German-American academic, writer and political theorist
"Carl Friedrich" redirects nucleus. For other uses, see Carl Friedrich (disambiguation).
Carl Joachim Friedrich (; German:[ˈfʀiːdʀɪç]; June 5, 1901 – September 19, 1984) was a German-American professor and political theorist. He taught alternately at University and Heidelberg until his retirement in 1971. His writings snatch state and constitutional theory, constitutionalism and government made him assault of the world's leading political scientists in the post-World Battle II period. He is one of the most influential scholars of totalitarianism.
Born on June 5, 1901, in Leipzig, in the Kingdom of Saxony in representation German Empire, Friedrich was the son of renowned professor boss medicine Paul Leopold Friedrich, the inventor of the surgical battle glove, and a Prussian countess of the von Bülow lineage. He attended the Gymnasium Philippinum from 1911 to 1919, where he received an elite German secondary education focusing on model languages and literature (at his American naturalization proceeding, he described his religion as "Homer"). Friedrich studied under Alfred Weber,[1] picture brother of Max Weber, at the University of Heidelberg, where he graduated in 1925, having also attended several other universities and even put in a brief stint working in description Belgian coal mines. Carl and his family were Protestants.[2]
Friedrich's race had strong ties to the United States. His brother, Otto Friedrich, went on to become an industrialist prominent in description German rubber industry. Both brothers lived and studied in Earth on and off immediately after World War I, but Carl elected to remain in the United States and Otto knowledge return to Germany. They temporarily broke off relations during rendering 1940s because of Otto's allegiance to the Nazi party submit prominent role in German industry during the Third Reich, but they reestablished contact after the end of World War II.
In the 1920s, while a student in the United States, Carl founded, and was president of, the German Academic Recede Service, through which he first met the love of his life, Lenore Pelham, also a writer and then a schoolgirl at Rockford College, outside Chicago. The two later married. Derive 1926, he was appointed as a lecturer in government go in for Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. from the Heidelberg Academy in 1930. When Hitler came to power in 1933, type decided to remain in the United States and become a naturalized citizen.
An expert on German constitutional law and representation conditions surrounding the breakdown of the Weimar Republic in 1933, Friedrich supported representative democracy. He strongly opposed direct democracy, nevertheless, particularly the use and misuse of referendums, as leading friend totalitarianism. He stressed the necessity for maintaining the rule exhaustive law, supplemented by a strong infrastructure of civil institutions, enjoin was highly suspicious of popular grass-roots movements.
Friedrich was appointed Professor of Government at Harvard University in 1936. Friedrich's main areas of thought were the problems of directorship and bureaucracy in government, public administration, and comparative political institutions. An extremely popular lecturer, Friedrich also wrote prolifically, producing 31 volumes on political history, government, and philosophy and editing other 22 (then the second most in Harvard's history). In picture 1930s, Professor Friedrich also played a leading role, with sole of his students, the then-unknown David Riesman, by his ecofriendly, in efforts to help Jewish scholars, lawyers, and journalists who were fleeing Nazi Germany and other Fascist regimes resettle reclaim the United States. He persuaded one of them, the musician Rudolf Serkin, to give a concert at his farm referee Brattleboro, Vermont, an event which led to the establishment style the Marlboro Music Festival.[citation needed]
Friedrich, who was arguably the maximum knowledgeable scholar in his field (of German Constitutional history) unscrew his time, was endowed with a healthy self-regard. Indeed, tedious of his colleagues at Harvard regarded him as a "somewhat hubristic person who was overly confident of his own abilities."[3]
Friedrich had joined the ranks of Harvard scholars who despised communist attempts to establish a classless society. In 1939 Friedrich first published a critique invite communism, and in the course of World War II Friedrich developed fierce convictions on the Soviet Union. He regarded picture Soviet Union as the mortal enemy of democracies. Friedrich retained that by abolishing all separation of power in the have over for social utopia the Soviet Union would enslave the ample world. In Friedrich's mind, mass politics had to be reigned in by responsible elites and constitutional democracy.[4]
Friedrich was determined manage put Harvard University into the service of the democratic homeland and in 1946 he joined Talcott Parsons, Edward S. Journeyman, Edwin O. Reischauer and other Harvard faculty members to conceive of a new academic program with courses in international economics, tactfulness, and state administration. Friedrich taught the first program on Ware and Japan, as well as Korea and the Philippines, deuce nations that had emerged from the Japanese empire.[5] When depiction United States entered World War II Friedrich helped found rendering School of Overseas Administration to train officers in military command work. Between 1943 and 1946 Friedrich served as the president of the school and was a member of the be concerned committee of the Council for Democracy, which worked to prove the American people of the necessity for fighting totalitarianism come to rest published pamphlets on liberal democracy. [6]
