Carl Schmitt Quotes

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.

Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.

The crisis of European jurisprudence began a century ago with the victory of legal positivism.

The most brazen humiliation ever inflicted upon God and mankind, justifying all the curses of the synagogue, is to be found in the 'sive' of the formula Deus sive Natura.

Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx's seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology.

The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.

Carl Schmitt could boast with some justice that the Nazi revolution was orderly and disciplined. But the reason lies not so much within the Nazis themselves as in the lack of an effective opposition. For millions the Nazi ideology did assuage their anxiety, did end their alienation, and did give hope for a better future. Other millions watched passively, not deeply committed to resistance. "Let them have a chance" was a typical attitude. Hitler took the chance and made the most of it.

Legality has become a poisonous dagger, with which one party stabs the other in the back.

All genuine political theories presuppose man to be ‘evil’.

The remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis [is] that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.

The concept of progress, i.e., an improvement or completion (in modern jargon, a rationalization) became dominant in the eighteenth century, in an age of humanitarian-moral belief. Accordingly, progress meant above all progress in culture, self-determination, and education: moral perfection. In an age of economic or technical thinking, it is self-evident that progress is economic or technical progress. To the extent that anyone is still interested in humanitarian-moral progress, it appears as a byproduct of economic progress. If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain - they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved.

the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

Norms are valid only for normal situations.

If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.

We are thus finding ourselves in an emergency situation (what Carl Schmitt referred to as Ernstfall, a fundamental concept which he argued liberal egalitarianism never really grasped, as it interprets the world according to a providential and miraculous logic, shaped by the ascending line of progress and development).

Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant.

The emptiness of mere majority calculus deprives legality of all persuasive power.

An historical truth is only true once

In the temporal sphere, the temptation to evil inherent in every power is certainly unceasing. Only in God is the conflict between power and good ultimately resolved. But the desire to escape this conflict by rejecting every earthly power would lead to the worst inhumanity.

The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.

The transformation of the community into an administrative state responsible for total social welfare leads to a paternal totality without a house-father when it fails to find any archy or cracy that is more than a mere nomos of distribution and production. I consider it to be a utopia when Friedrich Engels promises that one day all power of men over men will cease, that there will be only production and consumption with no problems, and that "things will govern themselves." This things-governing-themselves will make every archy and cracy super­fluous , and demonstrate that mankind at last has found its formula, just as, according to Dostoyevsky, the bees found their formula in the beehive, because animal s, too, have their nomos. Most of those who swarm around a nomos basileus fail to notice that, in reality, they propagate just such a formula.

I seat philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists, and hacks at the same table: Hobbes next to Hayek, Burke across from Palin, Nietzsche in between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.

How did Kirchmann understand the worthlessness of jurisprudence ? The answer lies in the aphorism: "Three revisions by the legislator and whole libraries became wastepaper." With a sharp alteration this answer became a slogan:"A stroke of the legislator's pen and whole libraries became wastepaper." Another aphorism in the same vein made the point even more brusquely and less politely: "Positive law turns the jurist into a worm in rotten wood." Kirchmann meant that jurisprudence could never catch up with legislation. Thus our predicament becomes immediately obvious. What remains of a science reduced to annotating and interpreting constantly changing regulations issued by state agencies presumed to be in the best position to know and articulate their true intent?

Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs to humanity . . . "Humanity" thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. If he discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed. Concepts such as "human being" thus contain the possibility of the deepest inequality and become thereby "asymmetrical.

All that can justify killing is 'an existential threat to one’s own way of life. . . . To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy.

In the nomadic age, the shepherd (nomeus) was the typical symbol of rule. In Statesman, Plato distinguishes the shepherd from the statesman: the nemein of the shepherd is concerned with the nourishment (trophe) of his flock, and the shepherd is a kind of god in relation to the animals he herds. In contrast, the statesman does not stand as far above the people he governs as does the shepherd above his flock. Thus, the image of the shepherd is applicable only when an illustration of the relation of a god to human beings is intended. The statesman does not nourish; he only tends to, provides for, looks after, takes care of. The apparently materialistic viewpoint of nourishment is based more on the concept of a god than on the political viewpoint separated from him, which leads to secularization. The separation of economics and politics, of private and public law, still today considered by noted teachers of law to be an essential guarantee of freedom.

In general, it would be a peculiar type of 'justice' to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity.

We always live in the eye of the more radical brother, who compels us to draw the practical conclusion and pursue it to the end.

As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist.

Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet.

humanity, bestiality.

Whoever knows no other enemy than death and recognizes in his enemy nothing more than an empty mechanism is nearer to death than life.

If words decorate the home of Being, then hands, and by extension art, are the sketch of Being.

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing.

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.

In 1968, Kojève held a meeting with the leaders of the West German Student Movement. His advice: the most important thing for them as student leaders to do would be to learn Ancient Greek. The young radicals were “quite perplexed.” Afterwards Kojève went to visit Carl Schmitt, arguing that he's "the only person in Germany worth talking to." “Carl Schmitt: Apocalyptic Prophet of the Counterrevolution

It would be ludicrous to believe that a defenseless people has nothing but friends, and it would be a deranged calculation to suppose that the enemy could perhaps be touched by the absence of a resistance

By claiming to be something more than the economic, the political is obliged to base itself on categories other than production and consumption. To repeat: it is curious that the capitalist entrepreneur and the socialist proletarian are of one accord in considering the political's assumption a presumption and, from the standpoint of their economic thinking, regarding the dominance of politicians as immaterial.

