Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:35:33.765Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Abdication, Collective Alignment, and the Problem of Directionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

In Ruling Oneself Out Ivan Ermakoff (2008) addresses the puzzle of what amounts to collective political suicide: why would any constitutional body pass legislation that in effect cedes all its power to another entity—an autocrat? Constitutional rule rules itself out, closing off any pathway back to constitutional rule. Ermakoff explores this unusual but not unique development in two cases of the utmost significance for World War II: the March 1933 decision by the German Reichstag to give power to Adolf Hitler to modify the Weimer constitution without further recourse to parliament, and the French National Assembly’s decision in Vichy in July 1940 to transfer all state powers to Marshall Philippe Pétain.

Ermakoff has woven a fabric of many threads—some historical, some methodological, some theoretical—drawn together in complex patterns. His analysis begins by artfully turning what in many books would be a historiographical review of previous work into a deep and thorough consideration of three alternative explanations of abdication.

Type
Special Section: Politics, Collective Uncertainty, and the Renunciation of Power
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ermakoff, Ivan (2008) Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, John R. (1999) Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar