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Intellectual History of the WeimarRepublic – Recent ResearchDavid L. Marshall aa Kettering University , Flint, MichiganPublished online: 06 Dec 2010.

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Intellectual History Review 20(4) 2010: 503–517

Intellectual History ReviewISSN 1749-6977 print/ISSN 1749-6985 online

©2010 International Society for Intellectual Historyhttp://www.informaworld.com/journals DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2010.525915

LITERATURE SURVEY

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC – RECENT RESEARCH

David L. Marshall

Taylor and FrancisRIHR_A_525915.sgm10.1080/17496977.2010.525915Intellectual History Review1749-6977 (print)/1749-6985 (online)Original Article2010International Society for Intellectual History2040000002010DavidMarshalldlmarshall@gmail.comAnthony 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 MoralThought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of Her Dissertation on Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI andCambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2008).Josef Kopperschmidt (ed.), Heidegger über Rhetorik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009).Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity 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: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007).

If it is registered at all (that is, if one’s attention is drawn to it), the present is experienced assomething like a pressure between particular aspects of the past that are felt to be pertinent andan array of possible futures, futures that range from the immediate and the almost certain tothose merely contemplated and almost impossible. One of the defining characteristics of theWeimar 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 andfrequency that could only inadequately be described as alarming. After the last-ditch successesof the 1917 offensive, catastrophic defeat followed for Germany in 1918, and civilian authori-ties were thrust forward as the agents of surrender. Soldiers and Workers councils, Räte impos-sible to perceive if not through the suddenly victorious Russian soviets, sprang up. Withinhours 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 frac-tious, unconsolidated Centre, playing a dangerous game, used the energies and force of both to

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win a constitutional moment. That moment dilated into debate – Preuss, Weber and a host ofothers its interlocutors – and then coalesced into a document that itself was fixed only on thepage, for its various articles brought into being a kaleidoscope of long-term, shifting possibili-ties. All of this in less than a year.

Little wonder, then, that the writers and thinkers of Weimar Germany were so often preoccu-pied with how to grapple with this ‘space’ of the present. For them, this present was both a viceand a vacuum: not only the increased pressure of forces and events building up but also thesuddenly 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 democraticprogress.1 Friedrich Meinecke, in his ‘conversation’ of autumn 1919, inquired into the nature ofthe rupture between Kaiserreich and Republik.2 Rosa Luxemburg argued for a historical andpolitical theory of a spontaneity that might be inserted into this rupture.3 Carl Schmitttransformed his prewar exposition of legal judgement into a theory of decisionism, where thepower to ignore a rule, and thereby break with tradition, became the mark of sovereignty.4 WalterBenjamin and Ernst Bloch explored the political–theological dimensions of messianism, whilePaul 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 ofpossibility, Möglichkeit, and temporal manifold.6

1 T. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, translated by W. D. Morris (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 6. Mann’sself-consciously paradoxical assertion of the progressive implications of his conservative statement connoted two funda-mental Weimar ironies – namely, the dialectical proximity of left-wing and right-wing arguments and the Frankenstein’smonster of romantic technology fetish. What was so striking in the case of Carl Schmitt (who was highly influential atboth ends of the political spectrum before 1933) has been observed more generally too, in, for example, Intellektuellen-diskurse in der Weimarer Republik: Zur politischen Kultur eine Gemengelage, edited by M. Gangl and G. Raulet(Frankfurt: Campus, 1994), 20. Likewise, Jeffrey Herf’s Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics inWeimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) was an attempt to understand thecompossibility of atavism and hypermodernism.2 F. Meinecke, ‘Ein Gespräche aus dem Herbste 1919’, in Nach der Revolution: Geschichtliche Betrachtungen überunsere Lage (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1919). Thus, in his Deutscher Historismus und der Übergang zurParlamentarischen Demokratie: Untersuchungen zu den Politischen Gedanken von Meinecke, Troeltsch, Max Weber(Lübeck: Matthiesen, 1964), Gustav Schmidt depicted Meinecke as one of a number of German thinkers who hadbeen deeply invested in a form of historicism that prized continuity of development and yet sought to identify ways inwhich the break of 1918/19 could be sutured (37). Robert A. Pois agreed that this had been Meinecke’s intellectualtask, but concluded that ‘Meinecke’s eventual turning [away from nationalism] towards the Goethean cosmopolitan-ism he had once rejected indicated either an avoidance of, or an inability to comprehend, the basic issue of twentieth-century 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 Spontaneität (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970).4 C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1922).5 E. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918); W. Benjamin, ‘Theologisch-politisches Fragment’, inGesammelte Schriften, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989),vol. 2, 203–4; 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 Heideg-ger, see, in particular, W. D. Blattner, Heidegger’s 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 Republichave 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 wasonce common, in the wake of the Second World War, to speak of the sense in which Weimar wasfated to failure, it has now become important to stress the role of chance, contingency andopenness in the various chapters of Weimar history. Thus, in his introduction to the new Weimarcomponent of the Shorter Oxford History of Germany, Anthony McElligott wishes to invert thetrope 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 thisredescription, fourteen years was an achievement not a failure, and the aim is to challenge thelogic of the apparent moral imperative to narrate the history of Weimar from ‘the vantage pointof 1933’, thereby reasserting the standard historical injunction that the past ought not to be readbackwards. McElligott also directly challenges the longstanding topos that Weimar was arepublic without republicans. Three quarters of the electorate voted for republican parties on19 January 1919; and even in 1932, at the height of the electoral crisis, a third of the electoratestill effectively stood behind the Republic.9 It may be that, like its inverse, a preference forcontingency rather than necessity is a metahistorical choice that can structure narratives but notbe demonstrated by them. If so, one might still support McElligott’s commitment on politicaltheoretical grounds, for among the opposites of a morose determinism is not only blithe hopeful-ness but also the perspicacious delineation of particular possibilities pertaining to particulardifficulties.