To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

For life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the order of human things. Ab integro nascitur ordo.8

Without wanting to decide the question of the nature of man one may say in general that as long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists. The political adversaries of a clear political theory will, therefore, easily refute political phenomena and truths in the name of some autonomous discipline as amoral, uneconomical, unscientific and above all else declare this- a devilry worthy of being combated.

The modern bourgeoisie, the social class that rots in fear for money and property, that has been morally shattered by scepticism, relativism, and parliamentarism. The form of rule of this class, modern democracy, is only a "demagogic plutocracy".

The partisan is still the one who refuses to carry weapons openly, who fights from ambush, and who uses the enemy's uniform, as well as true or false insignias and every type of civilian clothing as camouflage. Secrecy and darkness are his strongest weapons...

The principle of equal chance is of such sensitivity that any serious doubt about the loyalty of all participants already renders the principle's application impossible. For it is self-evident that one can hold open an equal chance only for those whom one is certain would do the same.

Every fundamental order is a spatial order. One speaks of the constitution of a country or a piece of earth as of its fundamental order, its Nomos. Now, the true, actual fundamental order touches in its essential core upon particular spatial boundaries and separations, upon particular quantities and a particular partition of the earth. At the beginning of every great epoch there stands a great land-appropriation. In particular, every significant alteration and every resituating of the image of the earth is bound up with world-political alterations and with a new division of the earth, with a new land-appropriation.

his sovereign slumbers in normal times but suddenly awakens when a normal situation threatens to become an exception.13 The core of this authority is its exclusive possession of the right of, or its monopoly of, political decision making. Thus Schmitt’s definition: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

The essence and value of the law lies in its stability and durability (...), in its “relative eternity.” Only then does the legislator’s self-limitation and the independence of the law-bound judge find an anchor. The experiences of the French Revolution showed how an unleashed pouvoir législatif could generate a legislative orgy.

Hauriou, became a crown witness for us when he confirmed this connection in 1916, in the midst of WWI: “The revolution of 1789 had no other goal than absolute access to the writing of legal statutes and the systematic destruction of customary institutions. It resulted in a state of permanent revolution because the mobility of the writing of laws did not provide for the stability of certain customary institutions, because the forces of change were stronger than the forces of stability. Social and political life in France was completely emptied of institutions and was only able to provisionally maintain itself by sudden jolts spurred by the heightened morality.

Modern technology easily becomes the servant of this or that want and need. In modern economy, a completely irrational consumption conforms to a totally rationalized production. A marvelously rational mechanism serves one or another demand, always with the same earnestness and precision, be it for a silk blouse or poison gas or anything whatsoever. Economic rationalism has accustomed itself to deal only with certain needs and to acknowledge only those it can "satisfy." In the modern metropolis, it has erected an edifice wherein everything runs strictly according to plan— everything is calculable. A devout Catholic, precisely following his own rationality, might well be horrified by this system of irresistible materiality.

The first few lines of the third chapter run as follows: All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The state of exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical idea of the state developed over the last few centuries. I had quickly come to see Carl Schmitt as an incarnation of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. During a stormy conversation at Plettenberg in 1980, Carl Schmitt told me that anyone who failed to see that the Grand Inquisitor was right about the sentimentality of Jesuitical piety had grasped neither what a Church was for, nor what Dostoevsky—contrary to his own conviction—had “really conveyed, compelled by the sheer force of the way in which he posed the problem.” I always read Carl Schmitt with interest, often captivated by his intellectual brilliance and pithy style. But in every word I sensed something alien to me, the kind of fear and anxiety one has before a storm, an anxiety that lies concealed in the secularized messianic dart of Marxism. Carl Schmitt seemed to me to be the Grand Inquisitor of all heretics.

Without sense of contradiction, for example, once can today consider a dissolution of the Reichstag 'strictly legal,' even though it is, in fact, a coup d'etat, and, vice versa, a parliamentary dissolution might substantively conform to the spirit of the constitution, and yet not be legal. Such antitheses document the breakdown of a system of legality, which ends in a formalism and functionalism without substance or reference points.

In Russia, before the Revolution, the doomed classes romanticized the Russian peasant as a good, brave, and Christian muzhik. ... The aristocratic society of France before the Revolution of 1789 sentimentalized ‘man who is by nature good’ and the virtue of the masses. Nobody scented the revolution; it is incredible to see the security and unsuspiciousness with which these privileged spoke of the goodness, mildness, and innocence of the people when 1793 was already upon them.

Strauss expressly refers to the “Notes.” He continues: “If ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are the facts that transcend ‘culture’ or, to speak more exactly, are the original facts, then the radical critique of the concept of ‘culture’ is possible only in the form of a ‘theological-political treatise,’ which must, however, if it is not to lead again to the foundation of ‘culture,’ have the very opposite tendency to that of seventeenth-century theological-political treatises, especially those of Hobbes and Spinoza.

