Karl Loewenstein


Karl Loewenstein was a German philosopher and political scientist, regarded as one of the prominent figures of Constitutional law in the twentieth century.
His research and investigations into the deep typology of the different constitutions have had some impact on the Western constitutional thought. He studied in his native city of Munich, where he got a doctor's degree in Public law and Political science.
When Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party took power in 1933, he was exiled and went to the United States, the country where he would carry out most of his doctrinal work and writings.

His philosophical and political views

Loewenstein has a clear leaning towards liberal democracy, as shown in the most important book he wrote, "Political Power and the Governmental Process".

Constitutional classification

Original and derived constitutions

Loewenstein states that there are several types of Constitutions, but a true constitution is one that, besides containing essential guarantees and an outline about the organization of the supreme political institutions of a country, also incarnates the deepest values of liberal democracy, as well as the reality of the social group it will be imposed upon. This is what he calls "ontological classification".
Analytically, Loewenstein considers three different kinds of constitutions:
On the other hand, Loewenstein discarded the idea of trying to devise a "perfect theoretical constitution", instead claiming that "an ideal constitution has never existed, and will never exist".

Political systems

Regimes

Loewenstein claims that political regimes are divides into:
According to Loewenstein, this classification not only has to be made looking to the laws that regulate those institutions, but also to the political practices actually observed, because the mere existence of a constitution is not enough to tell whether a certain governments is a democratic or an authoritarian one.

A new tripartite division of power

Loewenstein considered it was extremely difficult to try to change the division of power into the executive, legislative and judicial branches -as established by Montesquieu- which is a sort of "sacred dogma" for the constitutional theory and practice of liberal democracies.
However, he presented a new tripartite division of power into functions.
The most efficient mechanism to divide power and to control the national political decisions is to distribute the main government functions into different "departments", and do the same with their subordinate equivalents in the state, provincial or regional level.
Power distribution means that the different administrative departments are like a watertight compartments that mutually control and limit the otherwise potentially expansive sphere of influence of the others. In the modern parliamentary and presidential republics this is traditionally done through counterweights usually referred to as "checks and balances". Loewenstein considers that this last function is the most important in his views about the tripartite division of the political power, because if it didn't exist the other two would automatically fall apart, as even the reach and implications of the national political decisions couldn't be determined or estimated.

Works