McElligott’s emphasis on contingency has its precedents. As he indicates, he is followingDetlev Peukert’s classic work on Weimar as the ‘crisis of classical modernity’, which wasoriginally 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 stressedwhat amounted to the modal category of Weimar instability, which he saw as the result of rapidand multiform modernization. Periods of instability were to be thought of as simply those periods

7 Anson Rabinbach’s 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 aftershockof the event’ that attempted ‘to translate that experience into a philosophical language’ (2). Influenced in part by ReinhartKoselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft (which itself linked its consciousness of the simultaneity of past, present, and future inexperience to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and, in turn, the rhetorical tradition as it surfaced in Augustine’s Confessions),historians such as Rüdiger Graf have been interested in conceptions of the future in Weimar, and indeed that work isembedded in broader investigations into interwar utopianism. See R. Graf, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisenund Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland, 1918–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008) as well as Utopie und politischeHerrschaft 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 thatWeimar went undefended. Thus, in Politische Philosophie in der Weimarer Republik: Staatsverständnis zwischenFührerdemokratie und Bürokratischem Sozialismus (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1989), Norbert J. Schürgers argued thatcriticisms of the Republic could also be understood as attempts to differentiate what in Weimar was deemed worthfighting for and what was not (275). Similarly, in Weimar – Die Wehrlose Republik? Verfassungsschutzrecht undVerfassungsschutz in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991), Christoph Gusy took issue with the notionthat 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 Sontheimer’s 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, Jürgen Eder et al. go far beyond the oft-cited commonplaces in order to present a muchmore 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 Suchsensitivity to the modalities of possibility and necessity is likewise conspicuous in Fritz Stern’srecent Five Germanys I Have Known, in which he contends that ‘decades of study and experiencehave persuaded me that the German roads to perdition, including National Socialism, wereneither accidental nor inevitable’. In Stern more than in McElligott, one should understand, thisis a polemic: to Stern ‘all the tomes and slogans about Germany’s inevitable path “from Lutherto 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 ‘tothe very last there was room for alternative methods and decisions, though the choice becamesteadily narrower’.13

Such capacities to perceive not merely choices and alternatives but also irony, paradox anddialectic are essential skills for the historian, for they are all capacities to grapple with extremeor unexpected forms of compossibility – that particular kind of possibility that asserts the compat-ibility of two or more phenomena. These, indeed, are precisely the skills – both tactful and forth-right – that are so conspicuous in Joachim Radkau’s much praised biography of Max Weber. Tothe image of Weber the cool sociologist, we now have counterposed the image of Weber themasochist. The extraordinarily tactful achievement of Radkau’s biography consists in its abilitynot only to inform readers of the letters to Else Jaffé-Richthofen that shed new light on Weber’ssexuality, but also to use these revelations in order to interpret Weber’s writings on the sociologyof power, and yet to do both of these things without dismissing the seriousness of Weber’sthought or writing the biography in the manner of an exposé. Nowhere is this capacity toportray such doubleness so precise as in Radkau’s depiction of a scene related by Weber to Jaffé-Richthofen in a letter dated 15 January 1919:

once at a lecture, when he was again attacking the revolutionaries and chairs were flying across theroom, he relished the situation by thinking of the "dark gleaming eyes" of Else, whose assaults he alsoallowed to wash over him.14

The superimposition of sexuality upon politics is neither prurient nor salacious, because neithersexuality nor politics is occluded here and both gloss each other. The slave has a certain powerover 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 Weber’s characterization ofscenes such as this and his account of charismatic rule. Circumventing the dispute over whethercharisma 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 beingdominated 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 bythe old elites who wanted to cling to traditional attitudes and practices: it was the peculiarly crisis-prone nature of theprocess 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 Weitz’s recentwork demonstrates); but replacing the presumption of necessity with an awareness of possibility generates historiographicsophistication 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 Riseand Fall of Weimar Democracy, translated by E. Forster and L. E. Jones (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North CarolinaPress, 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 Weber’s inheritance of ‘charisma’ from Sohm’sdepiction of its relevance for early Christian communities to his application of that word to thepolitical situation of Germany after the war. As is well known, Weber’s predilection for aCaesarian democracy, with a directly elected and powerful presidential figure, found expressionin the Weimar Constitution of 1919; but Radkau argues that the reinvention of charisma in thepolitical arena required an overcoming of the debt to Sohm.16 There are many issues to beexplored here. As χ ρις, charisma had a deeper than Christian root in the ancient world, and itfeatures in the emotional matrix described by Aristotle’s Rhetoric.17 Weber’s experience ofcharisma was not only, perhaps, sexual but also oratorical, for in the chaos of the GermanRevolution 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 lateralthinker who never fitted people’s preconceptions’, who possessed ‘an unusual capacity to workhimself up into a rage against both the right and the left’.19 The image, Weber’s own fantasy inpart, is that of the speaker as the unmoved centre in a maelstrom of emotion. Just so, Weber’sideal politician was to possess passion, a sense of responsibility and judgement, where judgement– Augenmaß, sense of proportion, a visual sizing up – was, in Weber’s words, ‘the ability to main-tain one’s inner composure and calm while being receptive to realities’.20 Grace was thus glossedas balance, as an equidistance from pursuant possibilities until the moment of decision.

