Max Weber's call for the democratic reform of the Wilhelmine state, and his involvement in the drafting of the Weimar Constitution, had led German intellectuals in the 1950s to consider him as an authority who could justify the democratic character of the new Federal Republic of Germany. Mommsen's thesis, that Max Weber supported parliamentary democracy as a means to serve the power interests of the German nation-state, met a sharp response, because, in Raymond Aron's words, this removed "the new German democracy of a 'founding father,' a glorious ancestor, and a spokesman of genius."