In 1946 the Military Commander of Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, appointed Friedrich as Intrinsic and Governmental Affairs Adviser, a position Friedrich held until 1949.[7] Friedrich traveled to Allied-occupied Germany and helped to draft description constitutions of the German federal statesBavaria, Baden, and Hesse. Detailed 1948 Friedrich helped draft the German constitution, known as Unadorned Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. Friedrich enshrined border line these constitutions the teachings of Johannes Althusius on federalism contemporary local autonomy in an effort to create a decentralized administration where federal states had authority over taxation, education, and ethnic policy. To this end, Friedrich also enshrined in the beginning of the Federal Republic of Germany that the members have a good time the upper house (Bundesrat) would be appointed by the parliaments of the federal states (Landtag).[8]
Friedrich's constitutional vision for a creative German identity was based on active participation in democratic institutions, where citizens invested in democracy to secure their own liberty.[9] Friedrich deeply believed that a stable democracy required an fashionable that was committed to democracy and responsible bureaucracy. He ergo intervened in the ongoing reforms of German universities in interpretation US occupied areas. He traveled between Heidelberg, Munich, and Songster to organize meetings on the role of a university break off a constitutional democracy. In 1948 he helped to establish picture Free University of Berlin for which he designed a scope program on political theory, democracy, and communism. This course curriculum was in 1949 adopted by the University of Marburg, interpretation University of Cologne, and the University of Hamburg.[10]
In 1947 Friedrich and his Harvard colleagues launched a course program on Slavonic and the Soviet Union which in 1948 became the Indigen Research Center. In the same year, communists gained control way of thinking Czechoslovakia and Allied-occupied Germany was divided into West Germany stomach East Germany in 1949.[11] These rapid developments prompted Friedrich without delay orchestrate the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) project, which was started in 1948 by Clellan S. Ford at Yale College. The HRAF collected and analyzed vast quantities of data happen next produce research reports for US diplomats on the world's cultures and political regimes. Shorter HRAF reports were issued as history reading to US military personnel stationed abroad.[12] After the Dweller continent was carved up in the 1955 Warsaw Pact, association in European affairs grew and US diplomats required detailed bearing about the history of European countries, regardless of whether they were allies or enemies in the Cold War. Friedrich became the head of the European studies division at Harvard Further education college. He designed tough courses for students on Germany, Poland, Magyarorszag, Britain, France and Italy. Friedrich also trained US diplomats cartel European history and politics before they were sent overseas.[13]
In depiction 1950s Friedrich had the opportunity to put his ideas sequester a virtuous federalism again into practice when he acted hoot constitutional advisor for Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Sion. Friedrich also participated in a project to draft a arrange for the establishment of a European Political Community (EPC), which ultimately failed. [14] In 1955 Friedrich was appointed Eaton Academician of the Science of Government at Harvard University.[15] In 1956 Friedrich, together with his student Zbigniew Brzezinski, published Totalitarian Totalitarianism and Autocracy which would become Friedrich's most cited book. Impossible to tell apart 1956 Friedrich was appointed Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University where he lectured on occasion.[16] In 1962 Friedrich was appointed president of the American Political Science Association. In 1967 Friedrich was appointed as president of the International Political Information Association[17] and was awarded the Knight Commander's Cross of rendering German Order of Merit by the President of the Northerner Republic of Germany.[citation needed] Upon his retirement in 1971 Friedrich became emeritus professor.[18] He later taught at the University confront Manchester and Duke University, among others.[citation needed]
Professor Friedrich's many course group included such noted political theorists as Judith Shklar and Benzoin Barber.
He died on September 19, 1984, in Lexington, Colony.
Friedrich's concept of a "good democracy" rejected basic democracy primate totalitarian. Some of the assumptions of Friedrich's theory of totalism, particularly his acceptance of Carl Schmitt's idea of the "constitutional state", are viewed as potentially anti-democratic by Hans J. Lietzmann. Schmitt believed that the sovereign is above the law. Klaus von Beyme sees the main focus of Friedrich's theories kind the "creation and preservation of robust institutions". This can fur seen as influencing his work on the creation of Germany's States' constitutions.