Kirchheimer read Lenin through Schmitt’s categories against SPD constitutionalism

Evidence

Kirchheimer was, like Neumann, a member of the SPD, but he belonged to the Young Socialist wing of it, whereas Neumann could be reckoned as more right of centre. Kirchheimer’s dissertation made it clear that he despised the Social Democrats’ respect for parliamentary democracy and the constitution, and admired the position of the Bolsheviks, which he characterized in terms of Schmitt’s categories of sovereignty and the enemy. The Social Democrats, according to Kirchheimer, believed in `dual progress’, in the idea that the progress of the capitalist economy would correspond to progress in the education of humanity. But Lenin had replaced this doctrine with the doctrine of all-embracing, total struggle. The Social Democrats were fetishizing a state which amounted to less than a sovereign state with a definite enemythat is, merely a constitutional state. Bolshevik Russia, however, was more than a state: it proclaimed class as the sovereign power, it supported the immediately effective myth of world revolution instead of a rational utopia, it had a sovereign concept of dictatorship and a resolute concept of the enemy. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 954

Categorization

• XREF: A striking case of a left theorist importing Schmitt’s anti-liberal categories to defend Bolshevism — a mirror inversion the Institute’s Marxism would later need to distance itself from. — connects to: Kirchheimer framed Bolshevik rule as sovereign over the merely constitutional Social Democratic state — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 954
• QUESTION: How did Kirchheimer later reconcile this Schmittian-Bolshevik admiration with his post-war commitment to constitutional democracy in West Germany?

Broader Connections

• Kirchheimer framed Bolshevik rule as sovereign over the merely constitutional Social Democratic state #exemplifies (0.93) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 954