure of domination, but also the pleasure of obeying and being
dominated is part of the magic of power.15 Nor is Radkau entirely convinced that there is a clear
11 D.

J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, translated by R. Deveson (New York: Hill
& Wang, 1993), 281. Thus, what undermined the Republic was not, primarily, the resistance to modernization put up by
the old elites who wanted to cling to traditional attitudes and practices: it was the peculiarly crisis-prone nature of the
process of modernization itself (245).
12 F. Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 4, 165.
13 E. Kolb, The Weimar Republic, translated by P. S. Falla and R. J. Park (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 68. To be sure,
there are dangers involved in alternating a historiography of tragedy with one of promise (as, perhaps, Eric Weitzs recent
work demonstrates); but replacing the presumption of necessity with an awareness of possibility generates historiographic
sophistication too; in the work of Hans Mommsen, this sophistication takes the form of an eye for irony. See E. Weitz,
Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) and H. Mommsen, The Rise
and Fall of Weimar Democracy, translated by E. Forster and L. E. Jones (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996).
14 J. Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, translated by P. Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 524.
15 Radkau, Weber, 397, 524.

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and unhindered line of development from Webers inheritance of charisma from Sohms
depiction of its relevance for early Christian communities to his application of that word to the
political situation of Germany after the war. As is well known, Webers predilection for a
Caesarian democracy, with a directly elected and powerful presidential figure, found expression
in the Weimar Constitution of 1919; but Radkau argues that the reinvention of charisma in the
political arena required an overcoming of the debt to Sohm.16 There are many issues to be
explored here. As , charisma had a deeper than Christian root in the ancient world, and it
features in the emotional matrix described by Aristotles Rhetoric.17 Webers experience of
charisma was not only, perhaps, sexual but also oratorical, for in the chaos of the German
Revolution of 1918/19 he saw the possibility of a future for himself in politics as a demagogue.18
Indeed, Radkau accounts for Weber effectiveness as a speaker by describing him as a lateral
thinker who never fitted peoples preconceptions, who possessed an unusual capacity to work
himself up into a rage against both the right and the left.19 The image, Webers own fantasy in
part, is that of the speaker as the unmoved centre in a maelstrom of emotion. Just so, Webers
ideal politician was to possess passion, a sense of responsibility and judgement, where judgement
Augenma, sense of proportion, a visual sizing up was, in Webers words, the ability to maintain ones inner composure and calm while being receptive to realities.20 Grace was thus glossed
as balance, as an equidistance from pursuant possibilities until the moment of decision.
Radkaus ability to situate his detailed reading of Webers life in the context of what he has
previously described as an age of nervousness in Germany between Bismarck and Hitler has the
effect of making a number of other attempts to think about Webers significance appear thin by
comparison.21 The desire, for example, to overturn Wolfgang Mommsens revisionist 1959 reading of Weber as a representative of the illiberal nationalism of Wilhelmine Germany in Sung Ho
Kims Max Webers Politics of Civil Society appears to bring with it the need to select those parts
of Webers legacy that can be fashioned into a usable one might say salvageable political
theory.22 In Kims reading, with its emphasis on the influence of Tocquevillean accounts of
participatory associations and the Protestant reconciliation of economic rationality and an ethic
of conviction, Webers work begins to look like an anticipation of the political theory of Hannah
Arendt. Such a desire to claim Weber in the name of subsequent initiatives is likewise evident in
Nasser Behnegars Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics. It represents
Webers problem the conundrum of a modernity that can rationally assess the effectiveness of
certain means for particular ends but cannot convincingly articulate its commitment to one end
over the other as the problem that Strauss sought to address.23
16 Radkau,

Weber, 395.
Rhetoric, 1585a16.
18 Radkau, Weber, 513.
19 Radkau, Weber, 513.
20 M. Weber, Political Writings, edited by P. Lassman and R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
352, cit. Radkau, Weber, 515.
21 For further contextualization of the development of sociology at Heidelberg after Webers death, see also R. Blomert,
Intellektuelle im Aufbruch: Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber, Norbert Elias und die Heidelberger Sozialwissenschaften der
Zwischenkriegszeit (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1999).
22 S. H. Kim, Max Webers Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). W. Mommsen, Max
Weber und die Deutsche Politik, 18901920 (Tbingen: Mohr, 1959).
23 N. Behnegar, Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2003). With the problem defined in these terms, Behnegars characterization of the Straussian response is prototypical:
The aim of political science is the discovery of valid political judgments through the clarification of our understanding
of human excellence (207). Binding Strauss to Weber in this way emphasizes the sense in which Strauss was always a
Weimar thinker. As Steven B. Smith says, after Weimar, it was the very weakness and fragility of liberal democracy, its
susceptibility to demagoguery of both the Left and the Right, that would become a central problem of Strausss lifes work
(The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, edited by S. B. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18).
17 Aristotle,

