Twentieth-century German political thought was marked by the persistence, or better the recurrence, of certain concepts and by the polemical dispute about what those concepts meant. It appears to be a striking example of the general proposition that the ‘possibility of communicative breakdown is an ever-present feature, if not indeed a defining characteristic, of political discourse’. This polemical quality was displayed with greater or lesser skill and greater or lesser consciousness by most German political theorists. Carl Schmitt, one of the most adroit polemicists, was even capable of recognising such skill in his opponents, hence the praise offered by the authoritarian critic of the Weimar Republic for the liberal author of the Weimar constitution, Hugo Preuss. As indicated above, Schmitt saw that polemic was not just a defining quality of political discourse but was the defining quality of the political. Yet Schmitt's polemical practice assumed what his aesthetics of violence denied, namely that, as Max Horkheimer put it, ‘To address someone ultimately means to recognise him as the future possible member of an association of free men’.

It is consistent with this insight that the more extreme polemics sought to deny it by excluding their opponents and their opponents' ideas from the national community. Oswald Spengler's denunciation of them as the ‘internal England’ is one example of such a strategy. It took on even more vicious form in the attempt to eradicate the names of Jewish authors from the literature and discourse of the Third Reich.