Carl Schmitt

Academic career

While in Munich, Schmitt attended Max Weber's lectures, "Politics as a Vocation", "Science as a Vocation", and the General Economic History. In 1923, he contributed to the second volume of Melchior Palyi's Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber.

In 1921, Schmitt became a professor at the University of Greifswald, where he published his essay Die Diktatur (On Dictatorship).

In 1922, he published Politische Theologie (Political Theology) while working as a professor at the University of Bonn. Schmitt changed universities in 1928, when he became professor of law at the Handelshochschule in Berlin, and again in 1933, when he accepted a position at the University of Cologne. His most famous paper, "Der Begriff des Politischen" ("The Concept of the Political"), was based on lectures at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin.

In 1932, Schmitt was counsel for the Reich government in the case Preussen contra Reich (Prussia vs. Reich), in which the SPD-controlled government of Prussia disputed its dismissal by the right-wing Reich government of Franz von Papen. Papen was motivated by the fact that Prussia, by far the largest state in Germany, served as a powerful base for the political left and provided it with institutional power, particularly in the form of the Prussian police. Schmitt, Carl Bilfinger, and Erwin Jacobi represented the Reich, and one of the counsel for the Prussian government was Hermann Heller. In October 1932, the court ruled that the Prussian government had been suspended unlawfully but that the Reich had the right to install a commissar. In German history, the struggle that resulted in the de facto destruction of federalism in the Weimar Republic is known as the Preußenschlag.

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Religion

As a young man, Schmitt was "a devoted Catholic until his break with the church in the mid twenties". From around the end of World War I, he began to describe his Catholicism as "displaced" and "de-totalised". N. S. Lyons claims that something in Schmitt's interior life seems to have begun to shift around 1914, when his diary entries started to hint at a crisis of faith. According to Lyons, it was his troubled relationships with women that estranged him from the Faith.

According to political theorist Reinhard Mehring, Schmitt's involvement with Catholicism was mostly political rather than motivated by genuine belief in Catholic doctrine. He was known to be fond of the hierarchical structure and Roman law of the Catholic Church. Despite his lack of belief his works such as Political theology and Roman catholicism and Political form were heavily influenced by Catholicism. In his 1922 work Political theology, he argues that "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts". Schmitt particularly cites the idea of an all-powerful state or government is a secularized version of an all-powerful God. He also frequently quoted and was influenced by Christian thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Juan Donoso Cortés, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes.

Emergency powers

Schmitt's "state of exception" doctrine has enjoyed a revival in the 21st century. In his 1921 work The Dictatorship, he advocated for giving a state absolute power during crises and argued the law should not apply during times of emergency. Formulated 10 years before the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany, Schmitt claimed that urgency justified the following:

1. Special executive powers
2. Suspension of the Rule of Law
3. Derogation of legal and constitutional rights

Schmitt's doctrine helped clear the way for Hitler's rise to power by providing the theoretical legal foundation of the Nazi regime.

Support for the Nazi Party

On 31 January 1933, Schmitt remarked that with Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, "one can say that 'Hegel died.'" Richard Wolin observes:

[I]t is Hegel qua philosopher of the "bureaucratic class" or Beamtenstaat that has been definitely surpassed with Hitler's triumph ... this class of civil servants—which Hegel in the Rechtsphilosophie deems the "universal class"—represents an impermissible drag on the sovereignty of executive authority. For Schmitt ... the very essence of the bureaucratic conduct of business is reverence for the norm, a standpoint that could not but exist in great tension with the doctrines of Carl Schmitt ... Hegel had set an ignominious precedent by according this putative universal class a position of preeminence in his political thought, insofar as the primacy of the bureaucracy tends to diminish or supplant the prerogative of sovereign authority.

The Nazis engineered the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933 in March, which changed the Weimar Constitution to allow the "present government" to rule by decree, bypassing both the President, Paul von Hindenburg, and the Reichstag.

