The end of the First World War brought with it the collapse of the two German regimes and the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. The monarchic principle that Franz Josef had proclaimed as the source of German greatness evaporated with remarkable speed. The point was not lost on Hugo Preuss: ‘The suddenness with which the change took place, which set aside with a single blow 22 dynasties in a Germany considered as especially monarchist, is, however, so astonishing that one can understand the suspicious doubt about the permanence and fundamental character of the rapid transformation’. Preuss went on to explain that the collapse of the dynastic order was less surprising than it seemed, for the grip of this order on Germany had already been hollowed out. Especially in retrospect, his comments readily seem to have a different, prophetic meaning; for, although the monarchy was finished as a form of government, both the Weimar Republic and the Austrian Republic were of short-lived duration, and this has often been traced to the incompleteness of the break with the past which took place in 1918. Even during the short life of these republics, the extent of the break with the past was one of the issues that divided German political theorists.

The new republics, especially the Weimar Republic, were contested democracies facing critics from the right and the left. Both constitutions were compromises. Both were the product of political conflict that threw the role of professional politicians and the concept of politics into sharp relief. That does not mean that the old pretence of adopting a standpoint above parties had disappeared. It was still necessary for Gustav Radbruch to complain of the hypocrisy even of those involved in party politics, for whom politics ‘belongs to the things one does but does not willingly talk about’.