GermanyWho was Carl Schmitt?
Carl Schmitt was born in Plettenberg, Westphalia, in 1888 into a Catholic family. During the Weimar Republic he wrote his most influential works, including Political Theology (1922), The Concept of the Political (1927) and Constitutional Theory (1928), and defended an expansive reading of the president's emergency powers. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933, was appointed to the Prussian State Council by Hermann Goring and led Nazi legal organizations. After an SS attack in 1936 he lost his party posts but kept his Berlin chair. Interned by US forces after 1945 and questioned at Nuremberg, he was never charged, refused denazification and lived in Plettenberg until his death in 1985.
Political views
Argued that legal order rests on a sovereign decision, and that the sovereign is whoever can decide on the state of exception.
Source: plato.stanford.eduDefined politics by the distinction between friend and enemy, a public, collective distinction that can ultimately involve killing.
Source: plato.stanford.eduHeld that liberalism and parliamentary debate evade political decision and so weaken political community.
Source: plato.stanford.eduDefended broad presidential emergency powers under the Weimar Constitution and opposed a constitutional court as guardian of the constitution.
Source: plato.stanford.eduJustified the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in a 1934 article titled The Fuhrer Protects the Law.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgDemanded at a 1936 conference he organized that German law be cleansed of 'Jewish spirit' and that works by Jewish scholars be marked.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgArgued in The Nomos of the Earth that stable order rests on territorial division and that universalist ideologies make wars more total.
Source: plato.stanford.edu
Legacy
Schmitt is one of the most influential and controversial legal theorists of the 20th century. His ideas on sovereignty, emergency powers and the friend and enemy distinction are studied by conservatives and by left-wing critics of liberalism alike, and remained influential in West German conservative circles after the war. He is also remembered as the 'Crown Jurist' of National Socialism: he joined the Nazi Party in 1933, welcomed the burning of books by Jewish authors, justified the 1934 political killings and published antisemitic writings between 1933 and 1936. The SS attacked him in 1936 as an opportunist whose antisemitism was a pretense. Critics argue that his theory of the exception helped dismantle Weimar democracy, while some readers defend his analysis of emergencies as clarifying.
In their words
The sovereign is he who decides on the exception.