“At the beginning of this book,” Ernst Kantorowicz wrote in the preface to The King's Two Bodies, “stands a conversation held twelve years ago with my friend Max Radin (then John H. Boalt Professor of Law, at Berkeley) in his tiny office in Boalt Hall, brimful floor to ceiling and door to window of books, papers, folders, notes—and life.”1 The conversation the two men had that day centered on Kantorowicz's amusement at receiving a mailing from The Order of St Benedict, Inc. “To a scholar coming from the European Continent and not trained in the refinements of Anglo-American legal thinking,” Kantorowicz wrote, “nothing could have been more baffling than to find the abbreviation Inc., customary with business and other corporations, attached to the venerable community founded by St. Benedict on the rock of Montecassino in the very year in which Justinian abolished the Platonic academy in Athens.” Kantorowicz thus traced the origins of his magnum opus to an amusing tale about a mailing from an American Benedictine abbey and a stimulating conversation between two scholars on the Berkeley campus. But what Kantorowicz accomplished with this opening—in part by reminding his reader of his European erudition—was to place his study in a realm very different from that occupied by his first immense volume of 1927, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite.

Rosa Luxemburg's commitment to democratic politics stands as her most pronounced intellectual legacy. Her rhetoric, rarely mundane, becomes especially compelling and powerful when she invokes the creative potential of human beings to order their own affairs, the lifeblood of society pulsing through the actions of ordinary people. Especially her famed writings on the Russian Revolution have served as the intellectual wellsprings for an alternative socialist politics beginning with Paul Levi (her successor as head of the Communist party of Germany) in 1922 and continuing through the entire history of the twentieth- century Left. Written within months of the Bolshevik Revolution and while she still languished in prison, the oft-cited passages offer some of the finest expressions of her democratic sensibilities. In the margins she wrote what would become one of her most famous passages, the central phrase of which— “Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden”— was unfurled at the Liebknect-Luxemburg counterdemonstration in January 1988 in the German Democratic Republic and became the clarion call of the opposition in its early phase.

On 29 December 1918 Gustav Noske was appointed as a People's Commissar and charged with command of the armed forces in Germany. Within days Noske was confronted with an armed in surrection in Berlin, the so-called Spartacist Uprising, and subsequent revolutionary outbreaks in Bremen, Braunschweig, and the Ruhr, where sympathy for the events in Berlin existed. Relying on volunteer units, the Free Corps (drawn from war veterans, students, and the middle classes), Noske developed a powerful army on which he could rely to suppress the revolutionary violence from the Left. Using military force and martial law, he reestablished order throughout Germany in 1919 and 1920. The results of the so-called Noskepolitik were at best mixed. Mass movements based on the councils (Räte), often identified as “bolshevism’ by Noske and his contemporaries, were indeed suppressed, but the price was very high: counterrevolution and right-wing terror developed to the point that massive protests were provoked among wide segments of the working class. Bloodshed ensued, including the political murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by members of the Free Corps. Many workers became alienated from the newly formed Weimar Republic, while the Reichswehr drifted into hostility toward the young democracy, and some units joined in the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in March 1920. Noske, already under serious criticism from his own party, the Social Democrats, was forced to resign because of his inability to control the army and guarantee its loyalty to the Republic.