The process of continuous neutralization of various domains of cultural life has reached its end because technology is at hand. Technology is no longer neutral ground in the sense of the process of neutralization; every strong politics will make use of it. For this reason, the present century can only be understood provisionally as the century of technology. How ultimately it should be understood will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground.

The eighteenth-century humanitarian concept of humanity was a polemical denial of the then existing aristocratic-feudal system and the privileges accompanying it. Humanity according to natural law and liberal-individualistic doctrines is a universal, i.e., all-embracing, social ideal, a system of relations between individuals. This materializes only when the real possibility of war is precluded and every friend and enemy grouping becomes impossible. In this universal society there would no longer be nations in the form of political entities, no class struggles, and no enemy groupings.

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.

Karl Marx: bourgeoisie and proletariat. This antithesis concentrates all antagonisms of world history into one single final battle against the last enemy of humanity. It does so by integrating the many bourgeois parties on earth into a single order, on the one hand, and likewise the proletariat, on the other. By so doing a mighty friend-enemy grouping is forged. Its power of conviction during the nineteenth century resided above all in the fact that it followed its liberal bourgeois enemy into its own domain, the economic, and challenged it, so to speak, in its home territory with its own weapons. This was necessary because the turning toward economics was decided by the victory of industrial society.

If pacifist hostility toward war were so strong as to drive pacifists into a war against nonpacifists, in a war against war, that would prove that pacifism truly possesses political energy . . . this appears to be a peculiar way of justifying wars. The war is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity. Such a war is necessarily intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. . . the feasibility of such a war is particularly illustrative of the fact that war as a real possibility is still present today.

Allí donde se inicia el proceso de disolución, surgen con eso tales «pactos de Estado» dentro del Estado. Si una organización estamental o de otra clase logra dar el carácter de leyes constitucionales a pactos intraestatales, habrá alcanzado el grado sumo de vinculación del Estado que es posible conseguir sin suprimir la unidad política. Pero si el «pacto de Estado» tiene el sentido, no ya de introducir el procedimiento especial de reforma de la ley constitucional, sino de limitar y abolir el Poder constituyente, la unidad política se destroza, y se coloca el Estado en una situación por completo anómala. Todas las construcciones jurídicas de esta situación son inservibles. Naturalmente que tal proceso de disolución puede comenzar en cualquier momento.

The nasty racism that infused the progressive eugenics of Margaret Sanger and others has largely melted away. But liberal fascists are still racist in their own nice way, believing in the inherent numinousness of blacks and the permanence of white sin, and therefore the eternal justification of white guilt. While I would argue that this is bad and undesirable, I would not dream of saying that today's liberals are genocidal or vicious in their racial attitudes the way Nazis were. Still, it should be noted that on the postmodern left, they do speak in terms Nazis could understand. Indeed, notions of "white logic" and the "permanence of race" were not only understood by Nazis but in some cases pioneered by them. The historian Anne Harrington observes that the "key words of the vocabulary of postmodernism (deconstructionism, logocentrism) actually had their origins in antiscience tracts written by Nazi and protofascist writers like Ernst Krieck and Ludwig Klages. The first appearance of the word Dekonstrucktion was in a Nazi psychiatry journal edited by Hermann Goring's cousin. Many on the left talk of destroying "whiteness" in a way that is more than superficially reminiscent of the National Socialist effort to "de-Judaize" German society. Indeed, it is telling that the man who oversaw the legal front of this project, Carl Schmitt, is hugely popular among leftist academics. Mainstream liberals don't necessarily agree with these intellectuals, but they do accord them a reverence and respect that often amount to a tacit endorsement.

The motorization of law into mere decree was not yet the culmination of simplifications and accelerations. New accelerations were produced by market regulations and state control of the economy —with their numerous and transferable authorizations and subauthorizations to various offices, associations and commissions concerned with economic decisions. Thus in Germany, the concept of “directive” appeared next to the concept of “decree.” This was “the elastic form of legislation,” surpassing the decree in terms of speed and simplicity. Whereas the decree was called a “motorized law,” the directive became a “motorized decree.” Here independent, purely positivist jurisprudence lost its freedom of maneuver. Law became a means of planning, an administrative act, a directive.

Der erste Hinweis, den die Lektüre dieses ungewöhnlichen Buches uns nahelegt, betrifft die große historische Parallele, in der sich das geschichtliche Selbstverständnis des letzten Jahrhunderts konzentriert. Indem dieses Jahrhundert seine eigene Zeit mit der Zeit der römischen Bürgerkriege und des ersten Christentums in eine geschichtliche Parallele brachte, machte es den merkwürdigen Versuch, durch Vergleichung mit einer ganz anderen, zweitausend Jahre zurückliegenden Zeit sich selbst geschichtlich zu begreifen. Trotz aller hegelisch-marxistisch-stalinistischen Geschichtsdialektik haben wir tatsächlich kein anderes Mittel geschichtlichen Selbstverständnisses. Merkwürdig, warum uns aus der Unzahl der geschichtlichen Ereignisse und Zeiten gerade diese Zeit des ersten Christentums so einleuchtet -- Brief an Blumenberg

I believe in the Katechon: for me it is the only possibility of understanding history as a Christian and finding it meaningful.

Just because a people no longer has the strength or the will to remain in the sphere of the political, does not make the political disappear from the world. Only a weak people disappears.

