Carl Schmitt on the Transformations of the People in Modernity

Abstract This article argues that through the reinterpretation of the old theory of pouvoir constituant proposed by Sieyès, Carl Schmitt shows the impossibility of political modernity being anything other than authoritarian populism, whether by means of democratic or autocratic procedures. It is not that Schmitt's theory is authoritarian populism, but that modern politics, born out of the French Revolution, cannot be anything else. Schmitt's analyses of the idea of the people in political modernity in Dictatorship (1921), The Crises of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), Volksentscheid und Volksbegehren (1927), Constitutional Theory (1928), and State, Movement, People (1933) provide a fine analysis of the populist character of modernity. Something that those alive in the twenty-first century have been able to experience was theorized by Schmitt in an oracular way. Because of his keen insight he is still worth reading.