HUGO PREUSS’S CONCEPT OF THE <i>VOLK</i>: CRITICAL CONFUSION OR SOPHISTICATED CONCEPTION?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hugo Preuss, Germany’s Interior Minister during the revolution of 1918–9, was the chief influence on the shape of the Weimar Constitution (1919–33). In his writings and constitutional commentaries over the years that followed, he developed a theory of politics that aimed to bridge the gap between revolution and constitution by institutionalizing the power of the ‘people.’ From his critics’ point of view, the result was an eclectic mixture of different concepts of the ‘people.’ The Volk was sometimes a substantive, unified subject – the nation as real, willing entity; at other times, it was a disunited plurality of voices; at still other times it was the product of a procedure for creating laws and electing leaders. And last but not least, Preuss also referred to a set of historical and cultural notions that contributed to a sense of national belonging. I argue that Preuss provided an account of revolutionary democracies that was both realistic and viable precisely because it remained, in its basic concepts, fragmented and contradictory – as indeed the ‘people’ in a democracy, as a plurality of voices able to express itself in different institutional ways, in fact are. Preuss’s aim of emancipating civil society through a constitutional revolution while guarding against the myth of the state and the myth of the univocal Volk foreshadows the aims of the ‘self-limiting’ revolutionaries of 1989–90.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".