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.