Friedrich, Carl Joachim b.June 5, 1901; Leipzig, Saxony d. September 19, 1984; Lexington, Massachusetts
German-born scholar, most of whose long career was at Harvard University, but who spent much time in Germany before and after the Third Reich.
Through Carl Friedrich, German scholarship in the humanities and social sciences was introduced to the United States for several decades, and after World War II, he brought American approaches to politics and government to Germany— but with strong, generally unacknowledged, German roots.
Best known for his work in the field of comparative politics and government, Friedrich’s many books include (with Taylor Cole) Responsible Bureaucracy: A Study of the Swiss Civil Service (1932), Constitutional Government and Democracy (1941), and (with Zbigniew K. Brzezinski) Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956).Friedrich’s father was professor of surgery at the University of Leipzig. His mother, a von Bulow, came from an aristocratic family. He was the oldest of four children. World War I dealt a severe blow to the Friedrichs. The father died in a military hospital, apparently overworked by his surgical duties. Friedrich began his university studies in medicine but switched after a few semesters to social sciences and economics. He was active in the bourgeois German youth movement, a powerful force in Germany from the 1890s into the 1930s. In 1922 he undertook a trip to the United States in order to establish contacts with American academic youth. His experiences in the United States led to the founding of a major precursor of the German Academic Exchange Service. Returning to the United States the next year, he was soon to spend more time there than in Germany. In 1924 he married an American, Lenore Pelham. In 1925 he submitted his doctoral dissertation at Heidelberg University. His mentor was Alfred Weber, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and prominent brother of the great Max Weber.
Friedrich hoped for a position at Heidelberg, but his ambitions were blocked by a series of problems, of which one was that he was not actually granted the doctorate until 1930. In the meantime, his contacts in the United States secured him an untenured post in Harvard University’s Department of Government.His academic rise there was rapid; he became a full professor while still in his midthirties.
Often Friedrich is incorrectly assumed to have been a refugee from Nazi Germany. Since he was neither Jew nor leftist—and many emigres from Nazi Germany were both—he was not automatically considered an opponent by the Nazis. But like numerous other German-born scholars in the United States during World War II, many of whom were emigres, he was involved in the war effort in a way that drew upon his special skills. Beginning in 1943, he taught in a school to train U.S. personnel for military government in Germany and Japan, and later he was involved in postwar military government. He has been credited with participating in the drafting of the Marshall Plan (1947). He returned frequently to Europe, especially Heidelberg, to lecture and teach. Germans have often seen him as one of the founders—or refounders—of empirically based political science in Germany.
He is best known for his exposition of the conservative theory of totalitarianism: that the similarities between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia far outweigh the differences. This thesis has led to much heated debate, some of it very fruitful. The fame of his book on totalitarianism and the important role played by this concept in the cold war have unfortunately diverted attention from some of Friedrich’s most interesting and challenging work: his early scholarship on the political theorist Johannes Althusius (1557—1638) and his mid- to late career work on the concept of the “baroque.” Althusius is important in the early modern development of the notion of the sovereignty of the people, a concept used retrospectively to justify the revolt of the Netherlands against the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century.
Friedrich’s scholarship on Althusius includes editions of his works. When Friedrich began working on Althusius, “baroque” was a label applied mainly to the history of architecture and the visual arts, but eventually the term was to be applied, as the great nineteenthcentury historian Jacob Burckhardt did with his concept of the “Renaissance,” to almost every aspect of European activity, culture, thought, music, art, and politics. We are indebted to Friedrich for a masterly exploration and synthesis of attempts to describe every major aspect of an epoch as “baroque.” This achievement is embodied in his Age of the Baroque, 1610—1660 (1952), published in the famous series “The Rise of Modern Europe,” edited by the prominent Harvard historian William L. Langer.Walter Struve
See also American Occupation Zone; Foreign Policy (U.S., 1949-1955), West Germany in
References and Further Reading
Daalder, Hans, ed. Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession. London: Pinter, 1997.
Lietzmann, Hans J. Politikwissenschaft im “Zeitalter der Diktaturen”. Die Entwicklung der Totalitarismustheorie Carl Joachim Friedrichs. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1999.