Carl Joachim Friedrich was a German-American professor and political theorist. His writings on law and constitutionalism made him one of the world's leading political scientists in the post-World War II period. He is one of the most influential scholars of totalitarianism.
Biography
Born on June 5, 1901, in Leipzig, the site of the first significant defeat of the Napoleonic armies, Friedrich was the son of renowned professor of medicine Paul Leopold Friedrich, the inventor of the surgical rubber glove, and a Prussian countess of the von Bülow family. He attended the Gymnasium Philippinum from 1911 to 1919, where he received an elite German secondary education focusing on classical languages and literature. Friedrich studied under Alfred Weber, the 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 the Belgian coal mines. Friedrich's family had strong ties to the United States. His brother, Otto Friedrich, went on to become an industrialist prominent in the German rubber industry. Both brothers lived and studied in America on and off immediately after World War I, but Carl elected to remain in the United States and Otto to return to Germany. They temporarily broke off relations during the 1940s because of Otto's allegiance to the Nazi party and 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 Exchange Service, through which he first met the love of his life, Lenore Pelham, also a writer and then a student at Rockford College, outside Chicago. The two later married. In 1926, he was appointed as a lecturer in Government at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. from Heidelberg in 1930. When Hitler came to power, he decided to remain in the United States and become a naturalized citizen. He was appointed Professor of Government at Harvard in 1936. Friedrich's main areas of thought were the problems of leadership 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 another 22. In the 1930s, Professor Friedrich also played a leading role, with one of his students, the then-unknown David Riesman, by his side, in efforts to help Jewish scholars, lawyers, and journalists who were fleeing Nazi Germany and other Fascist regimes resettle in the United States. He persuaded one of them, the pianist Rudolf Serkin, to give a concert at his farm in Brattleboro, Vermont, an event which led to the establishment of the Marlboro Music Festival. An expert on German constitutional law and the conditions surrounding its breakdown, Friedrich supported representative democracy. He strongly opposed direct democracy, however, particularly the use of referendums, as leading to totalitarianism. He stressed the necessity for maintaining the rule of law, supplemented by a strong infrastructure of civil institutions, and was highly suspicious of grass-roots popular movements. During World War II, Friedrich helped found the School of Overseas Administration to train officers for military work abroad and served as its director from 1943 to 1946. He also served on the Executive Committee of the Council for Democracy, concerned with convincing the American people of the necessity for fighting totalitarianism and with strengthening national morale. Friedrich, who was arguably the most knowledgeable scholar in his field of his time, was endowed with a healthy self-regard. Indeed, some of his colleagues at Harvard regarded him as a "somewhat hybristic person who was overly confident of his own abilities." Friedrich was the author of an article "Poison in Our System" for the June 1941 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, criticizing Songs For John Doe, an album of songs against Roosevelt's peacetime draft, by the Almanac Singers, who included the then twenty-one-year-old Pete Seeger, performing under the pseudonym 'Pete Bowers'. Friedrich was apparently as alarmed by the potential for uncontrolled spread of such topical songs as he was by their content, and opined that "mere" legal suppression would be an inadequate antidote, calling for the establishment of civilian pressure groups to take cultural countermeasures:
These recordings are distributed under the innocuous appeal: "Sing out for Peace". Yet they are strictly subversive and illegal... The three records sell for one dollar and you are asked to "play them in your home, play them in your union hall, take them back to your people." Probably some of these songs fall under the criminal provisions of the Selective Service Act, and to that extent it is a matter for the Attorney-General. But you never can handle situations of this kind democratically by mere suppression. Unless civic groups and individuals will make a determined effort to counteract such appeals by equally effective methods, democratic morale will decline.
Friedrich's concept of a "good democracy" rejected basic democracy as totalitarian. Some of the assumptions of Friedrich's theory of totalitarianism, 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 as the "creation and preservation of robust institutions". This can be seen as influencing his work on the creation of Germany's States' constitutions. His best guess as to when this might occur was the year 2000.
