The Dual State: A Contribution To the Theory of Dictatorship

This is a unique analysis of how the Nazi dictatorship operated, written by a man who lived through it. As a lawyer working in Germany in the 1930s, the author saw how the ordinary workings of the justice system (the normative state) could, at the will of the Nazi authorities, be superseded by decisions dictated by Nazi ideology (the prerogative state). The interesting part is that these state apparatuses coexisted, hence the title of this book. The author gives his explanation of how this came to be and why the normative state was still needed.

Even though the book was published after the war, the analysis does not seem to extend temporally any further than to the author's exile in 1937. I particularly liked the general outline and show more examples of the dual state in operation presented in the first 100 pages of the In fact, I would have liked to read about more court cases where the prerogative state reared its ugly head. In the second half of the book the author moves into less interesting topics as he seeks to somehow contrast the dual state with the theory of natural law and investigates some historical antecedents.

This book is worth reading if you have a theoretical interest in past dictatorships. Something similar is unlikely to be published in the near future, unless some clerk in North Korea is secretly compiling his own manuscript at the time when I write this review. show less

A must read if people want to see first-hand out imperial-corporate capitalism will play out. We have the results, and they were recorded over 70 years ago.