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In fact, however, attempts such as these lead us indirectly back to the locations of personal
and intellectual drama that Radkau has done so much to reveal. It is the political situation of the
sociologist Weber in 1919 that, often, is crucial for contemporary interpreters, and there it was
the charismatic and ethical (in the original Greek sense of characterful) dimensions of political
action that were prominent. Whether it be the Caesarian mode of leadership (Baehr), Ciceronian
republican patriotism (Kelly) or Aristotelian phronesis (Hennis), the interpretative paradigms for
Weber are frequently classical and, within that classicism, rhetorical.24 Radkau adds a sexual
dimension that, to be sure, is (somewhat) more veiled in the Machiavellian tradition that
modulates this classical inheritance for a modern audience, but all are in point of fact focused on
the crises that call for political decision, action and a subtle, ruthless calibration of ones own
affective state to the emotions of those before whom one appears.
Precisely the same thing can be said of Andreas Kalyvass recent attempt to synthesize the
political theories of Weber, Schmitt and Arendt into a historically evolving account of what
he calls the politics of the extraordinary. Once again, although they play little overt role in the
narrative unfolding of the text itself (and are, in effect, glossed by the more recent revolutions of
1989 and the more recent reflections on the institution that is, refoundation of society in
Cornelius Castoriadis), the revolutionary moments of 1918/19 posed the problems to which these
three thinkers were, in large part, responding. For Kalyvas, Carl Schmitt ought to be understood
as someone who took up a problem left to him by Weber namely, how to resolve the
psychological power of transformation and innovation involved in charismatic authority into the
formalistic idiom on the law and its institutions. For Weber, this process of resolution had been
an aspect of the disenchantment of the world under conditions of modernization, but in Schmitt
the argument goes the inescapably political and decisionistic foundations of the law meant
that the legal system retained its terrible, arbitrary, sovereign power of deciding upon exceptions.
What Kalyvas, inadvertently, also succeeds in pointing out is that both Weber and Schmitt
conceived of the realities of political transformation and constitutional foundation in rhetorical
terms. Thus, Kalyvas wishes to demonstrate that for Weber charisma was a concept that applied
both to the leader and to the public to whom that leader was appealing. Charismatic communities
were, thus, prototypes of radically democratic communities in which public speech was decisive.
(The terminus ad quem here is the Arendtian council, behind which, of course, stood the Luxemburgian Rat.) In this reading, the democratization of charisma is an unfulfilled promise of
[Webers] theoretical and political propositions.25 Moreover, Webers term of art for the power
of charisma to effect a subjective or internal reorientation was precisely o a Greek
term for change of heart, which, in the history of the Greek language, later became a fully codified
rhetorical device in which one deliberately manifested the appearance of self-correction.26

24 P.

Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008), 59, 99; D. Kelly, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in
the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 58; W. Hennis,
Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, translated by K. Tribe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 1927.
25
A. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 69.
26
Kalyvas, Politics of the Extraordinary, 36. That the rhetorical valence of terms such as o often goes unnoted
(or even unnoticed) is a function of disciplinary specialization. One should note, however, that our disciplinary specialization is often more radical than that which existed in Weimar. Thus, Max Scheler knew that he was calling for a renewed
rhetoric in place of the extant dialectic when he said that we need a philosophy which resembles, unlike the Kantian, not
a closed fist but an open hand, even if his interpreters do not. Compare S. F. Schneck, Person and Polis: Max Schelers
Personalism as Political Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 4: terming his philosophy the
open hand, a veiled allusion perhaps to Nietzsches closed one; and L. A. Coser, Introduction, in M. Scheler, Ressentiment, translated by W. W. Holdheim (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 5: Scheler once called his philosophy
the philosophy of the open hand. By this he seems to have meant that it is full of contradictions.

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Likewise, both Schmitts critique of parliamentary democracy and his attempt to vindicate the
exemplary authority of the Catholic Church were made in the name of a capacity for manifestation. For Schmitt, the crucial problem for modern democracy was one of scale: in modern nationstates populations were generally so large that they could not manifest themselves in place and
time; the resultant representative democracies were illegitimate because they essentially
excluded the people from decision making. Likewise, what the artists and theologians of the
Catholic Church had achieved, he thought, was a passable impression of manifesting the infinite
in the finite, the universal in the particular. Dictatorship (again, a classical formula) was the
mechanism by means of which a simulacrum of popular participation could be generated in the
moment of a once again rhetorical mass acclamation in the Volksversammlungen, peoples
assemblies, that Kalyvas emphasizes.27 All of these Schmittian initiatives (scripted between
1919 and 1923) were, in essence if not intention, attempts to abide by the ancient rhetorical
injunction that an orator must make that which is absent (the desired, the feared) present to the
imagination of an audience in the form of enargeia a clear perception, a vivid description, a
self-evidence.28
To be sure, Schmitts work was also very basically and quite precisely a rejection of rhetoric, of faith in public discussion as procedure.29 In Kalyvass portrait, this was the point at which
Arendt took up the problem bequeathed to her from Weber via Schmitt. In place of an arbitrary
and perhaps violent decisionism, she inserted the exercise of freedom in publicly visible word and
deed into the void opened up by the process of founding, or refounding, a political community.
It is not at all coincidental that Stephan Kampowskis recent examination of Arendts Weimarera work on Augustine (and its development in her later thought) speaks directly to this issue.
Born in 1906, Arendt was, of course, still young when she fled Germany in 1933, yet there are
some very obvious ways in which her works of the 1950s and 1960s The Human Condition and
On Revolution, in particular developed the Weimar-era issues on which Kalyvas focuses.
Kampowskis basic contention is that, although Arendts intellectual calling was affected in the
most profound ways by the events of 1933 to 1945, there were basic concerns that remained
constant before and after her exile from Germany. Implicitly vindicating Arendts assertion in her
1929 Liebesbegriff bei Augustin that it was legitimate to disregard Augustines evolution over
time because the ancient rhetor never excised the thought of Cicero or Gaius Marius Victorinus,
Kampowski contends that it was, in turn, these rhetorical inheritances that impressed themselves
upon Arendt in an enduring way. Thus, for him, it was the Augustinian gloss on the human

