Weimar’s constitution weakened workers by obscuring the primacy of property rights.

Evidence

For Neumann and his Social Democratic colleagues in Berlin, Ernst Fraenkel, Otto Kahn-Freund and Martin Draht, what mattered was to exhaust the possibilities offered by the Weimar constitution. But for Kirchheimer what mattered was to understand that the constitution was not an opportunity but a trap. The constitution obscured awareness of the advantages of constitutionally guaranteed bourgeois property over the constitutionally guaranteed demands of the working class; it weakened the workers’ will to realize what they had demanded; and it encouraged a passive observation of events while the ruling classes regained their supremacy. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 252

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Pakty of juridical guarantees as a pacifying trap for the working class is a densely counterintuitive institutional mechanism worth sitting with.
• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School’s critique of liberal legal forms (Neumann’s rule of law work) the reader has likely already logged.