Carl Schmitt

Agora

Carl Schmitt

1888–1985

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

For Schmitt, politics is ultimately about deciding who is friend and who is enemy, and real sovereignty shows itself in the power to suspend the law.

Placement

Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.) · Western Europe · Politics & Law

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”; the friend–enemy distinction.

Key ideas

State of exception
Friend and enemy
Political theology

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Influence

Influenced by 4

Niccolò Machiavelli

influenced by ✓
Schmitt began his history of dictatorship with Machiavelli, reading The Prince as a technical treatise on state power (Die Diktatur, 1921). C. Schmitt, Die Diktatur (1921); SEP “Carl Schmitt”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Niccolò Machiavelli › 1469–1527
Francisco de Vitoria

influenced by
Schmitt read Vitoria’s Relectio de Indis (1539) as theology of a Christian order whose arguments nonetheless served the Spanish appropriation of land (Der Nomos der Erde, 1950). C. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950); F. de Vitoria, Relectio de Indis (1539)
Evidence: AI draft
Francisco de Vitoria › c. 1483–1546
Thomas Hobbes

influenced by ✓
Schmitt took Hobbes’s ‘auctoritas, non veritas facit legem’ as the formula of decisionism (Politische Theologie, 1922) and later examined the Leviathan as a failed political symbol (1938). C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie (1922); Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes (1938); SEP “Carl Schmitt”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Thomas Hobbes › 1588–1679
Max Weber

influenced by
Schmitt, who heard Weber’s ‘Politik als Beruf’ in Munich (1919), made the plebiscitary Reich president, as Weber conceived him, guardian of the constitution (Der Hüter der Verfassung, 1931). C. Schmitt, Der Hüter der Verfassung (1931); M. Weber, “Der Reichspräsident” (1919); W. J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890–1920 (1959); SEP “Carl Schmitt”
Evidence: AI draft
Max Weber › 1864–1920

Influenced 3

Walter Benjamin

influenced
Benjamin drew on Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922) for sovereignty and the state of exception in Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928), acknowledging the debt in a letter (1930). W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928); letter to C. Schmitt (9 Dec. 1930); H. Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes”, Critical Inquiry 25 (1999)
Evidence: AI draft
Walter Benjamin › 1892–1940
Reinhart Koselleck

influenced ✓
Koselleck, who saw Schmitt as a mentor, took up Schmitt’s account of the absolutist state as ending civil war, which Enlightenment critique then undermined (Kritik und Krise, 1959). R. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise (diss. Heidelberg 1954; publ. 1959); C. Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes (1938); R. Koselleck and C. Schmitt, Der Briefwechsel 1953–1983, ed. J. E. Dunkhase (2019); SEP “Carl Schmitt”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Reinhart Koselleck › 1923–2006
Giorgio Agamben

influenced
Agamben made Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as he who decides on the exception the starting point of Homo Sacer’s first part (1995) and State of Exception (2003). G. Agamben, Homo sacer (1995); Stato di eccezione (2003); C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie (1922); SEP “Carl Schmitt”
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
Giorgio Agamben › b. 1942

Criticism

Criticized by 1

Jürgen Habermas

criticised by
Habermas objected that Schmitt’s decisionism dissolves the normative foundations of constitutional democracy (‘Die Schrecken der Autonomie. Carl Schmitt auf Englisch’, in Eine Art Schadensabwicklung, 1987). J. Habermas, “Die Schrecken der Autonomie. Carl Schmitt auf Englisch”, in Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (1987)
Evidence: AI draft
Jürgen Habermas › 1929–2026

Works

1922Political Theology
Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
1927The Concept of the Political
The political is the distinction between friend and enemy.

Position

Schmitt’s thought starts from the limits of liberal legal order. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”: in an emergency it is not the norm that decides, but a will. In Political Theology he argued that the central concepts of modern political theory are secularised theological concepts. The Concept of the Political defines the political through the distinction between friend and enemy, which no economic or moral consensus can abolish; liberal parliamentarism, as endless discussion, fails to recognise this. Critics from Kelsen and Heller to Habermas hold that these ideas helped to hollow out the Weimar constitution; in 1932 he represented the Reich government against Prussia before the Staatsgerichtshof, and from 1933 he put his concepts at the service of the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, Schmitt remains an influential and contested reference for both the right and the left – from constitutional law to Agamben and Chantal Mouffe.

Life & context

Schmitt was born in 1888 in Plettenberg, Westphalia, into a Catholic family and became one of the leading German jurists of the Weimar Republic, teaching in Bonn and Berlin. In 1933 he joined the NSDAP and justified the regime’s crimes, including the murders of 1934, until he lost his party posts in 1936. After 1945 he never taught again and lived in Plettenberg until 1985.