Doch geht die Neigung, überall eine „Verkleidung" zu erkennen, viel tiefer; sie entspricht nicht nur einer proletarischen Stimmung, sondern ist von allgemeiner Bedeutung. Weit- hin werden alle kirchlichen und staatlichen Institutionen und Formen, alle rechtlichen Begriffe und Argumente, alles Offizielle, auch die Demokratie selbst, seitdem sie verfassungsmäßige Form ist, als leere und irreführende Verkleidungen empfunden, als Schleier, Fassade, Attrappe oder Dekoration. Die feinen und groben Worte, mit denen man das umschreibt, sind zahlreicher und stärker als die meisten entsprechenden Redewendungen anderer Zeiten, z. B. die von den „simulacra", deren sich die politische Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts als ihres symptomatischen Schlagwortes be- dient. Heute wird überall gleich die „Kulisse" konstruiert, hinter der sich die eigentlich bewegende Wirklichkeit verbirgt. Darin verrät sich die Unsicherheit der Zeit und ihr tiefes Gefühl, betrogen zu sein. Eine Zeit, die aus ihren eigenen Voraussetzungen keine große Form und keine Repräsentation hervorbringt, muß solchen Stimmungen erliegen und alles For- male und Offizielle für einen Betrug halten. Denn keine Zeit lebt ohne Form, mag sie sich noch so ökonomisch gebärden. Gelingt es ihr nicht, die eigene Form zu finden, so greift sie nach tausend Surrogaten aus den echten Formen anderer Zeiten und anderer Völker, um doch das Surrogat sofort wieder als unecht zu verwerfen.

Undermining the opponent through civil war and shattering his historical-philosophical self-esteem is, in the same proportion, a stronger weapon than the atomic bomb.

The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.

Incessantly ‘brooding over his problematic character’, [Carl] Schmitt labels himself as ‘Proletarian’ and even intends to write a character study of the type with opportunism as the essential trait. ‘The Proletarian, or, the Plebeian’, he notes, ‘[h]is instinct: to creep or to strut, as the situation demands. He is ad alterum’, i.e. he adapts to every other person he encounters. As one of the editors of Schmitt’s diaries remarks: ‘I know of no contemporary of Schmitt—nor of anyone today—whose written records reveal the psychological state of their author so unsparingly as these diaries.’ The area of Schmitt’s private life most unsparingly disclosed is his sexual obsessions, the tribulations of a man ‘driven by erotomania’. ‘Often bursting with sexual craving’ (27 February 1923; 164), he guiltily notes his ‘ejaculations’. ‘I sneak from a conference so horny I have to bite my fingers’, he records in November 1912.

Taking up a classic formula of Carl Schmitt, Dan Diner defines Israel as ‘a theologico-political project of modernity’.32 Zionism, appropriating the ideology and language of twentieth-century nationalisms, secularized a millennial history whose postulate lay in the identity between a people and a religion. It gave birth to a sui generis form of nationalism, not a traditional nation-state but a nation in permanent construction. A particular relationship between Zionism and religion followed from this. Is it in the strict sense a political religion?

The first precondition of the capacity for good definitions is a rare ability: an exclusion of the infinite.

I cannot be denazified, because I cannot be nazified.

Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt argued in 1922: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver, but also because of their systematic structure.

All concepts of the spiritual sphere, including the concept of spirit, are pluralistic in themselves and can only be understood in terms of concrete political existence. Just as every nation has its own concept of nation and finds the constitutive characteristics of nationality within itself, so every culture and cultural epoch has its own concept of culture. All essential concepts are not normative but existential. If the center of intellectual life has shifted in the last four centuries, so have all concepts and words.

Above all the state also derives its reality and power from the respective central domain, because the decisive disputes of friend-enemy groupings are also determined by it.

The succession of stages—from the theological, over the metaphysical and the moral to the economic—simultaneously signifies a series of progressive neutralizations of domains whose centers have shifted.

At the core of this astounding shift lies an elemental impulse that has been decisive for centuries, i.e., the striving for a neutral domain.

Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral domain, and always the newly won neutral domain has become immediately another arena of struggle, once again necessitating the search for a new neutral domain. Scientific thinking was also unable to achieve peace. The religious wars evolved into the still cultural yet already economically determined national wars of the nineteenth century and, finally, into economic wars.

Exchange and deception are often not far apart. A domination of men based upon pure economics must appear a terrible deception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades political responsibility and visibility.

there is no money equivalent for political freedom and political independence.

An imperialism based on pure economic power will naturally attempt to sustain a worldwide condition which enables it to apply and manage, unmolested, its economic means, e.g., terminating credit, embargoing raw materials, destroying the currencies of others, and so on.

Exchange by no means precludes the possibility that one of the contractors experiences a disadvantage and that a system of mutual contracts finally deteriorates into a system of the worst exploitation and repression. When the exploited and the repressed attempt to defend themselves in such a situation, they cannot do so by economic means. Evidently, the possessor of economic power would consider every attempt to change its power position by extra-economic means as violence and crime, and will seek methods to hinder this. That ideal construction of a society based on exchange and mutual contracts and, eo ipso, peaceful and just is thereby eliminated.

If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain—they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved.