27 Kalyvas,

Politics of the Extraordinary, 178ff.

desire to refashion Schmitt in such a way that he can be folded into a tradition of democratic thinking that
stands diametrically opposed to Schmitts actions on behalf of the Nazis in 1933 is striking, but not unique. One finds a
comparable initiative in the work of Ellen Kennedy, and there too it is the direct democratic semblance of Schmitts writings that is decisive. Seeking to release Schmitts Weimar-era works from a retrospective (and negative) judgement,
Kennedy sees his thought as a continuation of the political tradition that took the polis as the basic fact, or desideratum,
of political life (E. Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), 132).
29 Thus, in her analysis of the debate between Schmitt and Hermann Heller over whether the term Politik derives more
basically from polis or from polemos, Sabine Marquardt implicitly vindicates Heller by redescribing Schmitts struggle
to repress dialogue as essentially a discursive one. See S. Marquardt, Polis contra Polemos: Politik als Kampfbegriff der
Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Bhlau, 1997). Schmitts rejection of rhetoric is also a rejection of diversity as such,
however, as the debates among Schmitt, Smend and Heller about democratic homogeneity demonstrate. See G. Bisogni,
Weimar e lunit politica e giuridica dello stato: Saggio su Rudolf Smend, Hermann Heller, Carl Schmitt (Naples:
Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2005), 183, 216.
28 Kalyvass

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persons temporality and on the individuals lack of self-sufficiency (its embeddedness in

