Carl Friedrich

Carl Joachim Friedrich (born June 5, 1901 in Leipzig, Germany; died on September 19, 1984 in Lexington, Massachusetts) was a German-American professor and political theorist.

His writings on law and constitutionalism 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.

Born on June 5, 1901, in Leipzig, the site of the first significant defeat of the Napoleonic armies, 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.

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.

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