A league of nations as a concrete existing universal human organization would, on the contrary, have to accomplish the difficult task of, first, effectively taking away the jus belli from all the still existing human groupings, and, second, simultaneously not assuming the jus belli itself. Otherwise, universality, humanity, depoliticalized society—in short, all essential characteristics—would again be eliminated.

Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with an anthropological optimism. This would dissolve the possibility of enmity and, thereby, every specific political consequence.

The worst confusion arises when concepts such as justice and freedom are used to legitimize one's own political ambitions and to disqualify or demoralize the enemy.

First, law can signify here the existing positive laws and law-giving methods which should continue to be valid. In this case the rule of law means nothing else than the legitimization of a specific status quo, the preservation of which interests particularly those whose political power or economic advantage would stabilize itself in this law.

That production and consumption, price formation and market have their own sphere and can be directed neither by ethics nor aesthetics, nor by religion, nor, least of all, by politics was considered one of the few truly unquestionable dogmas of this liberal age.

In the concrete reality of the political, no abstract orders or norms but always real human groupings and associations rule over the other human groupings and associations. Politically, the rule of morality, law, and economics always assumes a concrete political meaning.

The central quality of all transformations that have led to our present stage—technicity—is the “striving for a neutral domain.” For Europe, the attraction of a neutral domain is that it seems to provide a solution to the conflicts that had grown up out of quarrels over theology. It transformed the concepts elaborated by “centuries of theological reflection” into what are for Schmitt “merely private matters” (AND, 90). However, each stage of neutralization became, in Schmitt's analysis, merely the next arena of struggle. Here it is important to see that what someone like John Rawls sees as one of the most important achievements of the West—religious toleration—is for Schmitt merely the prelude to another form of conflict.

A valid meaning is here attached to the word sovereignty, just as to the term entity. Both do not at all imply that a political entity must necessarily determine every aspect of a person's life or that a centralized system should destroy every other organization or corporation.

However one may look at it, in the orientation toward the possible extreme case of an actual battle against a real enemy, the political entity is essential, and it is the decisive entity for the friend-or-enemy grouping; and in this (and not in any kind of absolutist sense), it is sovereign. Otherwise the political entity is nonexistent.

Under no circumstances can anyone demand that any member of an economically determined society, whose order in the economic domain is based upon rational procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operations.

The economically functioning society possesses sufficient means to neutralize nonviolently, in a “peaceful” fashion, those economic competitors who are inferior, unsuccessful or mere “perturbers

Burckhardt also correctly noted the inner contradiction of democracy and the liberal constitutional state: “The state is thus, on the one hand, the realization and expression of the cultural ideas of every party; on the other, merely the visible vestures of civic life and powerful on an ad hoc basis only. It should be able to do everything, yet allowed to do nothing. In particular, it must not defend its existing form in any crisis—and after all, what men want more than anything else is to participate in the exercise of its power. The state's form thus becomes increasingly questionable and its radius of power ever broader.” 5

Thereby the inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses.

The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.

By virtue of this power over the physical life of men, the political community transcends all other associations or societies. Within the community, however, subordinate groupings of a secondary political nature could exist with their own or transferred rights, even with a limited jus vitae ac necis over members of smaller groups.

Haenel considers wrong the belief that the state has, at least potentially, the power of making all the social goals of humanity its goals too. Even though the state is for him universal, it is by no means total.

Carl Schmitt said, the essence of politics is in the distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, the word ‘fascism’ has simply come to stand in for anyone who opposes liberal or left-wing orthodoxy for any reason.

The real friend-enemy grouping is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely religious, purely economic, purely cultural criteria and motives to the conditions and conclusions of the political situation at hand.

The political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity, regardless of the sources from which it derives its last psychic motives. It exists or does not exist. If it exists, it is the supreme, that is, in the decisive case, the authoritative entity.

In a constitutional state, as Lorenz von Stein says, the constitution is “the expression of the societal order, the existence of society itself. As soon as it is attacked the battle must then be waged outside the constitution and the law, hence decided by the power of weapons.

First, all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation; the result (which manifests itself in war or revolution) is a friend-enemy grouping, and they turn into empty and ghostlike abstractions when this situation disappears.

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.

War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior.

For only in real combat is revealed the most extreme consequence of the political grouping of friend and enemy. From this most extreme possibility human life derives its specifically political tension.

A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics.

Humanity is not a political concept, and no political entity or society and no status corresponds to it.

Universality at any price would necessarily have to mean total depoliticalization and with it, particularly, the nonexistence of states.

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence.

if a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”10

If, in fact, the economic, cultural, or religious counterforces are so strong that they are in a position to decide upon the extreme possibility from their viewpoint, then these forces have in actuality become the new substance of the political entity.

The ever present possibility of a friend-and-enemy grouping suffices to forge a decisive entity which transcends the mere societal-associational groupings.

Fourth, war cannot altogether be outlawed, but only specific individuals, peoples, states, classes, religions, etc., which, by being outlawed, are declared to be the enemy.

If a people is afraid of the trials and risks implied by existing in the sphere of politics, then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule.

The phenomenon of the political can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibility of the friend-and-enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this possibility implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics.

Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.

Should the proletariat succeed in seizing political power within a state, a proletarian state will thus have been created.

