Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt was a German jurist and political theorist who taught in Bonn and Berlin and was a sharp critic of parliamentary liberalism in the Weimar years. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933, a record that shapes how his work is read. His claim that the sovereign is whoever decides on the exception, and his account of the political as the distinction between friend and enemy, remain widely discussed and contested.

Key ideas

• Sovereignty is revealed in who decides when the normal legal order is suspended.
• The political is defined by the distinction between friend and enemy.
• Key concepts of the modern state are secularised theological concepts.
• Liberal proceduralism, on his view, cannot handle genuine emergencies; critics answer that this argument licenses unchecked power.

Major works

• Political Theology (Politische Theologie, 1922)
• The Concept of the Political (Der Begriff des Politischen, 1927; expanded 1932)
• Legality and Legitimacy (1932)
• The Nomos of the Earth (1950)

In the conversation

• Debate Schmitt’s uncomfortable point survives: no constitution can fully govern its own emergencies Sana Mir · 6 replies