community) that stayed with Arendt and evolved in her subsequent work.30
From Kampowskis point of view, most crucial was Arendts postwar appropriation of the
Augustinian passage [initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit (so that there
might be a beginning, man was created, before whom nothing was). The first appearance of that
passage came in April 1951 in the Denktagebuch. Recording the initial results of her reading of
Augustines De civitate Dei, Arendt immediately linked the passage to what was at that moment
her contemporaneous study of totalitarianism. In that context, it was the Luxemburgian term
Spontaneitt that was crucial, for totalitarianisms eradication (Ausrottung) of human beings as
human beings was precisely an eradication of their spontaneity. In time, this node of thinking
became the point of origin for the Arendtian conception of natality, the capacity for bringing
things into being that made it possible for human communities to begin (and begin again).31 This
interest in the human capacity for innovation was, indeed, one of Arendts preoccupations in her
later work. There are strong reasons to suspect that the project on judgement, barely begun by the
time of her death in 1975, would also have been focused on the ability to bring new concepts into
being in the process of distinguishing and deciding upon what is genuinely unprecedented in the
particularities thrown up by history.32
Weimar is all but inescapable in modern intellectual history, and in this instance an interest in
postwar Arendtian political thought necessitates not only an investigation into its origins in interwar Germany but also a deeper, more explicit engagement with Weimar receptions of rhetoric.
In its early moments, Arendts theory of judgement was also a gloss on the krinein of Aristotles
Rhetoric (and not so much the phronesis of his Nicomachean Ethics), such that her account of the
polis cannot be fully understood except in reference to the transformation of Heideggers evaluation of Greek being-in-the-polis between his Summer Semester 1924 lectures on Aristotles
Rhetoric and the 1927 publication of Sein und Zeit. Arendts work on the Augustinian conception
of love must likewise be understood as a continuation of the phenomenology of affect that in 1927
Heidegger had traced to once again the Rhetoric. These contexts have become considerably
more accessible as a result of the publication in 2002 of Heideggers SS 1924 lectures as the
Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie volume in the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. Two
edited volumes have appeared in the wake of that publication: Heidegger and Rhetoric, edited
by Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann and Heidegger ber Rhetorik, edited by Josef
Kopperschmidt.
It was Theodore Kisiels great feat of intellectual historical reconstruction in The Genesis of
Heideggers Being and Time that showed just how useful the records of Heideggers lectures
could be for the purpose of understanding the development of his thought during the long gap in
publication between the Duns Scotus Habilitationsschrift of 1916 and the magnum opus of Sein
und Zeit eleven years later. Already in that 1993 work, Kisiel spoke of the SS 1924 lectures,
30 S. Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt
in the Light of Her Dissertation on Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 187.
Another important context for Arendts 1929 Promotion is the philosophical anthropology of Scheler and Plessner, both
of whom published important works in 1928. On this connection, see, in particular, M. T. Pansera, Antropologia
filosofica: La peculiarit dellumano in Scheler, Gehlen, e Plessner (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001).
31
H. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2 vols (Munich: Piper, 2002), vol. 1, 66. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XII.20. With regard to
the concept of natality, those who like the present author do not read Japanese should be hoping that Terukazu
Morikawas Hajimari no Arendt: shussho no shiso no tanjo (Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2010) will be translated.
32 Indeed, there are connections to be forged between Arendts first project and her last: while Arendts lectures on Kants
Critique of Judgment are suggestive, they lack the full context of vantage point provided by the bridge of the dissertation,
and the missing link is Arendts use of memoria as the space between past and future, which is the existential context
for the mental act of judging (H. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, edited by J. Vecchiarelli Scott and J. C. Stark
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 148).
om
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which unfolded an interpretation of the basic Aristotelian concepts of Book 5 in the Metaphysics
that was centred on the Rhetoric, as an embarrassment of riches which we can hardly begin to
communicate here.33 Historians of rhetoric have seized upon the opportunity. Kopperschmidts
basic assertions in Heidegger ber Rhetorik are that the twentieth century constituted the return
of a rhetorical inquiry that had been repressed and diffused into other disciplines in the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that Heideggers SS 1924 lectures
constitute perhaps the great, previously unrecognized, moment of recovery.34 As Temilo van
Zantwijk emphasizes in the Kopperschmidt volume, however, what Heidegger recovered was not
a techne , ars, or Vermgen but rather, a dunamis or Mglichkeit that is, rhetoric as simply an
awareness of possibilities pertaining to persuasion rather than an art of persuasion.35
Such a recovery of rhetoric generated new forms of political investigation. For Gross, Heidegger turned rhetoric from an art of speaking into an art of listening, or, in fact, an analysis of the
manifold ways in which human beings were primordially oriented to others on account of their
dispositions toward listening.36 For Nancy Struever, Heidegger effectively cannibalized rhetoric:
he intricates the life capacities passions (pathe ), desire (orexis), choice (prohairesis), habit
(hexis), and cares (Besorgen) with the basic strategic concerns of rhetoric: belief (pistis),
opinion (doxa), shared opinion (endoxa), commonplaces (topoi), and rhetorical argument
(enthymeme).37 For Kisiel (also contributing to the Gross and Kemmann volume), the SS 1924
lectures need to be placed in the context of the Weimar crises of 1923. To be sure, as Kisiel notes,
for Heidegger, the German mode of being with others during the Ruhr crisis was a bastardized
form of the Aristotelian sense that man was a zoon logon echon. In place of the Greek being who
possessed and was possessed by speech, there was the German who could be defined as a living
being who reads the newspapers. Kisiel believes that the likes of Bourdieu, Marcuse and Arendt
read the das Man reinscriptions of this observation in Sein und Zeit without being fully aware of
its rhetorical origins. In fact, being-with-others had, at least initially, been both problem and cure
for Heidegger: rhetoric was not only the repetition of commonplaces (such that logos debased
itself into Gerede, idle talk) but also the innovative authentic calibration of speech to situation, which itself required taking up a position relative to commonplaces. Thus, in a development
and negation of his early Promotion on the philosophy of judgement, Heidegger argued for the
value of pertinence. In Kisiels description,
em
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u[m
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the uniqueness of the 1924 [Ruhr Speech] is [] its quick dispatch of judgment in the usual sense of
declarative (apophantic) statement, traditionally the locus of truth as correspondence through the
33 T.

Kisiel, The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 294.
ber Rhetorik, edited by J. Kopperschmidt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 10, 12.
35 T. van Zantwijk, Logos bei Heidegger und Aristoteles, in Heidegger ber Rhetorik, 287. One might add that this
understanding of rhetorical d unamis as Mglichkeit can be related to the broader paradigm shift described by Kari
Palonen from a conception of politics centred on disciplinarity (and therefore considering issues of whether politics is a
science or an art, and what its subject matter might properly be said to be) to one focused on the conceptual space around
action and Macht considered in its etymological connection to Mglichkeit. See K. Palonen, Politik als Handlungsbegriff: Horizontwandel des Politikbegriffs in Deutschland, 18901933 (Helsinki: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters,
1985).
36 D. M. Gross, Being-Moved: The Pathos of Heideggers Rhetorical Ontology, in Heidegger and Rhetoric, edited by
D. M. Gross and A. Kemmann (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 3.
37 N. S. Struever, Alltglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program, in Heidegger and Rhetoric, 107. Whereas
Kurt Sontheimer thought that decision was ein wesentliches Moment antidemokratischer Denkstruktur, Struever is
thus able to redescribe it as a Heideggerean and Aristotelian prohairesis. Compare K. Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches
Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die Politischen Ideen des Deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933
(Munich: Nymphenburger, 1962), 327. Likewise, this complicates an earlier explication of Heideggers Entschlossenheit
primarily in the context of Schmitts Entscheidung and Jngers Kampf. See C. Graf von Krockow, Die Entscheidung:
Eine Untersuchung ber Ernst Jnger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1958), 81.
34 Heidegger