Radkau’s ability to situate his detailed reading of Weber’s life in the context of what he haspreviously described as an ‘age of nervousness’ in Germany between Bismarck and Hitler has theeffect of making a number of other attempts to think about Weber’s significance appear thin bycomparison.21 The desire, for example, to overturn Wolfgang Mommsen’s revisionist 1959 read-ing of Weber as a representative of the illiberal nationalism of Wilhelmine Germany in Sung HoKim’s Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society appears to bring with it the need to select those partsof Weber’s legacy that can be fashioned into a usable – one might say salvageable – politicaltheory.22 In Kim’s reading, with its emphasis on the influence of Tocquevillean accounts ofparticipatory associations and the Protestant reconciliation of economic rationality and an ethicof conviction, Weber’s work begins to look like an anticipation of the political theory of HannahArendt. Such a desire to claim Weber in the name of subsequent initiatives is likewise evident inNasser Behnegar’s Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics. It representsWeber’s problem – the conundrum of a modernity that can rationally assess the effectiveness ofcertain means for particular ends but cannot convincingly articulate its commitment to one endover the other – as the problem that Strauss sought to address.23

16 Radkau, Weber, 395.17 Aristotle, 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 Weber’s death, see also R. Blomert,Intellektuelle im Aufbruch: Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber, Norbert Elias und die Heidelberger Sozialwissenschaften derZwischenkriegszeit (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1999).22 S. H. Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). W. Mommsen, MaxWeber und die Deutsche Politik, 1890–1920 (Tübingen: 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, Behnegar’s characterization of the Straussian response is prototypical:‘The aim of political science is the discovery of valid political judgments through the clarification of our understandingof human excellence’ (207). Binding Strauss to Weber in this way emphasizes the sense in which Strauss was always aWeimar thinker. As Steven B. Smith says, after Weimar, ‘it was the very weakness and fragility of liberal democracy, itssusceptibility to demagoguery of both the Left and the Right, that would become a central problem of Strauss’s life’s work’(The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, edited by S. B. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18).

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In fact, however, attempts such as these lead us – indirectly – back to the locations of personaland intellectual drama that Radkau has done so much to reveal. It is the political situation of thesociologist Weber in 1919 that, often, is crucial for contemporary interpreters, and there it wasthe charismatic and ethical (in the original Greek sense of characterful) dimensions of politicalaction that were prominent. Whether it be the Caesarian mode of leadership (Baehr), Ciceronianrepublican patriotism (Kelly) or Aristotelian phronesis (Hennis), the interpretative paradigms forWeber are frequently classical – and, within that classicism, rhetorical.24 Radkau adds a sexualdimension that, to be sure, is (somewhat) more veiled in the Machiavellian tradition thatmodulates this classical inheritance for a modern audience, but all are in point of fact focused onthe crises that call for political decision, action and a subtle, ruthless calibration of one’s ownaffective state to the emotions of those before whom one appears.

Precisely the same thing can be said of Andreas Kalyvas’s recent attempt to synthesize thepolitical theories of Weber, Schmitt and Arendt into a historically evolving account of whathe calls ‘the politics of the extraordinary’. Once again, although they play little overt role in thenarrative unfolding of the text itself (and are, in effect, glossed by the more recent revolutions of1989 and the more recent reflections on the institution – that is, refoundation – of society inCornelius Castoriadis), the revolutionary moments of 1918/19 posed the problems to which thesethree thinkers were, in large part, responding. For Kalyvas, Carl Schmitt ought to be understoodas someone who took up a problem left to him by Weber – namely, how to resolve thepsychological power of transformation and innovation involved in charismatic authority into theformalistic idiom on the law and its institutions. For Weber, this process of resolution had beenan 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 meantthat 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 Schmittconceived of the realities of political transformation and constitutional foundation in rhetoricalterms. Thus, Kalyvas wishes to demonstrate that for Weber charisma was a concept that appliedboth to the leader and to the public to whom that leader was appealing. Charismatic communitieswere, 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 Luxem-burgian Rat.) In this reading, ‘the democratization of charisma is an unfulfilled promise of[Weber’s] theoretical and political propositions’.25 Moreover, Weber’s term of art for ‘the powerof charisma to ‘effect a subjective or internal reorientation’ was precisely µετ νoια – a Greekterm for change of heart, which, in the history of the Greek language, later became a fully codifiedrhetorical 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 (NewBrunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008), 59, 99; D. Kelly, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State inthe 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), 192–7.25 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 µετ νoια often goes unnoted(or even unnoticed) is a function of disciplinary specialization. One should note, however, that our disciplinary special-ization is often more radical than that which existed in Weimar. Thus, Max Scheler knew that he was calling for a renewedrhetoric in place of the extant dialectic when he said that ‘we need a philosophy which resembles, unlike the Kantian, nota closed fist but an open hand’, even if his interpreters do not. Compare S. F. Schneck, Person and Polis: Max Scheler’sPersonalism as Political Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 4: ‘terming his philosophy the“open hand”, a veiled allusion perhaps to Nietzsche’s closed one’; and L. A. Coser, ‘Introduction’, in M. Scheler, Ressen-timent, 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 Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary democracy and his attempt to vindicate theexemplary authority of the Catholic Church were made in the name of a capacity for manifesta-tion. For Schmitt, the crucial problem for modern democracy was one of scale: in modern nation-states populations were generally so large that they could not manifest themselves in place andtime; the resultant representative democracies were illegitimate because they essentiallyexcluded the people from decision making. Likewise, what the artists and theologians of theCatholic Church had achieved, he thought, was a passable impression of manifesting the infinitein the finite, the universal in the particular. Dictatorship (again, a classical formula) was themechanism by means of which a simulacrum of popular participation could be generated in themoment of – a once again rhetorical – mass acclamation in the Volksversammlungen, ‘people’sassemblies’, that Kalyvas emphasizes.27 All of these Schmittian initiatives (scripted between1919 and 1923) were, in essence if not intention, attempts to abide by the ancient rhetoricalinjunction that an orator must make that which is absent (the desired, the feared) present to theimagination of an audience in the form of enargeia – a clear perception, a vivid description, aself-evidence.28

