2 July 2020 marks the 5th anniversary of the death of Professor Dr Eberhard Schütt-Wetschky. He was not a regular professor at Kiel University, but worked at the Institute of Political Science (or Social Sciences) on an extracurricular basis and at his own expense. Eberhard Schütt-Wetschky was born in Hamburg in 1937 and graduated from the Christianeum in Hamburg in 1956. He initially worked in the commercial sector for several years and was supposed to take on responsibility in the Heinrich Schütt family business. However, his inclination was towards science and philosophy (he was a connoisseur and great admirer of Immanuel Kant's philosophy). He studied at the universities of Geneva and Paris (Sorbonne), and from 1962 finally at the University of Hamburg (initially law, then political science with the subsidiary subjects of medieval and modern history and public law). Schütt-Wetschky received his doctorate in 1973 with a study on the subject of proportional representation/majority voting. From 1974 to 1979, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg. His habilitation in political science, funded by a scholarship from the German Research Foundation, took place in 1981, after which Schütt-Wetschky took up a professorship. In 1983, he was appointed as a private lecturer and in 1995 as an adjunct professor at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg. From October 2002, Schütt-Wetschky taught political science at the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel. Here he mainly offered seminars on comparative government and supervised many master's theses and dissertations. To support his research and publication activities, he also employed research assistants privately and thus provided them with support.
His research focussed on the parliamentary system of government in the Federal Republic of Germany and the development of the theory of democracy in parliamentary systems of government. He was particularly concerned with the significance of parties and the concept of the separation of powers, which was expressed above all in his habilitation thesis "Grundtypen parlamentarischer Demokratie" (Basic Types of Parliamentary Democracy) published in 1984. His distinction between a traditional and realistic view of the functioning of parliamentary democracy, which ran through his further research, was illustrated in this work using the example of parliamentary party discipline. In his monograph "Interessenverbände und Staat" (Interest Groups and the State), published in 1997, he then enquired into the preconditions of politics orientated towards the common good. This was followed by numerous essays on topics such as the authority of the Federal Chancellor to issue directives, criticism of parliamentarism and the phenomenon of democratic political leadership.
Together with Gesine Schwan and Werner Link, Schütt-Wetschky initiated the Jahrbuch für Politik in 1990 and edited it as managing editor (two half-volumes per year). In 1996, the yearbook was expanded to become the Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft (ZPol). In 1996, Schütt-Wetschky also launched the Annotated Bibliography of Political Science, a bibliographical database that provided continuous information on all new political science publications in the German-speaking world.
Schütt-Wetschky advocated the approach of a practice-orientated political science, which, however, does not take practice uncritically as a yardstick, but always critically scrutinises it. He saw practical recommendations as the guiding task of political science.
Schütt-Wetschky was a partner in the steel trading company Heinrich Schütt in Hamburg. He established the Science and Democracy Foundation in 1992 and bequeathed his estate to it after his death in 2015. The aim of the foundation is to support scientific projects that are suitable for promoting liberal democracy, in particular to promote or conduct political science. The foundation is based in Kiel and today runs the Institute for Parliamentary Research in Berlin, the journal for strategic analyses SIRIUS, the Portal for Political Science and supports the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University.
The Executive Board of the Foundation for Science and Democracy
