Hugo Preuss’s Concept of the Volk: Critical confusion or sophisticated conception?

Hugo Preuss, Germany’s Interior Minister during the revolution of 1918–9, was the chief influence on the shape of the Weimar Constitution (1919–33). In his writings and constitutional commentaries over the years that followed, he developed a theory of politics that aimed to bridge the gap between revolution and constitution by institutionalizing the power of the ‘people.’ From his critics’ point of view, the result was an eclectic mixture of different concepts of the ‘people.’ The Volk was sometimes a substantive, unified subject – the nation as real, willing entity; at other times, it was a disunited plurality of voices; at still other times it was the product of a procedure for creating laws and electing leaders. And last but not least, Preuss also referred to a set of historical and cultural notions that contributed to a sense of national belonging. I argue that Preuss provided an account of revolutionary democracies that was both realistic and viable precisely because it remained, in its basic concepts, fragmented and contradictory – as indeed the ‘people’ in a democracy, as a plurality of voices able to express itself in different institutional ways, in fact are. Preuss’s aim of emancipating civil society through a constitutional revolution while guarding against the myth of the state and the myth of the univocal Volk foreshadows the aims of the ‘self-limiting’ revolutionaries of 1989–90.