To be sure, Schmitt’s work was also very basically – and quite precisely – a rejection of rhet-oric, of faith in public discussion as procedure.29 In Kalyvas’s portrait, this was the point at whichArendt took up the problem bequeathed to her from Weber via Schmitt. In place of an arbitraryand perhaps violent decisionism, she inserted the exercise of freedom in publicly visible word anddeed into the void opened up by the process of founding, or refounding, a political community.It is not at all coincidental that Stephan Kampowski’s recent examination of Arendt’s Weimar-era 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 aresome very obvious ways in which her works of the 1950s and 1960s – The Human Condition andOn Revolution, in particular – developed the Weimar-era issues on which Kalyvas focuses.Kampowski’s basic contention is that, although Arendt’s intellectual calling was affected in themost profound ways by the events of 1933 to 1945, there were basic concerns that remainedconstant before and after her exile from Germany. Implicitly vindicating Arendt’s assertion in her1929 Liebesbegriff bei Augustin that it was legitimate to disregard Augustine’s evolution overtime 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 themselvesupon Arendt in an enduring way. Thus, for him, it was the Augustinian gloss on the human

27 Kalyvas, Politics of the Extraordinary, 178ff.28 Kalyvas’s desire to refashion Schmitt in such a way that he can be folded into a tradition of democratic thinking thatstands diametrically opposed to Schmitt’s actions on behalf of the Nazis in 1933 is striking, but not unique. One finds acomparable initiative in the work of Ellen Kennedy, and there too it is the direct democratic semblance of Schmitt’s writ-ings that is decisive. Seeking to release Schmitt’s 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 morebasically from polis or from polemos, Sabine Marquardt implicitly vindicates Heller by redescribing Schmitt’s struggleto repress dialogue as essentially a discursive one. See S. Marquardt, Polis contra Polemos: Politik als Kampfbegriff derWeimarer Republik (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997). Schmitt’s 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 l’unità politica e giuridica dello stato: Saggio su Rudolf Smend, Hermann Heller, Carl Schmitt (Naples:Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2005), 183, 216.

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person’s temporality and on the individual’s lack of self-sufficiency (its embeddedness incommunity) that stayed with Arendt and evolved in her subsequent work.30

From Kampowski’s point of view, most crucial was Arendt’s postwar appropriation of theAugustinian passage [initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit (so that theremight be a beginning, man was created, before whom nothing was). The first appearance of thatpassage came in April 1951 in the Denktagebuch. Recording the initial results of her reading ofAugustine’s De civitate Dei, Arendt immediately linked the passage to what was at that momenther contemporaneous study of totalitarianism. In that context, it was the Luxemburgian termSpontaneität that was crucial, for totalitarianism’s eradication (Ausrottung) of human beings ashuman beings was precisely an eradication of their spontaneity. In time, this node of thinkingbecame the point of origin for the Arendtian conception of natality, the capacity for bringingthings into being that made it possible for human communities to begin (and begin again).31 Thisinterest in the human capacity for innovation was, indeed, one of Arendt’s preoccupations in herlater work. There are strong reasons to suspect that the project on judgement, barely begun by thetime of her death in 1975, would also have been focused on the ability to bring new concepts intobeing in the process of distinguishing and deciding upon what is genuinely unprecedented in theparticularities thrown up by history.32

Weimar is all but inescapable in modern intellectual history, and in this instance an interest inpostwar Arendtian political thought necessitates not only an investigation into its origins in inter-war Germany but also a deeper, more explicit engagement with Weimar receptions of rhetoric.In its early moments, Arendt’s theory of judgement was also a gloss on the krinein of Aristotle’sRhetoric (and not so much the phronesis of his Nicomachean Ethics), such that her account of thepolis cannot be fully understood except in reference to the transformation of Heidegger’s evalu-ation of Greek being-in-the-polis between his Summer Semester 1924 lectures on Aristotle’sRhetoric and the 1927 publication of Sein und Zeit. Arendt’s work on the Augustinian conceptionof love must likewise be understood as a continuation of the phenomenology of affect that in 1927Heidegger had traced to – once again – the Rhetoric. These contexts have become considerablymore accessible as a result of the publication in 2002 of Heidegger’s SS 1924 lectures as theGrundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie volume in the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. Twoedited volumes have appeared in the wake of that publication: Heidegger and Rhetoric, editedby Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann and Heidegger über Rhetorik, edited by JosefKopperschmidt.

