Antiextremismus und wehrhafte Demokratie

The premise that underlies this work is that the Federal Republic of Germany’s political understanding of its own democracy assumes that it distances itself in equal measure from different forms of extremism and is resistant to them. This resistance, however, goes hand in hand with the sovereignty of the people being curtailed. In this book, the author reconstructs how this understanding managed to prevail over other forms of democracy and presents detailed approaches to deconstructing democracy in this anti-extremist and resistant form. Using an analysis of hegemony, he examines key texts since 1945. Moreover, he demonstrates how institutions of political control and certain academic fields (such as research into totalitarianism and extremism) reinforce the aforementioned self-understanding. In doing so, he problematises the increasing tendency to extend constitutional protection outside the parameters of democracy and the inadequate justification for and validation of theoretical approaches to extremism.