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scientific demonstration that lets something be seen as it is, in order to get to the more practical and
crucial kinds of judgment (krinein) at issue or in abeyance in everyday speech situations.38

Krinein the crucial form of judging that is, also, a rendering distinctive.39
A great deal rides on ones understanding of that word Urteil. Translate it as proposition and
one is heading toward analytic philosophy; translate it as utterance and one retains an interest
in what people call continental philosophy. However, the analytic and continental traditions are
certainly not as radically incompatible as they may sometimes appear. Like Michael Friedmans
Parting of the Ways, Edward Skidelskys recent work on Ernst Cassirer demonstrates the
proximity of Heidegger, Cassirer and Rudolf Carnap. All three were present (the first two as the
leading participants) at the famous symposium at Davos in 1929 that, to contemporaries as well
as subsequent observers, seemed to mark a crucial impasse and rupture in the history of European
thought.40 Friedman and Skidelsky are at pains to argue both that at the time of the symposium
the intersections between phenomenology, humanism and logical positivism were significant
enough for the discussion to be genuine and also that thereafter these three traditions quickly
fractured to the point of mutual incomprehension and derision. Skidelsky seeks to demonstrate
that Cassirers enduring interest lies largely in the fact that he was the last great European
philosopher to straddle both of [C. P. Snows] two cultures with equal assurance.41 Whether we
invoke Snows two cultures or Diltheys Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften,
however, the danger of simplifying this gulf into unbridgeability is real. In a comparable
sentence, Friedman argues that Cassirers failure to hold Heidegger and Carnap together in
dialogue leaves us with the following choice:
we can either, with Carnap, hold fast to formal logic as the ideal of universal validity and confine
ourselves, accordingly, to the philosophy of the mathematical exact sciences, or we can, with
Heidegger, cut ourselves off from logic and exact thinking generally, with the result that we
ultimately renounce the ideal of truly universal validity itself.42

This is a false choice, deriving from an overly narrow understanding of what logic is. The fact of
the matter is that all three thinkers were interested in how inferential relationships to the world of
experience begin and are enacted. The still ongoing development of what Popper termed the logic
of scientific discovery in 1934 is but one indicator that the Davos intersection has not been
irrevocably fractured. Another potent initiative that, effectively, mediates between Heidegger and
Carnap (and many other supposedly incompatible projects) is to be found in the work of Robert
Brandom.43
38 T.

Kisiel, Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt, in Heidegger and Rhetoric, 133, 142.
Christopher Smith has emphasized similar issues. For him, what Heidegger pointed out was that originally, and in
Aristotle still, hermeneutics was the process itself of making things clearer in talking about them: As such, logos or
speech, he says, is privileged insofar as for it alone bringing about aletheuein is possible, i.e., making unhidden what
was previously hidden and covered up and putting it there, in the open and at our disposal. On this account, hermeneutics as act and not art requires facility in the rhetorical domain of topics. For Smith, original argument means
argument that reasons by the topics, namely similarity, difference, contraries, the more and the less, the prior
and the posterior, the part and the whole (P. C. Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration,
Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 1, 4).
40 See also, in this regard, P. E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger at Davos, 1929 An
Allegory of Intellectual History, Modern Intellectual History, 1 (2004), 21948.
41 E. Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 4.
42 M. Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2000), 156.
43 Consider, in particular, the double mode of inquiry and exposition pursued by Robert Brandom in Making it Explicit:
Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Tales of
the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
39 P.