From this standpoint, Schmitt came to the following conclusions about modern bourgeois politics. First, it is a system which rests on compromise; hence all of its solutions are in the end temporary, occasional, never decisive. Second, such arrangements can never resolve the claims of equality inherent in democracy. By the universalism implicit in its claims for equality, democracy challenges the legitimacy of the political order, as liberal legitimacy rests on discussion and the compromise of shifting majority rules. Third, liberalism will tend to undermine the possibility of the political in that it wishes to substitute procedure for struggle. Thus, last, legitimacy and legality cannot be the same; indeed, they stand in contradiction to each other.17

The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind and can effect at different times different coalitions and separations.

The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.

What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state—as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit.

If such physical destruction of human life is not motivated by an existential threat to one's own way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical and juristic norms. If there really are enemies in the existential sense as meant here, then it is justified, but only politically, to repel and fight them physically.

In its entirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction.

If the political power of a class or of some other group within a state is sufficiently strong to hinder the waging of wars against other states but incapable of assuming or lacking the will to assume the state's power and thereby decide on the friend-and-enemy distinction and, if necessary, make war, then the political entity is destroyed.

As the war drew to a close, Schmitt had no idea what new difficulties he might encounter, though he surely must have suspected that the Allies would hold him accountable for his Nazi collaboration. In April 1945, the Russians oc­cupied Berlin and arrested Schmitt at his home. During several hours of interrogation, Schmitt told the Russians that his relationship with National Socialism could best be understood in reference to the experiments of the German scientist Max von Pettenkofer. Schmitt explained to his baffled interrogators that at the beginning of this century, Pettenkofer had argued that the susceptibility of a person to illness was more important than a bacillus in causing infectious disease. To prove his point, Pettenkofer stood before his students and drank a glass of water containing a culture of cholera bacteria; he remained healthy. "You see," Schmitt concluded, "I have done exactly the same thing: I drank of the Nazi bacillus, but it had not infected me." While it is unknown what effect this story had on the Russians, Schmitt was released and allowed to return home.

the political” is found “not in fighting itself…but in a behavior that is determined by this real possibility

The war against war will then be undertaken as “the definitively final war of humanity.” Such a war, however, is “necessarily especially intensive and inhuman” because in it the enemy is fought as “an inhuman monster…that must be not only fended off but definitively annihilated” (36; 37). But humanity cannot be expected to be especially humane and, therefore, unpolitical after having just put behind it an especially inhumane war. Thus the effort to abolish the political for the sake of humanity has as its necessary consequence nothing other than the increase of inhumanity.

Yet technology can do nothing more than intensify peace or war; it is equally available to both.

The political must first be brought out of the concealment into which liberalism has cast it, so that the question of the state can be seriously put.

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.

Whereas for Schmitt the neo-Kantian the state was governed by right, for Schmitt the realist it was governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict.

This conception of the state became the focal point of his thinking. In contrast to Hegel, for whom the state was the realization of the highest form of existence, Schmitt perceived the role of the state as the securing of conditions under which citizens could pursue their private wills.

all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.

Arguing that the essence of sovereign power precludes it from being subject to law all the time, even in exceptional times, Schmitt maintained that the endeavors of the sovereign can only be understood in the overall context of the legal order within which this authority operates.

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.1 Only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept. Contrary to the imprecise terminology that is found in popular literature, a borderline concept is not a vague concept, but one pertaining to the outermost sphere. This definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine. It will soon become clear that the exception is to be understood to refer to a general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency decree or state of siege.

What is argued about is the concrete application, and that means who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes the public interest or interest of the state, public safety and order, le salut public, and so on.

The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law.

What significance can be given to the fact that in the contemporary theory of the state, neo-Kantian formalism has been thrown aside while, at the same time, a form is postulated from an entirely different direction? Is that another expression of those eternal mix-ups that are responsible for making the history of philosophy so monotonous? One thing is certain to be recognized in this modern theory of the state: The form should be transferred from the subjective to the objective.

We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced.

if it is not hampered in some way by checks and balances, as is the case in a liberal constitution, then it is clear who the sovereign is. He decides whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it. Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety.

Every concrete juristic decision contains a moment of indifference from the perspective of content, because the juristic deduction is not traceable in the last detail to its premises and because the circumstance that requires a decision remains an independently determining moment.

That the legal idea cannot translate itself independently is evident from the fact that it says nothing about who should apply it.

After all, every legal order is based on a decision, and also the concept of the legal order, which is applied as something self-evident, contains within it the contrast of the two distinct elements of the juristic—norm and decision. Like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm.

What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes. Because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind.

The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority over the validity of the legal norm.

The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute. The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one would say.

The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juristic element

There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.

All law is “situational law.” The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision. Therein resides the essence of the state’s sovereignty, which must be juristically defined correctly, not as the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but as the monopoly to decide. The exception reveals most clearly the essence of the state’s authority. The decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law.

The contemporary theory of the state reveals the interesting spectacle of the two tendencies facing one another, the rationalist tendency, which ignores the emergency, and the natural law tendency, which is interested in the emergency and emanates from an essentially different set of ideas.

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

The tendency of liberal constitutionalism to regulate the exception as precisely as possible means, after all, the attempt to spell out in detail the case in which law suspends itself.

