Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Identity

This chapter discusses the life and work of Carl Schmitt, a German legal scholar and professor of law who developed a constitutional theory that declared the liberal and parliamentary state under the rule of law to be outdated, a theory he used to justify rule by presidential decree in the Weimar Republic and then National Socialism. As a legal scholar, Schmitt avoided taking strong positions in terms of theological or philosophical claims, but his friend-enemy distinction provided a counterrevolutionary, apocalyptic, and anti-Semitic language and logic. Schmitt exerted a strong influence as a legal scholar and political commentator. He had a close friendship with Ernst Jünger; he argued for an “authoritarian” transformation of the Weimar Republic; and after 1933, he gave strong support to National Socialism and was influential in forming the Nazi understanding of the law and in the Nazi coordination [Gleichschaltung] of jurisprudence.