It was Theodore Kisiel’s great feat of intellectual historical reconstruction in The Genesis ofHeidegger’s Being and Time that showed just how useful the records of Heidegger’s lecturescould be for the purpose of understanding the development of his thought during the long gap inpublication between the Duns Scotus Habilitationsschrift of 1916 and the magnum opus of Seinund 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 Arendtin the Light of Her Dissertation on Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 187.Another important context for Arendt’s 1929 Promotion is the philosophical anthropology of Scheler and Plessner, bothof whom published important works in 1928. On this connection, see, in particular, M. T. Pansera, Antropologiafilosofica: La peculiarità dell’umano 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 tothe concept of natality, those who – like the present author – do not read Japanese should be hoping that TerukazuMorikawa’s Hajimari no Arendt: shussh[omacr ] no shis[omacr ] no tanj[omacr ] (Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2010) will be translated.32 Indeed, there are connections to be forged between Arendt’s first project and her last: ‘while Arendt’s lectures on Kant’sCritique of Judgment are suggestive, they lack the full context of vantage point provided by the bridge of the dissertation’,and ‘the missing link is Arendt’s use of memoria as the “space” between past and future, which is the existential contextfor 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).

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which unfolded an interpretation of the basic Aristotelian concepts of Book 5 in the Metaphysicsthat was centred on the Rhetoric, as ‘an embarrassment of riches which we can hardly begin tocommunicate here’.33 Historians of rhetoric have seized upon the opportunity. Kopperschmidt’sbasic assertions in Heidegger über Rhetorik are that the twentieth century constituted the returnof a rhetorical inquiry that had been repressed and diffused into other disciplines in theseventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that Heidegger’s SS 1924 lecturesconstitute perhaps the great, previously unrecognized, moment of recovery.34 As Temilo vanZantwijk emphasizes in the Kopperschmidt volume, however, what Heidegger recovered was nota techn[emacr ] , ars, or Vermögen but rather, a d[umacr ] namis or Möglichkeit – that is, rhetoric as simply anawareness 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, Heideg-ger turned rhetoric from an art of speaking into an art of listening, or, in fact, an analysis of themanifold ways in which human beings were primordially oriented to others on account of theirdispositions toward listening.36 For Nancy Struever, Heidegger effectively cannibalized rhetoric:he ‘intricates the life capacities – passions (path ), 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 1924lectures 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 bastardizedform of the Aristotelian sense that man was a zo n logon echon. In place of the Greek being whopossessed and was possessed by speech, there was the German who could be defined as a ‘livingbeing who reads the newspapers’. Kisiel believes that the likes of Bourdieu, Marcuse and Arendtread the das Man reinscriptions of this observation in Sein und Zeit without being fully aware ofits rhetorical origins. In fact, being-with-others had, at least initially, been both problem and curefor Heidegger: rhetoric was not only the repetition of commonplaces (such that logos debaseditself into Gerede, ‘idle talk’) but also the innovative – authentic – calibration of speech to situa-tion, which itself required taking up a position relative to commonplaces. Thus, in a developmentand negation of his early Promotion on the philosophy of judgement, Heidegger argued for thevalue of pertinence. In Kisiel’s description,

the uniqueness of the 1924 [‘Ruhr Speech’] is […] its quick dispatch of judgment in the usual sense ofdeclarative (apophantic) statement, traditionally the locus of truth as correspondence through the

33 T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 294.34 Heidegger über Rhetorik, edited by J. Kopperschmidt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 10, 12.35 T. van Zantwijk, ‘Logos bei Heidegger und Aristoteles’, in Heidegger über Rhetorik, 287. One might add that thisunderstanding of rhetorical d[umacr ] namis as Möglichkeit can be related to the broader paradigm shift described by KariPalonen from a conception of politics centred on disciplinarity (and therefore considering issues of whether politics is ascience 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 Möglichkeit. See K. Palonen, Politik als Handlungsbe-griff: Horizontwandel des Politikbegriffs in Deutschland, 1890–1933 (Helsinki: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters,1985).36 D. M. Gross, ‘Being-Moved: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical Ontology’, in Heidegger and Rhetoric, edited byD. M. Gross and A. Kemmann (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 3.37 N. S. Struever, ‘Alltäglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program’, in Heidegger and Rhetoric, 107. WhereasKurt Sontheimer thought that ‘decision’ was ‘ein wesentliches Moment antidemokratischer Denkstruktur’, Struever isthus able to redescribe it as a Heideggerean and Aristotelian prohairesis. Compare K. Sontheimer, AntidemokratischesDenken 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 Heidegger’s Entschlossenheitprimarily in the context of Schmitt’s Entscheidung and Jünger’s Kampf. See C. Graf von Krockow, Die Entscheidung:Eine Untersuchung über Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1958), 81.