Sovereignty is the highest, legally independent, underived power.

It utilizes the superlative, “the highest power,” to characterize a true quantity, even though from the standpoint of reality, which is governed by the law of causality, no single factor can be picked out and accorded such a superlative.

In political reality there is no irresistible highest or greatest power that operates according to the certainty of natural law.

The connection of actual power with the legally highest power is the fundamental problem of the concept of sovereignty.

For juristic consideration there are neither real nor fictitious persons, only points of ascription. The state is the terminal point of ascription, the point at which the ascriptions, which constitute the essence of juristic consideration, “can stop.

All the anarchist theories from Babeuf to Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Otto Gross revolve around the one axiom: “The people are good, but the magistrate is corruptible.

Every political idea in one way or another takes a position on the “nature” of man and presupposes that he is either “by nature good” or “by nature evil.

Marxist socialism considers the question of the nature of man incidental and superfluous because it believes that changes in economic and social conditions change man.

The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juristic element—the decision in absolute purity.

Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations.

What must be pointed out simultaneously is that the state reveals itself only in the making of law, be it by way of legislative enactment or by way of rewriting law.

The age-old Aristotelian opposites of deliberation and action begin with two distinct forms; whereas deliberation is approachable through legal form, action is approachable only by a technical formation.

Because the legal idea cannot realize itself, it needs a particular organization and form before it can be translated into reality.

Humanity reels blindly through a labyrinth that we call history, whose entrance, exit, and shape nobody knows;2 humanity is a boat aimlessly tossed about on the sea and manned by a mutinous, vulgar, forcibly recruited crew that howls and dances until God’s rage pushes the rebellious rabble into the sea so that quiet can prevail once more.

the bloody decisive battle that has flared up today between Catholicism and atheist socialism. According to Donoso Cortés, it was characteristic of bourgeois liberalism not to decide in this battle but instead to begin a discussion. He straightforwardly defined the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,” una clasa discutidora.

Schmitt is saying that it is the essence of sovereignty both to decide what is an exception and to make the decisions appropriate to that exception, indeed that one without the other makes no sense at all.

It is of the essence of Schmitt’s conception of the state that there can be no preset rule-fixed definition of sovereignty.

This claim is at the basis of Schmitt’s rejection of what he calls “liberal normativism”—that is, of the assumption that a state can ultimately rest on a set of mutually agreed-to procedures and rules that trump particular claims and necessities.

Politics is thus different from economics, where one has “competitors” rather than friends and enemies, as it is different from debate, where one has Diskussionsgegner (discussion opponents).22 It is not a private dislike of another individual; rather it is the actual possibility of a “battling totality” (kämpfende Gesamtheit) that finds itself necessarily in opposition to another such entity.

And if life can never be reduced or adequately understood by a set of rules, no matter how complex, then in the end, rule is of men and not of law—or rather that the rule of men must always existentially underlie the rule of law.

Human society can thus never be made to rest on the determination and application of rules to individual situations. Decisions and judgments would always be necessary. In this Schmitt can be thought to be an initiator (albeit not recognized or known as such) of contemporary developments such as Critical Legal Studies on the Left and the Law and Economics movement on the Right.

The sovereign must decide both that a situation is exceptional and what to do about the exception in order to be able to create or recover a judicial order when the existing one is threatened by chaos.

The central concepts of modern state theory are all secularized theological concepts

A class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict.

Although the liberal bourgeoisie wanted a god, its god could not become active; it wanted a monarch, but he had to be powerless; it demanded freedom and equality but limited voting rights to the propertied classes in order to ensure the influence of education and property on legislation, as if education and property entitled that class to repress the poor and uneducated; it abolished the aristocracy of blood and family but permitted the impudent rule of the moneyed aristocracy, the most ignorant and the most ordinary form of an aristocracy; it wanted neither the sovereignty of the king nor that of the people. What did it actually want?

There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea.

The world architect is simultaneously the creator and the legislator, which means the legitimizing authority.

In America this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God—a belief that is at the foundation of Jefferson’s victory of 1801.

La guerra no es pues en modo alguno objetivo o incluso contenido de la política, pero constituye el presupuesto que está siempre dado como posibilidad real, que determina de una manera peculiar la acción y el pensamiento humanos y origina así una conducta específicamente política

Mientras un pueblo exista en la esfera de lo político, tendrá que decidir por sí mismo, aunque no sea más que en el caso extremo - pero siendo él también quien decida si está dado tal caso extremo -, quién es el amigo y quién el enemigo. En ello estriba la esencia de su existencia política. Si no posee ya tal capacidad o voluntad de tomar tal decisión, deja de existir políticamente. Si se deja decir por un extraño quién es el enemigo y contra quién debe o no debe combatir, es que ya no es un pueblo políticamente libre, sino que está integrado en o sometido a otro sistema político. El sentido de una guerra no está en que se la haga por ideales o según normas jurídicas, sino en que se la haga contra un enemigo real.

El concepto democrático de igualdad es un concepto político y, como todo concepto político auténtico, debe relacionarse con la posibilidad de una distinción. Por eso, la democracia política no puede basarse en la indistinción de todos los hombres, sino sólo en la pertenencia a un pueblo determinado. (...) La igualdad que corresponde a la esencia de la democracia se dirige por eso siempre al interior, y no hacia fuera: dentro de un Estado democrático son iguales todos los súbditos. De aquí se deduce, a los efectos de la consideración política y jurídico-política: quien no es súbdito del Estado no entre en juego para esta igualdad democrática.

