Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was a German jurist and political theorist whose work on sovereignty, political theology, and the friend-enemy distinction has been one of the most contested legacies in twentieth-century political thought. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and rose to prominent legal positions in the Nazi state before falling from favor in 1936; he never repudiated his collaboration. Despite (and partly because of) this history, his concepts have been intensively engaged by thinkers across the political spectrum — from Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School to Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Mouffe, and contemporary right-postliberalism.

¶Core ideas

• The political = friend / enemy distinction. What is political is not a domain among others (alongside economic, aesthetic, religious) but the intensity of grouping of human associations into friends and enemies. The political moment is the moment of public-collective enmity capable of war as its extreme. Distinguished from individual hatred or moral disagreement.
• Sovereignty = the decision on the exception. Sovereignty is not the highest authority within a legal order; it is the authority capable of suspending the legal order in the name of preserving it. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Develops a political theology in which the structure of sovereign decision parallels the structure of theological decision.
• The state of exception. The condition in which the normal legal order is suspended. Not a juridical concept (since the suspending decision is what the order does not contain) but a political-theological one. Schmitt’s analysis is the upstream source for Agamben’s later analysis of the contemporary normalization of the exception.
• Critique of liberal proceduralism. Liberalism, on Schmitt’s reading, attempts to evade the political moment by reducing it to procedural negotiation. The attempt cannot succeed; the political moment returns under the cover of moralized humanitarian discourse, in more dangerous form.
• Ius publicum europaeum. The classical European law-of-nations as a particular spatial-political order, distinct from contemporary universalist humanitarian law. Schmitt’s late work analyzes the breakdown of that order and the emergence of contemporary global ordering.

¶Key works

• Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922)
• The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923)
• The Concept of the Political (1927; expanded 1932)
• Constitutional Theory (1928)
• The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950)
• The Theory of the Partisan (1963)
• Political Theology II (1970)

¶Where his work figures in this library

Schmitt is foundational for the friend-enemy-distinction, the postliberalism tradition’s account of the political, and is upstream of fascist-grammar. His reception runs through Benjamin, Agamben, Mouffe, and the contemporary right-postliberal authors (Deneen, Vermeule).