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Discovery, what is more, is precisely the conceptual domain within which Philippe-Alain
Michaud thinks we should understand Mnemosyne, an art history composed entirely of images
that was left unfinished upon the death of its author, Aby Warburg, in 1929. Warburgs library in
Hamburg was a creation that Cassirer once described as dangerous, something to be avoided
altogether or plunged into deeply, for the philosophical problems involved are close to my own,
but the concrete historical material which Warburg has collected is overwhelming.44 As an
attention to symbolic form, Warburgs art historical preoccupations were very clearly related to
Cassirers project, but, in Michauds reconstruction, there is also a striking connection to Heideggers rhetorical interests in the relationship between motion and affect. Michauds claim is that
Warburg was repeatedly focused on what he terms the image in motion: the early studies of
Botticelli were not simply exercises in identifying the replication of classical affective forms
the famous Pathosformeln but also (and more so) attempts to re-enact classical approaches to
representing the static image as itself dynamic, halted in the midst of a motion, suggesting a kind
of articulation over time. Likewise, the later studies of Netherlandish and Florentine portraiture
examined not so much the movements of gesture as the motions of time ageing and a kind of
Burckhardtian process of sought-after individuation. In a third reprise of the theme of motion, the
corporeal performativity of the sixteenth-century festive pageantry struck Warburg as a
Dionysian analogue of the Pueblo Indian rituals that he sought out during his travels in the United
States in 1905.45
In Michauds analysis, therefore, representing motion was not simply a trick played by the
artist on the eyes of the viewer; it was, instead, a concern with the most subtle investments of
psychological power in physical states. Michauds Warburg thus emerges as a connoisseur of the
lips: Angelo Poliziano has the full-lipped gourmets mouth and Luigi Pulci has a thin upper lip,
resting of the prominent lower lip with a hint of embitterment, while Mussolinis smile has a
Caesarean malice. Michaud has certainly learned something when he outdoes Warburg by
asking whether the motion on Maria Portinaris lips is not a smile half drawn but a smile half
erased.46 The smaller these motions (or, alternatively, the more they are the residue of habitual
motions), the more pertinent and revealing they become. Developing an eye for these things, it
should be noted, was not simply about gaining an enhanced capacity to explain what these things
symbolized. Instead, the artist was understood as training the viewer to see where these motions
came from and where they were going. The desideratum, expressed in an Aristotelian idiom, was
a capacity to perceive actualities in terms of their potentialities.47
Brilliantly, the movement that Michaud wants to specify is not simply the motion of gesture,
character or spectacle but also the imaginative, proto-discursive movement on display when
Warburg compared Florentine intermedi with Native American dance. Thus, in Michauds interpretation, Warburgs library and his Mnemosyne project were both, as it were, architectural
attempts to facilitate a practice of discovery. The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in
Hamburg was purpose-built to facilitate the forging and reforging of connections and distinctions
in its collections: Warburg would rearrange the contents of the library incessantly in order to
express relationships of similarity and difference in spatial terms; and he demanded large tables
in the centre of the reading room on which a wide variety of materials might be laid out and

44 Cit.

Skidelsky, Cassirer, 90.

Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, translated by S. Hawkes (New York: Zone, 2004), 72, 935,
102, 149, 170.
46 Michaud, Aby Warburg, 37, 116, 117, 127.
47 Michaud, Aby Warburg, 82.
45 P-A.

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compared.48 The image atlas thus emerged as something like the library itself in book form
that is, a series of spaces in which the comparability of the diverse and disparate could be visually
asserted. Published in a critical edition (which will eventually include the much anticipated
Grundlegende Bruchstcke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde) by Akademie Verlag in
2000, the Mnemosyne project gathered together into visual topoi the most diverse materials: art
reproductions, advertisements, newspaper clippings, geographical maps, and personal photographs. Avant-garde collage met, and transformed, the classical rhetoric of topical method.49
Just so, in her new book, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Nancy Struever claims that the
convolutes [of Walter Benjamins Passagenwerk] and the screens [of Warburgs Mnemosyne
project] suggest the traditional organization of the commonplace book, of classifying remarkable
diversity under topoi, compendious argumentative headings.50 Benjamin becomes, in her
reading, a modernist practitioner of the basic rhetorical concern for delineating possibilities that,
she argues, was also conspicuous in Hobbes and Vico. Struevers judgement is vindicated by the
inquiry possibilities that her act of ingenium brings into being. The book consisting entirely of
quotations and the art history composed wholly of images do gloss each other, and both are to be
understood in terms of the acts of mediation pace Adorno that they require of their readers;
but her judgement is also vindicated in terms of source and influence. Scholars of Benjamin know
that he took Pausaniass Description of Greece as a kind of inspiration for his own Passagenwerk,
but they have not been as aware of the rhetorical dimensions of the term topography as they
might have been. Moreover, both Warburg and the rhetorical tradition itself were important
points of reference for Benjamin in his failed Habilitationsschrift of 1925, the Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels. Max Pensky has emphasized Warburgs role in framing Benjamins
conception of melancholy in the Trauerspiel work, and Susan Buck-Morss has argued that the
emblem-book (the common-place books early modern visual cousin) was one of the sources for
48 In

