A WARNING OUT OF TIME

How autocrats create spheres of lawlessness

- BY AZIZ HUQ

ILLUSTRATION BY RICARDO TOMÁS

On September 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of fascism packed his suitcases and fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous two years. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin at the time, the catalyst for its author's flight.

The man fleeing that day was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel. He completed his manuscript two years later at the University of Chicago (where I teach), publishing it as The Dual State, with the modest subtitle A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.

Fraenkel offered a simple, yet powerful, picture of how the constitutional and legal foundations of the Weimar Republic eroded, and were replaced by strongman-style rule in which the commands of the Nazi Party and its leader became paramount. His perspective was not grounded in abstract political theory; it grew instead from his experience as a Jewish lawyer in Nazi Berlin representing dissidents and other disfavored clients. Academic in tone, The Dual State sketches a template of emerging tyranny distilled from bloody and horrifying experience.