Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt (born July 11, 1888, Plettenberg, Westphalia, Prussia [Germany]—died April 7, 1985, Plettenberg) German conservative jurist and political theorist, best known for his critique of liberalism, his definition of politics as based on the distinction between friends and enemies, and his overt support of Nazism.

Schmitt studied law in Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg, graduating with a doctorate in law in 1915.

In a series of books written during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), Schmitt emphasized what he thought to be the deficiencies of Enlightenment political philosophy and liberal political practice. In Political Theology (1922) and Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), he insisted that transcendental, extrarational, and supramaterial sources are necessary to ground moral-political authority. He also held that Russian anarchism and communism represented a general revolt against authority that would destroy Europe and irrevocably degrade humanity. Schmitt’s Crisis of Parliamentarism (1923) portrayed liberal parliamentary government as a sham: interest-based political parties feign protection of the national good while actually pursuing their own particularist agendas. Contemporary parliaments, Schmitt averred, were incapable of reconciling democracy, which presupposed political unity, with liberalism, a fundamentally individualist and pluralist doctrine.

Moving out of the ambit of Roman Catholic political thinking in the mid-1920s, Schmitt composed his most influential works. His magnum opus, Constitutional Theory (1927), offered an analysis of the Weimar Constitution as well as an account of the principles underlying any democratic constitution. In The Concept of the Political, composed in 1927 and fully elaborated in 1932, Schmitt defined “the political” as the eternal propensity of human collectivities to identify each other as “enemies”—that is, as concrete embodiments of “different and alien” ways of life, with whom mortal combat is a constant possibility and frequent reality. Schmitt assumed that the zeal of group members to kill and die on the basis of a nonrational faith in the substance binding their collectivities refuted basic Enlightenment and liberal tenets. According to Schmitt, the willingness to die for a substantive way of life contradicts both the desire for self-preservation assumed by modern theories of natural rights and the liberal ideal of neutralizing deadly conflict, the driving force of modern European history from the 16th to the 20th century.

Schmitt’s several other works included Legality and Legitimacy (1932), published during Weimar’s final years. In the midst of economic collapse and social conflict bordering on civil war, Schmitt argued that the democratic legitimacy of the republic’s president outweighed any limits on his authority as legally articulated in the Weimar Constitution. Schmitt advised members of President Paul von Hindenburg’s circle to bypass the parliament and rule by presidential decree for the duration of the crisis and potentially beyond it. Once those conservatives were outmaneuvered by Adolf Hitler, however, Schmitt helped to legally coordinate the Nazi seizure of power, and in 1933 he joined the Nazi Party. He wholeheartedly endorsed Hitler’s murder of political adversaries and promulgation of anti-Jewish policies. Schmitt subsequently occupied himself with pseudo-academic studies such as The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1936) and international law-based justifications of an expanding German empire, or Grossraum.

Refusing to be de-Nazified by the Allies (because he insisted that he had never been “Nazified”), Schmitt was banned from teaching after the war but continued to produce intriguing but often self-exculpating scholarly works, such as Ex Captivitate Salus, and a philosophical-historical study of international law, Nomos of the Earth, both published in 1950.