this respect, Warburg takes his place alongside other Weimar critics as analysed by David C. Durst who were focused
on developing a critique of all forms of passivity in the aesthetic realm. Warburg may not share the Marxian vocabulary
that framed many of these critiques as denunciations of passive consumerism, but the call for an active reception of
artworks was certainly common. See D. C. Durst, Weimar Modernism: Philosophy, Politics, and Culture in Germany
19181933 (Lanham, MA: Lexington, 2004).
49 Michaud, Warburg, 277. Gombrich was right when he concluded that Mnemosyne brings out most clearly what
Warburg meant by the after-life of antiquity and that this afterlife was not so much a problem of formal traditions as
one of collective psychology (E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, with a Memoir on the History
of the Library by F. Saxl (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 307). The conclusion also raises two further lines of inquiry: first, the
relationship between Richard Semons Mneme (1904), an influence on Warburg, and Frances Yatess The Art of Memory
(1966), indirectly influenced by Warburg; secondly, the tradition in which names are originally the predicates of unknown
subjects that goes back from Warburgs work, through the lectures he attended by Hermann Usener, themselves
influenced by Tito Vignolis Mito e scienza, to Vico (whom Vignoli called the pre-eminent theorist of myth). On this
second issue, Silvia Ferretti confirms that the German translation [of Vignolis Mito e scienza] (1880) can still be found
in the psychology section of the Warburg Library with Warburgs annotations, almost all of which, significantly enough,
concern the passages on movement in a state of tension (S. Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and
History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 9).
50
N. S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 823. Struevers
comparison of Warburg and Benjamin can be broadened to include Ernst Robert Curtius among the modernist investigators of the ars topica: a topic is in fact the literary counterpart of the art historians motif, and Toposforschung can be
thought of as an equivalent to an art history without names, a literary iconography. Curtius, therefore, set out to do for
literary history what Aby Warburg, Saxl, and Panofsky had been doing for more than twenty years in art history, and it
is with this intention in mind that he dedicated his Europische Literatur to the memory of Warburg (as well as to Gustav
Grber). See On Four Modern Humanists: Hofmannsthal, Gundolf, Curtius, Kantorowicz, edited by A. R. Evans
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 11920. On this issue (the famous tension between Curtius and Erich
Auerbach notwithstanding), consider Claus Uhligs judgement: figura und Typologie in Auerbachs Leben dieselbe
Funktion erfllten wie die berhmten topoi der klassischen Rhetorik fr Curtius in seiner Vision historischer Kontinuitt,
in Wahrnehmen Lesen Deuten: Erich Auerbachs Lektre der Moderne, edited by W. Busch and G. Pickerodt (Frankfurt:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 74.

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Benjamins conception of the dialectical image. As Buck-Morss explained, the lightning flash
of cognition [that dialectical images] provide is like illumination from a camera flashbulb, and
the images themselves dialectics at a standstill are like camera shots, that develop in time
as in a darkroom.51 In this way, Benjamin was a quintessentially Baroque rhetorician, focused
like Vico, as Benjamin himself would say in 1940 on the lightning flash of ingenium.52
Yet Benjamin was also, of course, quintessentially modernist, preternaturally sensitive to
radical developments in twentieth-century modes of artistic reproduction. Thus, the lexicon of
photography, montage and journalism structured his early modern interests. (Michaud makes an
analogous claim, one should note, when he argues that it is the moving images of cinema that,
counter-intuitively, provide the interpretative key for Warburgian art history.) What linked
Benjamins early modern literary studies and his modernist investigations was simply the theory
and practice of criticism making manifest how it is that art objects work and what they make
possible. Just so, when Terry Eagleton characterized Benjamins work as on the way to a
revolutionary criticism, he meant thereby to declare him an heir to Greco-Roman rhetoric, the
politico-literary criticism of the western tradition par excellence. Eagleton went on to sketch a
short history of rhetoric from Corax to Piscator in order to buttress his point.53 Indeed,
Benjamins own personal experience as an orator was, one might say, displaced. Bernd Witte has
painted a provocative portrait of Benjamins early anti-political politics during his time in the
German student movement before the First World War. His anarcho-Nietzschean appeal to the
Berlin Free Student Group for a kind of para-political inwardness and intensity in the Winter
Semester of 1913 to 1914 was unsuccessful, but there was a transference of these rhetorical
energies into the eighty-five radio broadcasts he produced between August 1929 and January
1933. In those broadcasts, he acted on a conviction that the new medium was not a novel
opportunity to effect belief but rather, a new politico-aesthetic phenomenon, the possibilities and
modes of which needed to be explained performatively to its audience.54
On 23 March 1933, with the passage of the Ermchtigungsgesetz, the Weimar Republic was
constitutionally suspended. It may be said, however, to have possessed an intellectual historical
afterlife in what A. Dirk Moses has called the Weimar syndrome. In his recent book, German
Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Moses examines historical and political debates in post-war
Germany as a series of clashes between what he calls redemptive republicans such as Jrgen
Habermas and integrative republicans such as Wilhelm Hennis. He then goes on to define the
Weimar syndrome as the tendency of redemptive and integrative republicans to view one

51 M.

Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 95; S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 228, 250.
52 Esther Leslie was picking up on another aspect of Benjaminian ingenium when she narrated his application of what he
called the doctrine of similars to the developmental psychology of his son Stefan. E. Leslie, Walter Benjamin (London:
Reaktion, 2007), 51.
53
T. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), 10113.
54 B. Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, translated by J. Rolleston (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press, 1997), 2930, 121. As Witte argued, criticism is to be understood in such a way that it would be the continuation
of politics by other means (125). Note that Benjamins active involvement in explaining the possibilities brought into
being by radio defends him against Adornos accusation that, in the Kunstwerk essay, he was displaying a kind of technological essentialism in which particular technological forms necessitated particular political forms. An exemplary
narration of the modal complexity involved in writing the history of new media is to be found in Peter Jelavichs recent
book Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2006). Media by their very nature bring new possibilities into being, but those possibilities themselves simply
occasion new moments of decision. For a close reading of some of Benjamins radio work, see J. Mehlman, Walter
Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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another as the incarnation of Germanys fatal path to fascism or totalitarianism.55 In Mosess

highly revealing account, the successive generations of forty-fivers, sixty-eighters and eightyniners have grappled with the problem of how to fashion a civil society out of the ashes and
crimes of the Third Reich. As he frames it,