Alfred Hugenberg, the leader of the German National People's Party, one of the Nazis' partners in the coalition government that was being squeezed out of existence, hoped to slow the Nazi takeover of the country by threatening to quit his cabinet position. Hugenberg reasoned that by doing so, the government would be changed, and the Enabling Act would no longer apply, as the "present government" would no longer exist. A legal opinion by Schmitt prevented this manoeuvre from succeeding. Well known at the time as a constitutional theorist, Schmitt declared that "present government" did not refer to the cabinet's makeup when the act was passed, but to the "completely different kind of government"—that is, different from the democracy of the Weimar Republic—that the Hitler cabinet had brought into existence.

Schmitt was the presiding legal expert at meetings during the early stages of the Third Reich that resulted in a formal decision to bypass the process of formulating a new constitution. An approach that would nominally maintain the former constitution was adopted, even though the Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) was given transcendent supra-legal status. Schmitt claimed that the adoption of the Leader Principle in place of a legal constitution was legitimized by the presumed "Völkisch" or racial composition of the German people and their identification with Hitler.

Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933. Within days, he rejoiced in the burning of Jewish authors' "un-German" and "anti-German" writings and called for a much more extensive purge, to include works by authors influenced by "Jewish" ideas. From June 1933, he was in the leadership council of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law and chaired the Committee for State and Administrative Law. In July, Hermann Göring appointed him to the Prussian State Council, and in November he became the president of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists. He also replaced Heller as a professor at the University of Berlin, a position he held until the end of World War II. He presented his theories as an ideological foundation of the Nazi dictatorship and a justification of the Führer state concerning legal philosophy, particularly through the concept of auctoritas.

In June 1934, Schmitt was appointed editor-in-chief of the Nazi newspaper for lawyers, the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung ("German Jurists' Journal"). In July he published in it "The Leader Protects the Law (Der Führer schützt das Recht)", a justification of the political murders of the Night of the Long Knives with Hitler's authority as the "highest form of administrative justice (höchste Form administrativer Justiz)". Schmitt presented himself as a radical antisemite and chaired an October 1936 law teachers' convention in Berlin at which he demanded that German law be cleansed of the "Jewish spirit (jüdischem Geist)" and that all Jewish scientists' publications be marked with a small symbol.

Nevertheless, in December 1936, the Schutzstaffel (SS) publication Das Schwarze Korps accused Schmitt of being an opportunist, a Hegelian state thinker, and a Catholic, and called his antisemitism a mere pretense, citing earlier statements in which he criticized the Nazis' racial theories. After this, Schmitt resigned as Reichsfachgruppenleiter (Reich Professional Group Leader) but retained his professorship in Berlin and his title "Prussian State Councillor". Schmitt continued to be investigated in 1937, but Göring stopped further reprisals.

During the German occupation of Paris, a "round-table" of French and German intellectuals met at the Georges V Hotel, including Schmitt, the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau, and Henry de Montherlant, and the publisher Gaston Gallimard.

After World War II

In 1945, US forces captured Schmitt and, after spending more than a year in an internment camp, he returned to Plettenberg and, later, to his housekeeper Anni Stand's residence in Plettenberg-Pasel. He remained unrepentant for his role in the creation of the Nazi state and, refusing every attempt at denazification, was barred from academic jobs. Despite being isolated from the mainstream of the scholarly and political community, from the 1950s on, he continued his studies, especially of international law, and frequently received visitors, both colleagues and younger intellectuals, well into his old age. Among the visitors were Ernst Jünger, Jacob Taubes, and Alexandre Kojève.

In 1962, Schmitt gave lectures in Francoist Spain, two of which resulted in the 1963 publication of Theory of the Partisan, in which he called the Spanish Civil War a "war of national liberation" against "international Communism". Schmitt regarded the partisan as a specific and significant phenomenon that, in the latter half of the 20th century, indicated the emergence of a new theory of warfare.