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scientific demonstration that ‘lets something be seen’ as it is, in order to get to the more practical andcrucial 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 one’s understanding of that word Urteil. Translate it as ‘proposition’ andone is heading toward analytic philosophy; translate it as ‘utterance’ and one retains an interestin what people call continental philosophy. However, the analytic and continental traditions arecertainly not as radically incompatible as they may sometimes appear. Like Michael Friedman’sParting of the Ways, Edward Skidelsky’s recent work on Ernst Cassirer demonstrates theproximity of Heidegger, Cassirer and Rudolf Carnap. All three were present (the first two as theleading participants) at the famous symposium at Davos in 1929 that, to contemporaries as wellas subsequent observers, seemed to mark a crucial impasse and rupture in the history of Europeanthought.40 Friedman and Skidelsky are at pains to argue both that at the time of the symposiumthe intersections between phenomenology, humanism and logical positivism were significantenough for the discussion to be genuine and also that thereafter these three traditions quicklyfractured to the point of mutual incomprehension and derision. Skidelsky seeks to demonstratethat ‘Cassirer’s enduring interest lies largely in the fact that he was the last great Europeanphilosopher to straddle both of [C. P. Snow’s] two cultures with equal assurance’.41 Whether weinvoke Snow’s two cultures or Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften,however, the danger of simplifying this gulf into unbridgeability is real. In a comparablesentence, Friedman argues that Cassirer’s failure to hold Heidegger and Carnap together indialogue leaves us with the following choice:

we can either, with Carnap, hold fast to formal logic as the ideal of universal validity and confineourselves, accordingly, to the philosophy of the mathematical exact sciences, or we can, withHeidegger, cut ourselves off from logic and ‘exact thinking’ generally, with the result that weultimately 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 ofthe matter is that all three thinkers were interested in how inferential relationships to the world ofexperience begin and are enacted. The still ongoing development of what Popper termed the logicof scientific discovery in 1934 is but one indicator that the ‘Davos intersection’ has not beenirrevocably fractured. Another potent initiative that, effectively, mediates between Heidegger andCarnap (and many other supposedly incompatible projects) is to be found in the work of RobertBrandom.43

38 T. Kisiel, ‘Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt’, in Heidegger and Rhetoric, 133, 142.39 P. Christopher Smith has emphasized similar issues. For him, what Heidegger pointed out was that ‘originally, and inAristotle still, hermeneutics was the process itself of making things clearer in talking about them: ‘As such, logos orspeech’, he says, ‘is privileged insofar as for it alone bringing about aletheuein is possible, i.e., making unhidden whatwas previously hidden and covered up and putting it ‘there’, in the open and at our disposal’.’ On this account, herme-neutics – as act and not art – requires facility in the rhetorical domain of topics. For Smith, ‘original argument’ meansargument that ‘reasons by the “topics”, namely “similarity”, “difference”, “contraries”, “the more and the less”, “the priorand 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 – AnAllegory of Intellectual History’, Modern Intellectual History, 1 (2004), 219–48.41 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 ofthe Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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Discovery, what is more, is precisely the conceptual domain within which Philippe-AlainMichaud thinks we should understand Mnemosyne, an art history composed entirely of imagesthat was left unfinished upon the death of its author, Aby Warburg, in 1929. Warburg’s library inHamburg was a creation that Cassirer once described as ‘dangerous’, something to be avoidedaltogether 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 anattention to symbolic form, Warburg’s art historical preoccupations were very clearly related toCassirer’s project, but, in Michaud’s reconstruction, there is also a striking connection to Heideg-ger’s rhetorical interests in the relationship between motion and affect. Michaud’s claim is thatWarburg was repeatedly focused on what he terms ‘the image in motion’: the early studies ofBotticelli 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 torepresenting the static image as itself dynamic, halted in the midst of a motion, suggesting a kindof articulation over time. Likewise, the later studies of Netherlandish and Florentine portraitureexamined not so much the movements of gesture as the motions of time – ageing and a kind ofBurckhardtian process of sought-after individuation. In a third reprise of the theme of motion, thecorporeal performativity of the sixteenth-century festive pageantry struck Warburg as aDionysian analogue of the Pueblo Indian rituals that he sought out during his travels in the UnitedStates in 1905.45

In Michaud’s analysis, therefore, representing motion was not simply a trick played by theartist on the eyes of the viewer; it was, instead, a concern with the most subtle investments ofpsychological power in physical states. Michaud’s Warburg thus emerges as a connoisseur of thelips: Angelo Poliziano has ‘the full-lipped gourmet’s mouth’ and Luigi Pulci has ‘a thin upper lip,resting of the prominent lower lip with a hint of embitterment’, while Mussolini’s smile has a‘Caesarean malice’. Michaud has certainly learned something when he outdoes Warburg byasking whether the motion on Maria Portinari’s lips is ‘not a smile half drawn but a smile halferased’.46 The smaller these motions (or, alternatively, the more they are the residue of habitualmotions), the more pertinent and revealing they become. Developing an eye for these things, itshould 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 motionscame from and where they were going. The desideratum, expressed in an Aristotelian idiom, wasa 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 whenWarburg compared Florentine intermedi with Native American dance. Thus, in Michaud’s inter-pretation, Warburg’s library and his Mnemosyne project were both, as it were, architecturalattempts to facilitate a practice of discovery. The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg inHamburg was purpose-built to facilitate the forging and reforging of connections and distinctionsin its collections: Warburg would rearrange the contents of the library incessantly in order toexpress relationships of similarity and difference in spatial terms; and he demanded large tablesin the centre of the reading room on which a wide variety of materials might be laid out and

44 Cit. Skidelsky, Cassirer, 90.45 P-A. Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, translated by S. Hawkes (New York: Zone, 2004), 72, 93–5,102, 149, 170.46 Michaud, Aby Warburg, 37, 116, 117, 127.47 Michaud, Aby Warburg, 82.

