Carl Schmitt Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a German political theorist and law professor. His theories favored strong executive authority to maintain order during time of crisis.

Schmitt, a Roman Catholic, was born in Plettenberg, Westphalia. He studied law and passed his state examinations in 1915. A year later he volunteered for the German Army. After World War I (1914–1918), Schmitt taught law at a number of German universities, including the University of Griefswald (1921–1922), the University of Bonn (1922–1926), the Handelschochschule (1926–1932), and the University of Cologne (1932–1933). He finally joined the University of Berlin faculty in 1933.

Schmitt was a legal advisor to German chancellor Kurt von Schleicher in the chancellor’s efforts to block a seizure of power by the Nazis or Communists. However, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in 1933, where he captured the attention of Hermann Göring, one of the party’s leaders and was appointed president of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists. Schmitt assumed a number of other leadership roles in the legal profession in Germany and used them to provide legal justification of the National Socialist regime and the persecution of Jews. He defended the Nazi regime’s murder of political opponents on the so-called Night of the Long Knives in 1934. In October 1936, Schmitt demanded that all publications by Jewish scientists be designated with a symbol. At the 1936 conference that he organized on Judaism and jurisprudence, he demanded that German law be cleansed of what he called the “Jewish spirit.”

Schmitt’s influence would be short-lived. In December 1936, Das schwarze Korps, a Shutzstaffel (SS) publication, accused him of being an opportunist and cited his earlier criticism of Nazi racial theories. Schmitt then was stripped of his leadership roles but was allowed to keep his position at Berlin through Göring’s intercession on his behalf.

Schmitt was captured by the American army in August 1945 and was interrogated on at least four occasions by the American Military Government and the Nuremberg prosecutors. However, he was never prosecuted, and he eventually returned to his birthplace of Plettenberg, where he would continue to write.

Schmitt’s writings tended to support executive power. According to him, unanticipated and sudden changes in political situations cause instability in any system based on the rule of law. In his essay “Die Diktatur” (“On Dictatorship”), which was published in 1921, he examined the constitution of the new Weimar Republic. Schmitt viewed the emergency powers granted to the president as a strength of the document, contending that the weakness of parliamentary democracy was its deliberative nature. He believed that for government to be effective, it must be decisive. In subsequent works, Schmitt continued his criticism of liberal democracy. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), he contends that liberal democracy, which is justified by the notion that policies are the product of rational discussion, is actually a process where decisions are made by political party leaders who are more concerned about good politics than good policy.

In The Concept of the Political (1927) Schmitt contends that politics is different than other aspects of life because, “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism.” He suggested that, in politics, the annihilation of one’s adversary is acceptable if necessary.

Schmitt’s work has influenced both European conservatives and those on the far left who find his rejection of liberalism and support of strong executive power attractive.

Bibliography:

Balakrishnan, Gopal. The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso, 2000.
Bolsinger, Eckard. The Anatomy of the Political: Carl Scmitt’s and Lenin’s Political Realism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001.
The Lesson of Carl Schmitt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Mouffe, Chantal, ed. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso, 1999.
Müller, Jan-Werner. A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-war European Thought. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Romanticism, translated by Guy Oakes. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George D. Schwab. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.

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