Carl Schmitt

Based on Wikipedia: Carl Schmitt

In the summer of 1934, Adolf Hitler ordered the murder of dozens of political rivals and former allies in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Within days, Germany's most prominent legal scholar published an article titled "The Leader Protects the Law," arguing that Hitler's authority represented "the highest form of administrative justice." The scholar was Carl Schmitt, and his willingness to provide intellectual cover for political assassination tells you almost everything you need to know about why his ideas remain so dangerous—and so influential—nearly a century later.

Schmitt wasn't some hack propagandist. He was brilliant. His analyses of constitutional weakness and executive power were so penetrating that political theorists across the ideological spectrum still grapple with them today. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it bluntly: Schmitt "was an acute observer and analyst of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. But there can be little doubt that his preferred cure turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease."

That tension—between genuine insight and monstrous application—makes Schmitt one of the most troubling figures in modern political thought.

The Provincial Catholic Who Became Hitler's Jurist

Carl Schmitt was born in 1888 in Plettenberg, a small town in the Westphalia region of what was then the German Empire. His family were Roman Catholics who had migrated from the rural Eifel region, and his father ran a modest business. Nothing about his origins suggested the outsized influence he would eventually wield.

He studied law at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, completing his doctorate in 1910 with a thesis on guilt and criminal responsibility. By 1914, he had earned his habilitation—the advanced academic qualification required to teach at German universities—with a work examining the relationship between the state and the individual.

Then the First World War interrupted everything.

Schmitt volunteered for the Bavarian Army in February 1915 and served until July 1919. What he experienced during those years, and during the chaotic collapse of the German Empire that followed, shaped his conviction that parliamentary democracy was fundamentally weak. He watched the Weimar Republic struggle to establish itself amid economic crisis, political violence, and constitutional gridlock. Where others saw a young democracy finding its footing, Schmitt saw a system incapable of decisive action when decisive action was desperately needed.

After the war, he launched an academic career that took him through a succession of prestigious appointments: the Technical University of Munich in 1920, the University of Greifswald in 1921, the University of Bonn in 1922, and eventually positions in Berlin and Cologne. Along the way, he attended lectures by Max Weber, the towering sociologist whose analysis of bureaucracy and political leadership would influence Schmitt's own thinking about power and authority.

The State of Exception

Schmitt's most consequential idea is deceptively simple: whoever decides when normal rules don't apply is the true sovereign.

Think about what that means. In ordinary times, a government operates within constitutional limits. Laws constrain what officials can do. Courts review their actions. Legislatures debate and compromise. But what happens when circumstances become extraordinary? When the nation faces invasion, civil war, economic collapse, or some other existential threat?

Someone has to decide that the emergency is real. Someone has to determine which rules get suspended and for how long. Someone has to act when the normal machinery of government moves too slowly. That someone, Schmitt argued, is the sovereign—regardless of what any constitution might formally say about where power resides.

He called this the "state of exception," and he developed the concept in his 1921 essay on dictatorship and his 1922 book Political Theology. The German term Ausnahmezustand literally means "exception-state," and Schmitt was at pains to strip away what he saw as a taboo surrounding the word "dictatorship." Every effective government, he insisted, contains a dictatorial element. The question isn't whether emergency powers exist but who gets to invoke them and under what circumstances.

This wasn't purely abstract theorizing. The Weimar Constitution included Article 48, which granted the president emergency powers to suspend civil liberties and rule by decree when public order was threatened. Schmitt saw this provision as the most effective element of the constitution precisely because it acknowledged what parliamentary procedure could never deliver: the capacity for swift, unified action.

If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.

Notice the implication. Democracy, in Schmitt's view, inevitably generates the conditions for its own suspension. The question is whether that suspension serves to restore the constitutional order or to replace it with something entirely different.

Friends and Enemies

Schmitt's other famous contribution to political theory appears in his 1927 essay "The Concept of the Political." His argument was startling in its starkness: the fundamental distinction in politics is not between good and evil, or between profitable and unprofitable, or between beautiful and ugly. It's between friend and enemy.

An enemy, in Schmitt's sense, isn't necessarily someone you hate personally or consider morally inferior. An enemy is simply the other—the group whose existence poses an existential challenge to your own community's way of life. Politics, at its core, is about identifying who belongs to "us" and who threatens "us" from outside.

This friend-enemy distinction can't be reduced to economics, ethics, or any other category. It's irreducibly political. And because the stakes are ultimately existential—the survival or destruction of a way of life—political conflict always contains the possibility of violence. A world without enemies would be a world without politics, and Schmitt believed such a world was neither possible nor desirable.

