Carl Schmitt

What Schmitt Actually Wrote

Carl Schmitt opened Political Theology (1922) with the frequently cited claim that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” — the argument that the true locus of sovereign authority lies not in ordinary legal rule-following but in the power to determine when a legal order’s normal rules must be suspended, and what must be done outside them. In The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt argued that the defining criterion of specifically political action, as distinct from moral, economic, or aesthetic action, was the distinction between friend and enemy, and that genuine political communities were defined by their capacity to identify and if necessary fight an enemy. Both works were developed as critiques of liberal constitutionalism, which Schmitt regarded as unable to account for sovereignty and political conflict on its own terms.

Historical Role

Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in May 1933, shortly after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, and for a period served as a prominent legal theorist for the regime, holding academic and professional positions and providing legal justification for Nazi actions, including an article defending the legality of the June 1934 Night of the Long Knives killings. He lost favor within the party by 1936, after being attacked in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps over questions about the sincerity of his Nazi commitment and his earlier career, though he retained his university position and continued publishing through the war. After 1945, Schmitt was interned and interrogated by Allied authorities but not tried, and he was barred from formal academic teaching positions in postwar West Germany; he continued to write and correspond influentially from private life until his death in 1985.

Disputed Scholarly Interpretation

Schmitt’s legacy is unusually contested because his major theoretical concepts have been taken up across a wide and often mutually opposed range of later thinkers, including scholars on the political left as well as the right, who read his analysis of sovereignty, exception, and the limits of liberal legalism as diagnostically valuable independent of — or despite — his Nazi affiliation. Jan-Werner Müller traces this postwar reception in detail, noting that Schmitt’s influence on later theorists of emergency powers, constitutional crisis, and international order, including Giorgio Agamben’s use of the “state of exception,” proceeds by extracting his analytic framework from its original political context. Historians and legal scholars continue to debate how far Schmitt’s Weimar-era theoretical work already anticipated or logically supported his 1933 turn to Nazism, as opposed to representing a more contingent, careerist alignment with the regime; Schmitt himself never fully repudiated his Nazi-era activity after 1945, which scholars generally treat as relevant context for assessing continuity between his theory and his political choices.

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