Todos los conceptos centrales de la moderna teoría del Estado son concepto teológicos secularizados. Lo cual es cierto no sólo por razón de su evolución histórica, en cuanto fueron transferidos de la teología a la teoría del Estado, convirtiéndose, por ejemplo, el Dios omnipotente en el legislador todopoderoso, sino también por razón de su estructura sistemática, cuyo conocimiento es imprescindible para la consideración sociológica de sus conceptos. El Estado de excepción tiene en la jurisprudencia análoga significación que el milagro en la teología. [...] Ambas disciplinas tienen un "duplex principium": la "ratio" (de ahí la teología natural y la jurisprudencia natural) y la "scriptura", es decir, un libro con revelaciones y reglas positivas.

True law is not imposed; it arises from unintentional developments. (...)Law emerges (...) as something not merely legislated but given. The later positivism knows no origin and has no home. It recognizes only causes or basic norms. It seeks to be the opposite of “unintended” law. Its ultimate goal is control and calculability.

Along with Schmitt, neo-Aristotelianism is critical of the search for universal legal and/or moral rules, and, again following Schmitt, neo-Aristotelians associate this tendency with the characteristic moral theories of liberalism, in particular Kantianism and utilitarianism. However, unlike Schmitt, Toulmin at least locates the origin of this tendency not with the Anglo-American thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but much earlier – in fact, just at the point where Schmitt's jus publicum Europaeum is first established, in the early seventeenth century. This is when, Toulmin argues, the moral insights of Renaissance humanism and the classical world were put aside. Under the influence of Descartes and Hobbes, along with many lesser talents, formal logic came to displace rhetoric, general principles and abstract axioms were privileged over particular cases and concrete diversity, and the establishment of rules (or 'laws') that were deemed of permanent as opposed to transitory applicability came to be seen as the task of the theorist. Toulmin suggests that at this time moral reasoning became 'theory-centered' rather than 'practically-minded

It is equally easy to see how Schmitt associates this notion of international law with the United States – but it is worth noting that for Schmitt, unlike Carr and other realists, the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson is not central to this critique, or rather is simply a continuation of early American policies. The key date here is not 1919 but 1823, the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine which symbolizes the emergence of a new kind of imperial rule. The Monroe Doctrine purports to warn off European powers from attempting to take new territories in the Americas, but actually involves an assertion of American power over the rest of the Western hemisphere. This is a new kind of Empire, a hegemony under which the US dominates usually without actually formally ruling; the US often intervenes in the affairs of the lesser American powers, and sometimes does so militarily, but always in the name of progressive values and in the putative interests of the locals – this is a form of rule that is both more effective than traditional empire because it does not involve the usual administrative costs, but also more hypocritical, because it denies its own nature, pretending to exercise power only in the interests of others.

The League of Nations Covenant (which specifically endorses the Monroe Doctrine) represents the global extension of this hegemony. The US did not join the League, but American economic power underwrote the peace settlement and, eventually, in the Second World War, US military power was brought to bear to bring down the jus publicum Europaeum and replace it with 'international law', liberal internationalism and, incipiently, the notion of humanitarian intervention in support of the liberal, universalist, positions that the new order had set in place. On Schmitt's account, the two world wars were fought to bring this about – and the barbarism of modern warfare is to be explained by the undermining of the limits established in the old European order. In effect, the notion of a Just War has been reborn albeit without much of its theological underpinnings. The humanized warfare of the JPE with its recognition of the notion of a 'just enemy' is replaced by the older notion that the enemy is evil and to be destroyed – in fact, is no longer an 'enemy' within Schmitt's particular usage of the term but a 'foe' who can, and should, be annihilated. Schmitt

A deep-seated ambivalence has always characterized the official response to the political prisoner. Charged and tried for the criminal act, his guilt is always political in nature. This ambivalence is perhaps best captured by Judge Webster Thayer’s comment upon sentencing Bartolomeo Vanzetti to fifteen years for an attempted payroll robbery: “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is an enemy of our existing institutions.” (The very same judge incidentally, sentences Sacco and Vanzetti3 to death for a robbery and murder of which they were manifestly innocent.)4 It is not surprising that Nazi Germany’s foremost constitutional lawyer, Carl Schmitt, advanced the theory which generalized this a priori culpability. A thief, for example, was not necessarily one who had committed an overt act of theft, but rather one whose character renders him a thief (wer nach seinem wesen ein Dieb ist).

If the parliamentary legislative state typically permits a 'state of exception' with the suspension of basic rights, its intention is not to render the special commissioner equivalent with the legislature or the special commissioner's decrees equivalent with statutes, but to create the freedom to issues measures that are necessary and effective.

If the assumptions underlying the legislative state of the parliamentary-democratic variety are no longer tenable, then closing one's eyes to the concrete constitutional situation and clinging to an absolute, 'value-neutral,' functionalist and formal concept of law, in order to save the system of legality, is not far off. The 'law,' then, is only the present decision of the momentary parliamentary majority.