Liberalism, he argued, tries to dissolve political conflict into economic competition or ethical debate. It imagines that rational discussion can resolve fundamental disagreements, that free markets can substitute for political decisions, that universal human rights can transcend the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt thought this was naive at best and dangerous at worst. By pretending that politics can be eliminated, liberalism leaves societies unprepared for the moments when existential conflicts inevitably arise.

The Path to Collaboration

Something shifted in Schmitt during the 1920s. As a young man, he had been what one historian called "a devoted Catholic," but his faith began to waver around the time of the First World War. His diary entries hint at a crisis of belief. His troubled relationships with women apparently estranged him further from the Church. By the mid-1920s, he described his Catholicism as "displaced" and "de-totalised."

Some scholars argue that his engagement with Catholic thought was always more political than spiritual—he admired the hierarchical structure and Roman legal heritage of the Church rather than its doctrines. But whatever the cause, the intellectual framework he had built was increasingly detached from any transcendent moral anchor.

Meanwhile, his reputation as a constitutional theorist grew. In 1932, he represented the Reich government in a landmark case known as Preussen contra Reich—Prussia versus the Reich. The right-wing national government under Chancellor Franz von Papen had dismissed the elected Social Democratic government of Prussia, by far the largest German state and a powerful base for the political left. Schmitt argued that the dismissal was legal. The court's mixed ruling—finding the dismissal technically unlawful but allowing the Reich to install a commissioner anyway—effectively destroyed German federalism and cleared another obstacle from the path to dictatorship.

When Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, Schmitt immediately grasped the significance. The next day, he remarked that "one can say that Hegel died." It was an obscure reference, but the meaning was clear. Hegel had celebrated the professional bureaucracy as the "universal class" that could mediate between rulers and citizens. Schmitt saw this bureaucratic mentality—with its reverence for established norms and procedures—as an obstacle to sovereign authority. Hitler's triumph meant that obstacle had been swept away.

Providing the Legal Foundation

The Nazis moved quickly to consolidate power. In March 1933, they engineered passage of the Enabling Act, which allowed the government to rule by decree without consulting the Reichstag or President Hindenburg. The act was supposed to apply only to the "present government," and some opponents hoped that any cabinet changes would void it.

Schmitt closed that loophole. As the most prominent constitutional theorist of the day, he declared that "present government" didn't refer to the specific individuals in office but to the "completely different kind of government" that Hitler had brought into being. The Nazi revolution, in other words, had created a new constitutional reality that the Enabling Act was designed to serve.

He didn't stop there. Schmitt was the presiding legal expert at meetings that formally decided to bypass the process of creating a new constitution. Instead, the Nazis would nominally maintain the Weimar Constitution while treating the Führerprinzip—the Leader Principle—as having transcendent authority over any written law. Schmitt provided the theoretical justification: the German people's racial composition legitimized their identification with Hitler, who embodied their collective will.

On May 1, 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party. Within days, he was publicly celebrating the burning of books by Jewish authors and calling for an even more extensive purge of works influenced by "Jewish ideas." He took on a cascade of official positions: leadership roles in the Academy for German Law, chairman of committees on state and administrative law, appointment to the Prussian State Council, president of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists. He replaced a Jewish scholar, Hermann Heller, as professor at the University of Berlin.

His 1934 article defending the Night of the Long Knives remains the most notorious example of intellectual collaboration with tyranny. When Hitler ordered the extrajudicial killing of Ernst Röhm and dozens of others, Schmitt didn't merely accept it. He celebrated it. The Führer's authority, he wrote, was "the highest form of administrative justice."

The Antisemitism Question

Was Schmitt a genuine antisemite or an opportunist who adopted the regime's rhetoric for career advancement?

The evidence suggests both, in a way that makes the distinction less meaningful than it might seem. In October 1936, Schmitt chaired a law teachers' convention in Berlin where he demanded that German law be "cleansed of the Jewish spirit" and that publications by Jewish scholars be marked with special symbols. This wasn't reluctant compliance; it was enthusiastic leadership.

Yet within months, the SS publication Das Schwarze Korps attacked him as an opportunist whose antisemitism was "mere pretense." The article cited his earlier criticisms of Nazi racial theories and called him a "Hegelian state thinker" and a Catholic—both terms of suspicion in Nazi circles. Schmitt resigned from his position as Reich Professional Group Leader, though he retained his professorship and his title as Prussian State Councillor. Hermann Göring intervened to prevent further reprisals.

