Carl Joachim Friedrich (; ; June 5, 1901 – September 19, 1984) was a German-American professor and political theorist. He taught alternately at Harvard and Heidelberg until his retirement in 1971. His writings on state and constitutional theory, constitutionalism and government made him one of the world's leading political scientists in the post-World War II period. He is one of the most influential scholars of totalitarianism. Biography Early years in Germany: 1901–1936 Born on June 5, 1901, in Leipzig, in the Kingdom of Saxony in the German Empire, Friedrich was the son of renowned professor of medicine Paul Leopold Friedrich, the inventor of the surgical rubber glove, and a Prussian countess of the von Bülow family. He attended the Gymnasium Philippinum from 1911 to 1919, where he received an elite German secondary education focusing on classical languages and literature (at his American naturalization proceeding, he described his religion as "Homer"). Friedrich studied under Alfred Weber, the brother of Max Weber, at the University of Heidelberg, where he graduated in 1925, having also attended several other universities and even put in a brief stint working in the Belgian coal mines. Carl and his family were Protestants. Friedrich's family had strong ties to the United States. His brother, Otto Friedrich, went on to become an industrialist prominent in the German rubber industry. Both brothers lived and studied in America on and off immediately after World War I, but Carl elected to remain in the United States and Otto to return to Germany. They temporarily broke off relations during the 1940s because of Otto's allegiance to the Nazi party and prominent role in German industry during the Third Reich, but they reestablished contact after the end of World War II. In the 1920s, while a student in the United States, Carl founded, and was president of, the German Academic Exchange Service, through which he first met the love of his life, Lenore Pelham, also a writer and then a student at Rockford College, outside Chicago. The two later married. In 1926, he was appointed as a lecturer in Government at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. from the Heidelberg University in 1930. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he decided to remain in the United States and become a naturalized citizen. An expert on German constitutional law and the conditions surrounding the breakdown of the Weimar Republic in 1933, Friedrich supported representative