Law, Politics, and the Transformation of the German Left: Ernst Fraenkel and the Theory of "Collective Democracy"

During the 1950s, the German left went through the most dramatic transformation in its history: within a decade, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was transformed from a class-based party that called for neutrality in international politics and opposed Germany's Western integration, to a pluralist, anti-Marxist party loyal to NATO. Through the writings and work of Ernst Fraenkel, this paper will offer a new look at this transformation. As one of the most influential Socialist intellectuals during the 1950s, Fraenkel was a key agent in renouncing Marxism as the basis for Socialist politics, and played a central role in opening the SPD to cross-class cooperation. As an employee of the U.S. State Department in Germany, he was also a central mediator between the U.S. establishment and many Socialist organizations. This paper will argue, however, that these actions and the networks they created were not merely the result of U.S. pressure as part of its Cold War campaigns in Europe. Rather, their intellectual origins lay in internal Socialist debates from the Weimar period, about the nature of the future post-Capitalist society and the relations between Socialist theory and the bourgeois state. It will uncover Fraenkel's forgotten Weimar-era theory of “Collective Democracy,” in which he sought to redefine the intellectual core of Socialism, and called for a cross-class front that would destroy Communism. Motivated by this theory, Fraenkel and an entire network of Socialist activists sought to reform the SPD in the late 1920s, and only continued their efforts after WWII. Exploring how Weimar-era political theory and traditions were both absorbed and shaped U.S. Cold War policies, the paper will argue that the engagement of the United States with the German Left was successful only because it relied on local agents, who were motivated by their own, much earlier intellectual reformatory agendas.