Carl Schmitt Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Carl Schmitt, organized by topic.
Browse Carl Schmitt by topic
Carl Schmitt on Justice
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“All law is "situational law." The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.”
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“The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.”
Wikiquote
Carl Schmitt on Knowledge
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“Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortés only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question “Christ or Barabbas?” with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.”
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“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.”
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“Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.”
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Carl Schmitt on Nature
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“The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.”
Wikiquote
Carl Schmitt on Politics
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“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
p.5 -
“The political is the distinction between friend and enemy.”
The Concept of the Political -
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”
Political Theology -
Attributed to Carl Schmitt:
“Every political concept is a polemical concept.”
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Attributed to Carl Schmitt:
“Where there is a real enemy, there is a real politics.”
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“To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." 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. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.”
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“The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.”
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“The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.”
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“A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories.”
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“That the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction of friend and enemy.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“Value has its own logic. In the constitutional state that is most clearly recognizable in the enactment of its constitution.”
"The Tyranny of Values" (1967) -
“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 Concept of the Political(1927) -
“What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy.”
The Concept of the Political(1927)