SCHMITT, CARL (1888–1985)

German legal theorist.

Carl Schmitt was among the most important and controversial legal theorists of twentieth-century Europe. Schmitt's work raised profound questions about sovereignty, legitimacy, and the viability of liberal parliamentarism, while his life raised profound questions about the appropriate relationship between philosophical thought and political action.

Schmitt was born in the Protestant Westphalian town of Plettenburg, into a family that was politically active and devoutly Catholic. Despite his family's limited means, Schmitt's brilliance earned him a scholarship to a good gymnasium, where he received a humanistic, liberal education. He studied jurisprudence in Strasbourg, Munich, and Berlin, completing his Habilitationschrift (second dissertation) in 1914.

Schmitt volunteered for the infantry at the beginning of World War I, but a back injury meant that he spent the war in Munich in the noncombat position of censor. After the war he took an academic position at Bonn, where he became an out-spoken champion of the traditional Right. He advocated in the courts and in the journals for the Weimar constitution's emergency provision (Article 48) as a means of curbing the excesses of Communist and Nazi agitators. Among his influences at this time was Max Weber, and among his interlocutors was Leo Strauss. Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. A prestigious teaching post in Berlin was his reward. Celebrated as the Nazi "crown jurist," he publicly supported Adolf Hitler's "Night of the Long Knives," though a close friend of Schmitt's was among its victims. When doubt was cast on his loyalty in 1936 and his own safety came into question, Schmitt quietly left the party. His writings of the time were incisive but emphatically anti-Semitic, characteristics reflected in his decidedly theological postwar notebooks.

After the war, Schmitt was arrested and brought to Nuremberg but never tried. Though banned from teaching, he remained a highly regarded figure among German legal scholars throughout the twentieth century. He was honored with Festschriften, collections of essays, on his seventieth and eightieth birthdays, which included articles by luminaries such as Reinhart Koselleck. Schmitt died at the age of ninety-six in Plettenburg, the town where he was born, just as the force of his work began to dawn on English-speaking scholars.

Schmitt's ideas revolve around an opposition between the value neutral, rule governed, and technical on one hand, and the decisive and political on the other. He opposes "the political" and "the sovereign" to what can be discussed scientifically or executed technologically. In The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt describes the political as a decision based on the criterion of friendship or enmity. By "enemy" Schmitt means one who poses a threat to a people's way of life. Deciding who the enemy is cannot rest on further criteria or norms. Liberalism's fault is precisely its incapacity to decide based on "political" criteria alone. Schmitt argues in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) that liberalism is instead characterized by ceaseless discussion and by the domination of private interests that depoliticize and hence dehumanize public life. Because law cannot rule on its own, legitimacy cannot rest on formal legal positivism or rational discussion. Legality and Legitimacy (1932) thus advocates a system where the Reichspräsident can act as a "commissarial dictator," a concept Schmitt first explored in Dictatorship (1921). The dictator must be able to defend the constitution unchecked by a parliament too neutral to outlaw parties (such as the Communists and Nazis) who explicitly aim to destroy it. Schmitt's preference for decisive and unitary action is also reflected in his definition of "sovereignty" in Political Theology (1922) as characteristic of he who "decides on the exception." The constant possibility of an unexpected crisis means someone must be above norms, able at any moment to decide who the enemy is and then to act decisively to destroy it.

Hannah Arendt, Franz Neumann, and Walter Benjamin are among those influenced by Schmitt's work, which took on a renewed importance across the political spectrum in the last two decades of the twentieth century. He is the Right's philosopher of unified leadership, of politics that leaves liberal fantasies for the comfort of the bourgeoisie. For the Left, he challenges liberal parliamentarism's illusory neutrality, its cooptation by private, class-based interests. Despite his popularity at the turn of the twenty-first century, the question remains whether Schmitt's ideas are separable from his political past. While his participation in Nazi politics does not, of itself, negate the value of his thought, the compatibility of his ideas with Nazism suggests that scholars should be cautious in drawing on his ideas without carefully considering their ramifications.

See alsoArendt, Hannah; Communism; Liberalism; Nazism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. New Brunswick, N.J., 1976.

——. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Translated by Ellen Kennedy. Cambridge, Mass., 1985.

——. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge, Mass., 1985.

——. Legality and Legitimacy. Translated by Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, N.C., 2004.

Secondary Sources

Dyzenhaus, David. Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller in Weimar. Oxford, U.K., 1997.

McCormick, John P. Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.

Meier, Heinrich. The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy. Translated by Marcus Brainard. Chicago, 1998.

Schwab, George. The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936. New York, 1986.

Nomi Claire Lazar