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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 visuallyasserted. Published in a critical edition (which will eventually include the much anticipatedGrundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde) by Akademie Verlag in2000, the Mnemosyne project gathered together into visual topoi the most diverse materials: ‘artreproductions, advertisements, newspaper clippings, geographical maps, and personal photo-graphs’. 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 ‘theconvolutes [of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk] and the screens [of Warburg’s Mnemosyneproject] suggest the traditional organization of the commonplace book, of classifying remarkablediversity under topoi, compendious argumentative headings’.50 Benjamin becomes, in herreading, a modernist practitioner of the basic rhetorical concern for delineating possibilities that,she argues, was also conspicuous in Hobbes and Vico. Struever’s judgement is vindicated by theinquiry possibilities that her act of ingenium brings into being. The book consisting entirely ofquotations and the art history composed wholly of images do gloss each other, and both are to beunderstood 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 knowthat he took Pausanias’s 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 theymight have been. Moreover, both Warburg and the rhetorical tradition itself were importantpoints of reference for Benjamin in his failed Habilitationsschrift of 1925, the Ursprung desdeutschen Trauerspiels. Max Pensky has emphasized Warburg’s role in framing Benjamin’sconception of melancholy in the Trauerspiel work, and Susan Buck-Morss has argued that theemblem-book (the common-place book’s 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 focusedon developing a critique of all forms of passivity in the aesthetic realm. Warburg may not share the Marxian vocabularythat framed many of these critiques as denunciations of passive consumerism, but the call for an active reception ofartworks was certainly common. See D. C. Durst, Weimar Modernism: Philosophy, Politics, and Culture in Germany1918–1933 (Lanham, MA: Lexington, 2004).49 Michaud, Warburg, 277. Gombrich was right when he concluded that ‘Mnemosyne brings out most clearly whatWarburg meant by the “after-life of antiquity”’ and that this afterlife ‘was not so much a problem of formal traditions asone of collective psychology’ (E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, with a Memoir on the Historyof the Library by F. Saxl (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 307). The conclusion also raises two further lines of inquiry: first, therelationship between Richard Semon’s Mneme (1904), an influence on Warburg, and Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory(1966), indirectly influenced by Warburg; secondly, the tradition in which names are originally the predicates of unknownsubjects that goes back from Warburg’s work, through the lectures he attended by Hermann Usener, themselvesinfluenced by Tito Vignoli’s Mito e scienza, to Vico (whom Vignoli called the pre-eminent theorist of myth). On thissecond issue, Silvia Ferretti confirms that ‘the German translation [of Vignoli’s Mito e scienza] (1880) can still be foundin the psychology section of the Warburg Library with Warburg’s 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, andHistory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 9).50 N. S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 82–3. Struever’scomparison of Warburg and Benjamin can be broadened to include Ernst Robert Curtius among the modernist investiga-tors of the ars topica: ‘a topic is in fact the literary counterpart of the art historian’s motif, and Toposforschung can bethought of as an equivalent to “an art history without names”, a literary iconography. Curtius, therefore, set out to do forliterary history what Aby Warburg, Saxl, and Panofsky had been doing for more than twenty years in art history, and itis with this intention in mind that he dedicated his Europäische Literatur to the memory of Warburg (as well as to GustavGröber)’. See On Four Modern Humanists: Hofmannsthal, Gundolf, Curtius, Kantorowicz, edited by A. R. Evans(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 119–20. On this issue (the famous tension between Curtius and ErichAuerbach notwithstanding), consider Claus Uhlig’s judgement: ‘figura und Typologie in Auerbachs Leben dieselbeFunktion erfüllten wie die berühmten topoi der klassischen Rhetorik für Curtius in seiner Vision historischer Kontinuität’,in Wahrnehmen Lesen Deuten: Erich Auerbachs Lektüre der Moderne, edited by W. Busch and G. Pickerodt (Frankfurt:Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 74.

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Benjamin’s 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 timeas 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 toradical developments in twentieth-century modes of artistic reproduction. Thus, the lexicon ofphotography, montage and journalism structured his early modern interests. (Michaud makes ananalogous 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 linkedBenjamin’s early modern literary studies and his modernist investigations was simply the theoryand practice of criticism – making manifest how it is that art objects work and what they makepossible. Just so, when Terry Eagleton characterized Benjamin’s work as on the way to ‘arevolutionary criticism’, he meant thereby to declare him an heir to Greco-Roman rhetoric, thepolitico-literary criticism of the western tradition par excellence. Eagleton went on to sketch ashort history of rhetoric from Corax to Piscator in order to buttress his point.53 Indeed,Benjamin’s own personal experience as an orator was, one might say, displaced. Bernd Witte haspainted a provocative portrait of Benjamin’s early anti-political politics during his time in theGerman student movement before the First World War. His anarcho-Nietzschean appeal to theBerlin Free Student Group for a kind of para-political ‘inwardness and intensity’ in the WinterSemester of 1913 to 1914 was unsuccessful, but there was a transference of these rhetoricalenergies into the eighty-five radio broadcasts he produced between August 1929 and January1933. In those broadcasts, he acted on a conviction that the new medium was not a novelopportunity to effect belief but rather, a new politico-aesthetic phenomenon, the possibilities andmodes of which needed to be explained performatively to its audience.54

