Carl Schmitt 1888 – 1985

Carl Schmitt was a German jurist and political theorist, one of the most influential and most compromised legal thinkers of the twentieth century. His Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, set out a decisionist account of sovereignty, the friend-enemy distinction as the criterion of the political, and a sharp critique of liberal constitutionalism. He joined the National Socialist party in 1933 and served the regime until falling out of favor with the SS, after which he produced his late international-law writings on the nomos of the earth. His thought has been intensely studied across the political spectrum since his death.

Carl Schmitt was born at Plettenberg in Westphalia in July 1888, the son of a Catholic merchant. He studied law at Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, took his doctorate at Strasbourg in 1910 and his habilitation in 1916, and held chairs successively at Greifswald, Bonn, the Handelshochschule Berlin, Cologne, and from 1933 the University of Berlin. He joined the NSDAP on 1 May 1933 and rose briefly as the regime's 'Crown Jurist' before SS attacks demoted him to a professorial role in 1936; interned by the Allies in 1945 and twice questioned at Nuremberg, he refused denazification and lived the rest of his life as a private scholar in Plettenberg.

His major works are Political Romanticism (1919), Dictatorship (1921), Political Theology (1922), The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), The Concept of the Political (1927, expanded 1932), Constitutional Theory (1928), Legality and Legitimacy (1932), The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), The Nomos of the Earth (1950), and Theory of the Partisan (1963). Late notebooks were posthumously published as Glossarium.

Schmitt is read for his definition of the sovereign as 'he who decides on the exception', for the friend-enemy distinction as the criterion of the political, for his thesis that the central concepts of modern political theory are secularised theological concepts, and for the late account of the planetary order of land and sea as a nomos. He died at Plettenberg in April 1985, a few months short of ninety-seven.