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Brief Lives

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985)

Marco Pandolfini on the ideas of a highly contentious legal theorist.

Carl Schmitt was the most controversial legal and political theorist of the twentieth century. His radical critique of liberal constitutionalism in works like Political Theology (1922) and The Concept of the Political (1927) transformed debates about sovereignty, democracy, and the rule of law. Yet his intellectual relevance was compromised by his support for National Socialism, earning him the title of ‘Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’. Schmitt’s life and work raised the most profound questions about the relationship between politics and realism, and between intellectual clarity and moral corruption.

Early Life

Carl Schmitt was born on 11 July 1888 in Plettenberg, a small town in Westphalia, north west Germany. His parents were devout Catholics of modest means – his father worked as a commercial clerk. Growing up in a predominantly Protestant region of Germany, Schmitt experienced social marginalization, an experience that would shape his lifelong sense of being an outsider to established German culture.

After his brilliant university studies and his qualification as a university professor, during World War I he served in military administration. This position allowed him to continue his academic work while giving him firsthand exposure to the operation of state power under emergency conditions. The experience reinforced his conviction that law could not function without sovereign political authority.

After the war, Schmitt secured academic positions at several German universities, eventually becoming a professor of law at the University of Bonn in 1921. It was during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) that Schmitt produced his most influential theories. The Republic’s constant political and constitutional crises provided the perfect laboratory for his ideas about sovereignty, emergency powers, and the limits of constitutionalism.

We will now look at Schmitt’s approach to legal and political philosophy developed through three distinct periods, each marked by major works that refined and extended his core insights.

Carl Schmitt in 1929
Schmitt from Spanish Magazine ABC, Public Domain

The Weimar Period

During the 1920s Schmitt established his reputation as the Weimar Republic’s most penetrating constitutional theorist. Schmitt’s political philosophy rests on two fundamental and interconnected claims: that all legal order depends on sovereign decisions, and that all politics is based on the distinction between friend and enemy.

In Political Theology (1922), Schmitt advanced his famous definition of sovereignty: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’. This deceptively simple formula contains a first step towards a fully articulated critique of liberal constitutionalism’s faith in the rule of law.

The primary focus of this text is legal positivism – the current of political thought that advocates the self-sufficiency of the rule of law. According to this philosophy, every legal norm is deduced from another legal norm that precedes it in the national legal-bureaucratic system, ultimately referring back to a series of self-evident universal legal and moral principles. The law, therefore, becomes merely a kind of mechanism, operating according to logical deductions, references, and conclusions. But for Schmitt, general legal rules don’t apply themselves. They require interpretation and application to situations, and the law itself often fails to provide determinate guidance on how to do this. More critically, all legal systems presuppose a condition of normality or social order. When society descends into large-scale crisis – revolution, invasion, civil war – the continued application of ordinary legal procedures will produce arbitrary results while preventing effective action to restore order. In such exceptional circumstances, Schmitt argued, the law can and must be suspended. But the decision to declare a state of exception cannot itself be governed by legal rules without regress (how are we to decide when the declaration to suspend law is itself legal?). Someone must simply decide when the situation is abnormal enough to require suspending the constitution. In other words, someone must have the power to decide when the law holds and when it does not. That authority, whether a person or institution, is the true sovereign, regardless of what the written constitution says.

Schmitt’s argument thus undermines the liberal dream of eliminating sovereignty (that is, the power of an individual or institution over another), through comprehensive legal regulation. Every legal system, he insists, ultimately rests on a sovereign decision that stands outside and prior to law. So constitutional democracies deceive themselves when they claim to have abolished sovereignty. They have merely concealed it.

The Concept of the Political & a Critique of Liberalism

If sovereignty provides the backbone of political authority, The Concept of the Political (1927), supplies its body. Here Schmitt made his most notorious definition: the essence of politics lies in the distinction between friend and enemy.

In a society and culture composed of various conceptual fields capable of influencing each other, such as the moral, the aesthetic or the economic, the political field is to be characterized as different in that it emerges whenever a field of thought or ideas acquires sufficient intensity that groups are willing to fight and kill to defend their collective identification with those ideas and their comrades. So the political relationship is defined by the real possibility of physical killing.

