Felix Somary’s 1952 essay, his political testament, is a diagnosis of democracy’s self-reversal. It argues that the West tried to universalize not only freedom but sovereignty—unlimited power—and thereby strengthened the very state it meant to restrain. The opening paradox gives the thesis:
Die drei großen Ideenbewegungen Europas haben zu Resultaten geführt, die den Absichten ihrer Schöpfer diametral entgegengesetzt waren und sind.
English translation: The three great movements of ideas in Europe have led to results that were, and are, diametrically opposed to the intentions of their creators.
Part A reconstructs this paradox from medieval limits on authority through English liberalism, American independence, and the French Revolution. Somary’s key move is to split the revolutionary inheritance into competing lines: liberal limitation of state power; Jacobin primacy of politics, state ownership, and governmental irresponsibility; physiocratic-technocratic planning; and Babeuf’s communism. Liberty and equality are not natural allies. Once detached from property, independent professions, and legal restraint, equality becomes the idiom of centralized power, while popular sovereignty becomes a legitimating fiction:
Sind die Völker wirklich Souveräne? Nein.
English translation: Are the peoples truly sovereign? No.
Part B makes mass war the decisive transformer of modern society. War is not a mere interruption of democracy but the process that habituates populations to command, rationing, censorship, inflation, conscription, collective guilt, and bureaucratic rule. It lowers resistance to the state by turning emergency into routine:
Der Krieg uniformiert Gedanken und Sprache, Nahrung und Kleidung, Leben und Sterben.
English translation: War puts a uniform on thought and speech, food and clothing, living and dying.
Thus Somary explains the twentieth century as the passage from Rechtsstaat to Machtstaat. Political murder becomes ordinary, enemy peoples and internal groups are treated as collectively rightless, the planned economy migrates from war into peace, and state paper money permits silent confiscation. His juridical contrast is stark:
Den Rechtsstaat charakterisiert die Begrenzung, das Maß; den Machtstaat die Unbegrenztheit, das Totale.
English translation: The Rechtsstaat is characterized by limitation, by measure; the power-state by unlimitedness, by the total.
This analysis also structures his geopolitics. National self-determination, meant as democratic liberation, fragments Europe and makes it vulnerable to Russian domination. The United States becomes, against its own self-understanding, the leader of the “right democracies,” yet its presidency concentrates vast power in an office not formed for world rule. The Soviet dictator, conversely, fuses czarist autocracy with Jacobin egalitarian rhetoric.
Parts C and D give Somary’s sociology of dependence. Democracy requires citizens independent of the state and states independent of external pressure; both are eroded by war debts, taxation, inflation, welfare claims, and administrative expansion. The “Sozialgesetze der verkehrten Proportion” condense this into aphoristic laws. The first is also the book’s political anthropology:
Je stärker die Gewalt konzentriert ist, desto geringer ist die Verantwortung.
English translation: The more strongly power is concentrated, the smaller is responsibility.
These laws explain why expanded rights may go undefended, why larger states diminish popular influence, why harsher regimes often provoke less resistance, and why multiplying laws can destroy living law. Somary is not merely anti-communist; he is anti-illusionist. He sees liberal, socialist, nationalist, and technocratic slogans alike as dangerous when they conceal the growth of dependence.
The final section compares communism with the “right democracies.” Somary denies Bolshevism ethical or economic superiority and attributes its effectiveness to disciplined coercion and its ability to exploit egalitarian resentment:
Die Stärke des Bolschewismus liegt weder in der Ethik noch in der Dogmatik oder gar in der Wirtschaftsorganisation, sie beruht auf Macht und auf ihr allein.
English translation: The strength of Bolshevism lies neither in ethics nor in doctrine, still less in economic organization; it rests on power, and on power alone.
Against this, the Swiss model shows what real democracy needs: small scale, limited competences, local responsibility, militia, legal continuity, and a population trained in freedom. But Somary sharply rejects democratic export by conquest:
Soll Demokratie Bestand haben, so darf sie nicht von außen – am wenigsten von einem Feind von gestern – in ein Land gebracht werden, sie muß organisch entstehen.
English translation: If democracy is to endure, it must not be brought into a country from outside—least of all by a former enemy; it must arise organically.
The essay’s relevance lies in this theory of limits. It treats democracy not as voting plus moral vocabulary, but as a fragile social order requiring property, independent professions, courts, fiscal restraint, sound money, and resistance to the cult of state power. Its prognosis is that, without restored limits on sovereignty, emergency rule, and monetary-financial expropriation, popular sovereignty becomes the mask of mass dependency.
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