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the conclusion Habermas drew from Auschwitz was that the Germans have forfeited the right to base
their political identity on grounds other than the universal principles of citizenship in whose light
national traditions are no longer unscrutinized but are appropriated only critically and selfcritically.56

In contrast, Hennis (and other integrative republicans) sought to recast a culturally and politically (but not vlkisch) conceived nation-state as a source of political orientation in the disintegrating conditions of modernity. One of the implications of such a stance was that a German
cultural patrimony had to be located that could characterize the Nazi debacle as a betrayal.57
What makes this debate between the cosmopolitan universalism of Habermas and the particularist communitarianism of Hennis so absorbing, in Mosess staging of it, is the degree to which
both protagonists share basic presuppositions about the interdependence of republican and rhetorical practices even as they come to fundamentally divergent conclusions. Again, the connection
can be asserted in very precise terms: in the late 1950s, Hennis gave his card catalogue file on the
rise and fall of the public sphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to Habermas.58
However, whereas Habermas, in his famous book originally published in 1962, founded his idealization of the public use of reason on the vision of Immanuel Kant, Hennis instead wrote his 1963
account of politics and practical philosophy with the topics of Giambattista Vico in mind.59 In
fact, Kantian ffentlichkeit and Vichian topics were both primarily concerned with the once
again rhetorical concept of sensus communis, and they are not as incompatible as they may, at
first blush, appear.60 However, Habermas paid no particular attention to Vico and his theory of
55 A. D. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
189. Note that an earlier iteration of this definition of the Weimar Syndrome had been slightly different: the tendency,
indeed, necessity of framing major issues in terms of a narrative of Weimars collapse (A. D. Moses, The Weimar
Syndrome in the Federal Republic of Germany, in Leben, Tod und Entscheidung: Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der
Weimarer Republik, edited by S. Loos and H. Zaborowski (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2003), 191).
56 Moses, German Intellectuals, 231.
57 Moses, German Intellectuals, 90. Alternatively, Chris Thornhill has centred postwar German political thought on the
diverging opinions of Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. In his account, while Habermas sought to make technocracy
accountable to a critical public sphere, Luhmann aimed to show why the multiple and subsystemizing systems of
modern society should be permitted to develop their own classificatory codes so as achieve the greatest possible efficiency something that implies independence from extra-systemic (and political) control. In so far as communication is
precisely a modern development of rhetoric (and there are strong arguments that can be made for this supposition), this
debate too can be understood in rhetorical terms: the BielefeldFrankfurt discussion, between Luhmann and Habermas,
might be summarized as a critical exchange between two forms of communication-theory, one normative, hermeneutic
and social, one autopoietic, de-centered and asocial (C. Thornhill, Political Theory in Modern Germany, An Introduction
(Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 203). In his broader historical narrative, Jaspers becomes an important mediator between
Weimar phenomenology and the Bonn republicanism of the postwar era, a heritage along with Arendt for Habermass
normative account of communicative practices (C. Thornhill, Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London:
Routledge, 2002), 3, 14). At a broader level still, Thornhill sees the HabermasLuhmann debate as the latest iteration in
a long sequence of debates in the German tradition (dating back at least to the Reformation) on how to ground and/or
institutionalize the concept of lawfulness (C. Thornhill, German Political Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Law
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 339).
58 Moses, German Intellectuals, 101.
59 J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit: Untersuchung zu einer Kategorie der brgerlichen Gesellschaft
(Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962); W. Hennis, Politik und praktischer Philosophie: eine Studie zur Rekonstruktion der
politischen Wissenschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963).
60 Compare Vico, Scienza nuova, 143 and Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 40.

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communicative action with its ideal speech situation as the foundation for the democratic republic
was abstract, while Hennis concentrated solely on Vicos De ratione (newly published by Walter
Otto, Fritz Schalk and Carl Friedrich von Weizscker in 1947), missing, therefore, an opportunity
to engage more fully with Vicos creative appropriation of the topical tradition in the Scienza
nuova. In fact, topics had been a theory of invention (as Warburg and Benjamin knew), a practice
of innovation based on an awareness of pertinent possibilities.
In sum, Weimar Germany was one of the great collisions between rich intellectual tradition and
extreme intellectual urgency, but in ways that historians are only just beginning to perceive, and
still in a piecemeal fashion it was also the context for one of the great modernist reinventions
of the rhetorical tradition. The sudden advent of a democratic republic, combined with a strong
conviction that there could be no easy application of speech theory to speech practice, sparked a
fragmented but brilliant series of investigations of an essentially rhetorical nature. Rhetorical
inquiry in Germany, 19181933, is therefore fertile territory for future research.
Flint, Michigan
Kettering University