  Schmitt recognizes that it would be implausible to assume that a written constitution represents a conscious choice of the popular sovereign down to its last detail. The revolution of the German people in 1918 that led to the creation of the Weimar constitution, for example, expressed the German people’s conscious decision for a democratic, republican, and federal state, committed to the principles of the rule of law, and endowed with a parliamentary system of legislation and government (CT 77–8). But in addition to these general principles of political and social order, the Weimar constitution came to contain a large number of specific provisions that do not reflect conscious decisions of the popular sovereign (CT 82–8). Schmitt argues that it would be wrong to treat such particular constitutional norms as possessing the same normative force as the people’s decision for a concrete form of political existence, which is expressed in the basic principles implicit in the constitution. It is wrong, therefore, to regard a constitution as nothing more than the set of all particular constitutional norms, and to assume that all these norms are equally subject to constitutional amendment. Even where, as in Weimar, the positive constitution provides a procedure that seems to allow for the amendment of any particular constitutional norm, it is to be understood, Schmitt argues, that the core constitutional principles chosen by the constituent power are not open to formal abrogation. To claim that they are is to advocate a usurpation of the constituent power of the people by a mere party or faction (CT 77–82, 147–58).