Power Plus Persuasion: The Anatomy of Kennedy’s Housing Order

We examine the influence of various political actors on the substance and timing of presidential orders. Specifically, we analyze President John F. Kennedy’s decision to issue E. O. 11063, which directed the federal bureaucracy to eliminate discrimination in the sale or lease of residential property overseen by the federal government. We show that this order did not result solely from Kennedy’s policy preferences; rather, it was a product of persuasion by several political actors who coaxed Kennedy to act. This reinforces previous findings that the president’s power of the pen is often conditioned by the informal political costs of unilateral executive action.     

‘Germany’s salvation’: Carl Schmitt’s teleological history of the Second Reich

Although Schmitt’s enthusiastic conversion to National Socialism is well known, his short history of the German Kaiserreich, published in 1934, remains neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This article contextualizes Schmitt’s narrative through the National Socialist conception of history and its accompanying teleology leading to the formation of the Third Reich. By placing Schmitt’s historical text in conversation with his earlier Staat, Bewegung, Volk, this article argues that Schmitt appropriated the history of the Kaiserreich to construct liberalism as a social pathology which could only be cured through the ‘concrete state theory’ he outlined in Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Furthermore, this article argues that Schmitt’s history relied heavily on propagandistic clichés of the Third Reich and thereby functioned as a rhetorical legitimation of Hitler’s rise to power.