grasped by the intellect", the authoritarian state was the natural order desired by the German people. Politics, Mann argued, was inevitably a commitment to democracy and therefore alien to the German spirit: While scholars have debated whether these formulations should be considered artistic and idealistic, or rather a serious attempt to draw a political analysis of that period, young Mann's writings have been influential on many Conservative Revolutionaries. Mann was accused by the right of watering down his undemocratic views in 1922 after he removed some paragraphs from the republication of Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen ("Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man"), originally released in 1918. In a speech pronounced the same year (Von Deutscher Republik), Mann publicly became a staunch defender of the Weimar Republic and attacked many of the figures associated with the Conservative Revolution such as Oswald Spengler, whom he depicted as intellectually dishonest and irresponsibly immoral. In 1933, he described National Socialism as the politische Wirklichkeit jener konservativen Revolution, that is to say the "political reality of that Conservative Revolution". In 1921, Carl Schmitt published his essay Die Diktatur ("The Dictatorship"), in which he studied the foundations of the recently established Weimar Republic. Comparing what he saw as the effective and ineffective elements of the new constitution, he highlighted the office of the Reichspräsident as a valuable position, essentially due to the power granted to the president by the Article 48 to declare an Ausnahmezustand ("state of emergency"), which Schmitt implicitly praised as dictatorial. Schmitt further advanced in Politische Theologie (1922) that there cannot be any functioning legal order without a sovereign authority. He defined sovereignty as the possibility, or the power, to decide on the triggering of a "state of emergency", in other words a state of exception regarding the law: "There is some person or institution, in a given polity, capable of bringing about a total suspension of the law and then to use extra-legal force to normalize the situation, then that person or institution is the sovereign in that polity." According to him, every government should include within its constitution that dictatorial possibility to allow, when necessary, for faster and more effective decisions than going through parliamentary discussion and compromise. Referring to Adolf Hitler, he later used in 1934 the following formulation to justify the legitimacy of the Night of the Long Knives: Der Führer schützt das Recht ("The leader defends the law"). Front-line socialism Conservative