On 23 March 1933, with the passage of the Ermächtigungsgesetz, the Weimar Republic wasconstitutionally suspended. It may be said, however, to have possessed an intellectual historicalafterlife in what A. Dirk Moses has called ‘the Weimar syndrome’. In his recent book, GermanIntellectuals and the Nazi Past, Moses examines historical and political debates in post-warGermany as a series of clashes between what he calls ‘redemptive republicans’ such as JürgenHabermas and ‘integrative republicans’ such as Wilhelm Hennis. He then goes on to define ‘theWeimar 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 Massa-chusetts 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 hecalled 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), 101–13.54 B. Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, translated by J. Rolleston (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UniversityPress, 1997), 29–30, 121. As Witte argued, ‘criticism is to be understood in such a way that it would be the continuationof politics by other means’ (125). Note that Benjamin’s active involvement in explaining the possibilities brought intobeing by radio defends him against Adorno’s accusation that, in the Kunstwerk essay, he was displaying a kind of tech-nological essentialism – in which particular technological forms necessitated particular political forms. An exemplarynarration of the modal complexity involved in writing the history of new media is to be found in Peter Jelavich’s recentbook Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 2006). Media by their very nature bring new possibilities into being, but those possibilities themselves simplyoccasion new moments of decision. For a close reading of some of Benjamin’s radio work, see J. Mehlman, WalterBenjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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516 D. L. MARSHALL

another as the incarnation of Germany’s fatal path to fascism or totalitarianism’.55 In Moses’shighly revealing account, the successive generations of forty-fivers, sixty-eighters and eighty-niners have grappled with the problem of how to fashion a civil society out of the ashes andcrimes of the Third Reich. As he frames it,

the conclusion Habermas drew from Auschwitz was “that the Germans have forfeited the right to basetheir political identity on grounds other than the universal principles of citizenship in whose lightnational traditions are no longer unscrutinized but are appropriated only critically and self-critically.”56

In contrast, Hennis (and other ‘integrative republicans’) sought ‘to recast a culturally and politi-cally (but not völkisch) conceived nation-state as a source of political orientation in the “disinte-grating” conditions of modernity’. One of the implications of such a stance was that a Germancultural 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 particu-larist communitarianism of Hennis so absorbing, in Moses’s staging of it, is the degree to whichboth protagonists share basic presuppositions about the interdependence of republican and rhetor-ical practices even as they come to fundamentally divergent conclusions. Again, the connectioncan be asserted in very precise terms: in the late 1950s, Hennis gave his card catalogue file on therise 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 ideal-ization of the public use of reason on the vision of Immanuel Kant, Hennis instead wrote his 1963account of politics and practical philosophy with the topics of Giambattista Vico in mind.59 Infact, Kantian Öffentlichkeit and Vichian topics were both primarily concerned with the – onceagain rhetorical – concept of sensus communis, and they are not as incompatible as they may, atfirst 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 Weimar’s collapse’ (A. D. Moses, ‘The “WeimarSyndrome” in the Federal Republic of Germany’, in Leben, Tod und Entscheidung: Studien zur Geistesgeschichte derWeimarer 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 thediverging opinions of Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. In his account, while Habermas sought to make technocracyaccountable to a critical public sphere, Luhmann aimed to show why the multiple and ‘subsystemizing’ systems ofmodern society should be permitted to develop their own classificatory codes so as achieve the greatest possible effi-ciency – something that implies independence from extra-systemic (and political) control. In so far as communication isprecisely a modern development of rhetoric (and there are strong arguments that can be made for this supposition), thisdebate too can be understood in rhetorical terms: ‘the Bielefeld–Frankfurt discussion’, between Luhmann and Habermas,‘might be summarized as a critical exchange between two forms of communication-theory, one normative, hermeneuticand 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 betweenWeimar phenomenology and the Bonn republicanism of the postwar era, a heritage – along with Arendt – for Habermas’snormative account of communicative practices (C. Thornhill, Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London:Routledge, 2002), 3, 14). At a broader level still, Thornhill sees the Habermas–Luhmann debate as the latest iteration ina long sequence of debates in the German tradition (dating back at least to the Reformation) on how to ground and/orinstitutionalize 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 Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchung zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft(Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962); W. Hennis, Politik und praktischer Philosophie: eine Studie zur Rekonstruktion derpolitischen 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 republicwas abstract, while Hennis concentrated solely on Vico’s De ratione (newly published by WalterOtto, Fritz Schalk and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1947), missing, therefore, an opportunityto engage more fully with Vico’s creative appropriation of the topical tradition in the Scienzanuova. In fact, topics had been a theory of invention (as Warburg and Benjamin knew), a practiceof innovation based on an awareness of pertinent possibilities.

In sum, Weimar Germany was one of the great collisions between rich intellectual tradition andextreme intellectual urgency, but – in ways that historians are only just beginning to perceive, andstill in a piecemeal fashion – it was also the context for one of the great modernist reinventionsof the rhetorical tradition. The sudden advent of a democratic republic, combined with a strongconviction that there could be no easy application of speech theory to speech practice, sparked afragmented but brilliant series of investigations of an essentially rhetorical nature. Rhetoricalinquiry in Germany, 1918–1933, is therefore fertile territory for future research.

Flint, MichiganKettering University

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