One of the more surprising elements in Bruno Leipold’s book Citizen Marx is just how fierce a critic Karl Marx was of what political scientists call presidential systems.

In presidential systems, the executive is invested with power that does not derive from the legislature, as in a parliamentary system. Instead, the executive is invested with power derived from elsewhere, most commonly election by the people themselves. Such systems tend to lionize the executive as a creature above and beyond the normal shabbiness of politics.

That kind of elevation of the executive in a presidential system is something that Alexander Hamilton, that old fox, was wise to, and why he advocated so forcefully for it.

Marx saw immediately how such a system, which had been created by the constitution of the Second Republic, threatened to eclipse the power of the legislature. As he wrote in the Eighteenth Brumaire:

The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation to the nation, but the elected president stands in a personal relation to it. The National Assembly, through its individual representatives, well exhibits the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the president the national spirit is incarnated. Against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is president by the grace of the people.

It wasn’t just the way the executive was set up to loom over the legislature that Marx feared. As Leipold shows, Marx was also keen to the abuses of power that executives of this sort were particularly prone to. Among the worst abuses that Marx feared? Arbitrary use of the pardon power and summary firing of government officials.

Sound familiar?