This conception of politics has profound implications. Firstly, only the participants themselves can judge what threatens their form of life sufficiently to require political opposition: no external authority can determine whether a group is justified in defining itself in a certain way or in identifying others as enemies. The decision is existential – made from the perspective of those whose collective existence is at stake. Secondly, because the political is generated by the intensity of a relationship to ideas, politics necessarily takes precedence over all other spheres of social life. Concepts such as war, public enemy, sacrifice, and human wickedness, become founding elements of political science and practice.

Schmitt’s conception of the political grounds his aversion to liberalism. Liberal ideology, he argued, systematically denies the reality of the political by believing that all conflicts can be resolved through deliberation, institutional reform, or economic development. Liberals imagine a world where friend-enemy distinctions have become obsolete, replaced by peaceful competition among individuals pursuing private interests.

This vision is both impossible and dangerous, Schmitt contended. It is impossible because political conflict stems from incompatible collective identities, not from ignorance or scarcity. It is dangerous because liberal depoliticization weakens political communities, leaving them vulnerable to internal dissolution and external conquest. Moreover, liberal neutrality is a fiction. By presenting its own substantive ideological commitments as neutral principles, liberalism conceals its own exercise of political power. The liberal state that refuses to acknowledge political conflict does not eliminate politics – it merely makes political power obscure and unaccountable.

Constitutional Theory (1928), was Schmitt’s most systematic work of the period. In this book, Schmitt attempted to reconcile his authoritarian conception of sovereignty with democratic procedures. He argued that democracy means rule by the people, but a people only exists politically when it has achieved collective identity through the friend-enemy distinction. Moreover, the people’s constituent power – their capacity to give themselves a constitution – is unlimited and inalienable. This apparent liberal principle led Schmitt to defend ‘sovereign dictatorship’, this being the exercise of extra-constitutional power in the name of the people to create or restore conditions for constitutional government. Far from being anti-democratic, sovereign dictatorship is the form through which a politically united people exercises its constituent power.

This theory had ominous implications. If democratic legitimacy requires political homogeneity based on a clear friend-enemy distinction, democracy demands the forcible suppression of ‘internal enemies’ – those who do not identify with the community’s defining characteristics. The enemy must be outside the in-group.

The Nazi Period

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Schmitt quickly offered his services to the new regime. Though not previously a Nazi supporter, he portrayed the Machtergreifung (seizure of power) as an authentic exercise of the German people’s power.

Schmitt’s writings during this period enthusiastically supported Nazi policies. He defended Hitler’s extrajudicial killing of political opponents in 1934, arguing the actions were legitimate exercises of power. He participated in campaigns to purge Jewish scholars from German universities and legal institutions. His 1934 essay ‘The Führer Protects the Law’ declared that “the Führer’s deed was genuine jurisdiction” and “in the Führer’s person the highest sovereign authority is directly united with the entirety of judicial authority.”

During this period, Schmitt claimed to shift from ‘decisionism’ to ‘concrete order thinking’ – a position on law that took its bearings from the ‘authentic form of life’ of the German people. But this supposed transformation mainly translated his existing ideas into openly racist language, identifying the German people’s political identity with racial purity.

Schmitt’s Nazi career ended abruptly in 1936, when an SS newspaper attacked him as an opportunistic latecomer to National Socialism. Rivals within the Nazi legal establishment used Schmitt’s pre-1933 writings and his Catholic background against him, forcing his resignation from positions of power. He retained his university professorship, but was effectively marginalized.

The Postwar Period: International Law

After Germany’s defeat, Schmitt was briefly interrogated as a potential subject for the Nuremberg trials. He was not prosecuted, but was barred from returning to academic life. Nevertheless, he remained intellectually active, publishing works on international law and political theory from his home in Plettenberg until his death in 1985.