The episode reveals something important about Schmitt's relationship to Nazi ideology. He wasn't a true believer in the biological racism that animated figures like Heinrich Himmler. His authoritarianism was rooted in different intellectual traditions—in decisionism, in the friend-enemy distinction, in the theology of sovereignty. But when biological racism became the basis for state power, he adapted his theories to serve it. Whether this makes him better or worse than the ideologically committed Nazis is a question without a satisfying answer.

The Unrepentant Theorist

American forces captured Schmitt in 1945. He spent more than a year in an internment camp before returning to his hometown of Plettenberg. He was never tried at Nuremberg, though he was interrogated by Allied prosecutors seeking to understand how the Nazi legal system had functioned.

He could have returned to academic life by going through denazification—the process by which former Nazi officials acknowledged their complicity and committed to democratic values. He refused. Until his death in 1985, at the age of 96, Schmitt never expressed regret for his role in establishing the theoretical foundations of the Nazi state.

This refusal to repent isolated him from mainstream scholarly and political life but didn't silence him. From his home in Plettenberg, he continued writing, particularly on international law. Visitors came regularly: old colleagues, younger intellectuals, admirers from across the political spectrum. The philosopher Alexandre Kojève visited. So did the writer Ernst Jünger, with whom Schmitt had attended a controversial "round-table" of French and German intellectuals in occupied Paris during the war.

In 1962, Schmitt traveled to Francisco Franco's Spain to deliver lectures that became his book Theory of the Partisan. He characterized the Spanish Civil War as a "war of national liberation" against "international Communism" and argued that the partisan—the irregular fighter operating outside conventional military structures—represented a new and significant phenomenon in modern warfare. The analysis was characteristically sharp, even if the political sympathies were characteristically troubling.

Why Schmitt Still Matters

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Schmitt's ideas didn't die with the Third Reich. They continue to influence political thought and practice around the world.

His critique of liberalism resonates with anyone who believes that parliamentary democracy is too slow, too fragmented, too captured by special interests to address urgent challenges. His concept of the state of exception provides a framework for understanding—and justifying—emergency powers. His friend-enemy distinction offers a vocabulary for the kind of identity politics that treats political opponents not as fellow citizens with different views but as existential threats to the community.

Scholars have traced Schmitt's influence on governance in contemporary China and Russia, where authoritarian leaders invoke emergency conditions to justify indefinite suspension of liberal norms. His ideas have been detected in the intellectual foundations of neoconservatism, which emphasizes decisive executive action and views international relations through the lens of existential conflict. Some analysts see echoes of Schmitt in the populist movements that have reshaped Western democracies in recent years, including Trumpism in the United States.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has written extensively on Schmitt's state of exception, arguing that modern democracies increasingly govern through emergency measures that bypass normal constitutional procedures. The "war on terror," pandemic lockdowns, economic crises—each generates pressure to concentrate power in the executive and suspend ordinary legal protections. Schmitt would have recognized the pattern.

Even those who reject Schmitt's conclusions often find themselves engaging with his analyses. His observation that liberalism tends to depoliticize conflict—transforming political questions into economic or technical ones—captures something real about how modern democracies function. His insistence that every legal order rests ultimately on decisions that can't themselves be legally justified exposes a genuine tension in constitutional theory. His recognition that emergencies create opportunities for the transformation of political systems remains disturbingly relevant.

The Disease and the Cure

What do we do with a thinker whose insights illuminate genuine problems but whose solutions led to catastrophe?

One approach is simply to ignore him. Schmitt collaborated with Nazis, justified murder, promoted antisemitism. Why should we take his ideas seriously? But this approach has its own dangers. Schmitt identified real weaknesses in liberal democracy. Pretending those weaknesses don't exist doesn't make them go away. It just leaves us less prepared to defend against those who would exploit them.

A better approach is to engage critically with Schmitt's diagnoses while firmly rejecting his prescriptions. Yes, parliamentary democracies can be slow and gridlocked. Yes, liberal constitutionalism contains tensions that become acute during emergencies. Yes, political communities do make distinctions between insiders and outsiders, and those distinctions can become existential under certain conditions.

But acknowledging these realities doesn't require embracing dictatorship. The answer to democratic dysfunction isn't the abandonment of democracy. The answer to constitutional tension isn't the suspension of constitutionalism. The answer to political conflict isn't the elimination of opponents.

Schmitt's career demonstrates where his logic leads. He provided the intellectual foundation for a regime that murdered millions. He justified political assassination. He called for the purging of Jewish thought from German law. He never repented. His brilliant mind was deployed in service of monstrous ends.

The Stanford Encyclopedia's verdict stands: the cure was infinitely worse than the disease. But the disease was real, and it hasn't gone away. Understanding Schmitt helps us understand the vulnerabilities that authoritarians exploit. It's an uncomfortable education, but a necessary one.