Schmitt’s major postwar work, The Nomos of the Earth (1950), was a historical and theoretical account of international legal order (nomos is law in Greek). He argued that legitimate international law required recognizing states’ unrestricted right to wage war based on their own judgment. The attempt to moralize international law by distinguishing just from unjust wars, Schmitt contended, destroys the mechanisms that contain warfare, transforming limited conflicts into ideological crusades.

Schmitt contrasted liberal internationalism unfavorably with the ius publicum Europaeum, which was the international legal order in Europe from the Peace of Westphalia to World War I (1648-1914). This system recognized all sovereign states as equally legitimate belligerents regardless of the justice of their cause, enabling effective constraints on the methods of warfare while allowing mediation and peace treaties without admission of guilt.

For legitimate international order to exist, Schmitt argued, political conflicts must be ‘spatialized’ – tied to territorial boundaries. Political communities committed to universal values like human rights cannot accept such territorial limitations, which ensures international relations will be characterized by unlimited ideological crusades rather than limited wars among spatially bounded sovereigns.

Schmitt continued writing and publishing into his nineties. His later works included various essays on constitutional and international law, and Theory of the Partisan (1963), which analyzed irregular warfare and revolutionary violence. He also kept extensive diaries, portions of which have been published posthumously, revealing the depth of his bitterness about his postwar treatment and his continuing antisemitism.

Legacy

Schmitt’s legacy remains deeply contested. His intellectual contributions to legal and political theory are undeniable, yet they are inseparable from his support for fascism in particular and totalitarianism in general.

Despite his Nazi collaboration, Schmitt’s work has proven remarkably influential across the political spectrum. His analysis of sovereignty, his definition of the political, and his analysis of constitutional power has shaped debates about politics in democracies. Moreover, these ideas contributed to the foundations of political theory as a rigorous and universal discipline, based on stable and tested concepts to be studied and handed down in academic textbooks. His distinction between constitutional fundamentals and ordinary constitutional provisions influenced postwar German constitutional law and the concept of ‘militant democracy’ – of constitutional orders willing to restrict rights to defend themselves against anti-democratic forces.

Schmitt’s critique of liberal proceduralism has been appropriated by both left and right. Left-wing theorists like Chantal Mouffe have used his emphasis on the undeniable reality of political conflict to criticize Rawlsian liberalism’s assumption of achievable political consensus. Right-wing theorists have drawn on his defense of political sovereignty against cosmopolitan internationalism. His work on international law continues to inform debates about humanitarian intervention, the International Criminal Court, and the proper structure of global order.

Contemporary interest in Schmitt reflects disillusionment with liberal democracy’s capacity to address fundamental political challenges. As democratic institutions seem increasingly paralyzed by polarization, and global institutions appear unable to manage international crises, Schmitt’s diagnosis of liberalism’s weaknesses appears prophetic to some readers.

A Moral Reckoning

However, any honest assessment of Schmitt’s legacy must confront his enthusiastic collaboration with National Socialism. This was not youthful error or opportunistic careerism, but active, committed participation in one of history’s most monstrous regimes. Schmitt used his intellectual authority to legitimize Nazi violence and racial persecution. Moreover, the connection between his theoretical work and his Nazi engagement was not accidental. His emphasis on homogeneity and exclusion, his valorization of sovereign decision unconstrained by legal norms, his promotion of the friend-enemy distinction, both expressed and enabled his support for totalitarianism. And the homogeneous political community Schmitt theorizes in practice requires the violent elimination of those deemed internal enemies.

The catastrophic history of the twentieth century demonstrates where rejection of liberal universalism and embrace of authoritarian politics leads. Schmitt’s career serves as a warning about the human cost of subordinating law to politics and constraining individual rights in the name of collective identity.

Schmitt combined profound theoretical insight with profound moral failure. His life and work remain a cautionary tale: intellectual brilliance without moral constraint, theoretical sophistication without ethical foundations, can become complicit in monstrous evil. This is perhaps the most important lesson his controversial legacy teaches.

Marco Pandolfini is a PhD student in Political Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. He studied Philosophy in Florence and Stuttgart.