Personal life

According to biographers such as Reinhard Mehring, Schmitt's private life was deeply troubled and distressed by extreme antisemitism, self-destructive and compulsive sexuality, and a deep resentment of bourgeois life. This is said to have had a profound impact on his activities.

In 1916, Schmitt married his first wife, Pavla Dorotić, a Croatian woman who pretended to be a countess. They divorced, but an annulment was not granted by a Catholic tribunal, so his 1926 marriage to Duška Todorović, a Serbian woman, was not deemed valid under Catholic law. Schmitt and Todorović had a daughter, Anima, who in 1957 married Alfonso Otero Varela, a Spanish law professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela and a member of the ruling FET y de las JONS party in Francoist Spain. She translated several of her father's works into Spanish. Letters from Schmitt to his son-in-law have been published.

Schmitt was known to have had numerous extramarital affairs and for other sexually deviant behaviour. He kept a journal that graphically detailed his sexual experiences. In 1928, he reportedly watched The Passion of Joan of Arc a dozen times and, on several occasions in Berlin and Rome, picked up prostitutes to watch with him. He reportedly had an affair with English teacher Kathleen Murray while his divorce from Dorotić was still pending and had multiple affairs during his second marriage to Todorović.

Schmitt died on 7 April 1985 and is buried in Plettenberg.

Influence

Through Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Arato, Chantal Mouffe and other writers, Schmitt has become a common reference in recent writings of the intellectual left as well as the right. These discussions concern not only the interpretation of Schmitt's own positions but also matters relevant to contemporary politics: the idea that laws of the state cannot strictly limit actions of its sovereign, the problem of a "state of exception" (later expanded upon by Agamben).

Schmitt's argument that political concepts are secularized theological concepts has also recently been seen as consequential for those interested in contemporary political theology. The philosopher Jacob Taubes, for example, engaged Schmitt widely in his 2004 study of Saint Paul, The Political Theology of Paul. Taubes' understanding of political theology is very different from Schmitt's, and emphasizes the political aspect of theological claims rather than the religious derivation of political claims.

Schmitt is described as a "classic of political thought" by Herfried Münkler, while in the same article Münkler speaks of his postwar writings as reflecting an "embittered, jealous, occasionally malicious man" ("verbitterten, eifersüchtigen, gelegentlich bösartigen Mann"). Schmitt was termed the "Crown Jurist of the Third Reich" ("Kronjurist des Dritten Reiches") by Waldemar Gurian.

According to historian Renato Cristi in the writing of the 1980 Constitution of Chile, Pinochet collaborator Jaime Guzmán based his work on the pouvoir constituant concept used by Schmitt (as well as drawing inspiration in the ideas of market society of Friedrich Hayek). This way Guzmán would have enabled a framework for a dictatorial state combined with a free market economic system.

Schmitt's anti-parliamentarian political theory received renewed attention as a historical reference with immediate contemporary relevance during the electoral cycles and administrations of the U.S. President Donald Trump.

China

Some have argued that Schmitt has become an important influence on Chinese political theory in the 21st century, particularly since Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. Leading Chinese Schmittians include the theologian Liu Xiaofeng, the public policy scholar Wang Shaoguang, and the legal theorist and government adviser Jiang Shigong. Schmitt's ideas have proved popular and useful instruments in justifying the legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party rule.

The first important wave of Schmitt's reception in China started with Liu's writings at the end of the 1990s. In the context of a transition period, Schmitt was used both by liberal, nationalist and conservative intellectuals to find answers to contemporary issues. In the 21st century, most of them are still concerned with state power and to what extent a strong state is required to tackle China's modernization. Some authors consider Schmitt's works as a weapon against liberalism. Others think that his theories are helpful for China's development.

A critical reception of his use in a Chinese context also exists. These differences go together with different interpretations of Schmitt's relation with fascism. While some scholars regard him as a faithful follower of fascism, others, such as Liu Xiaofeng, consider his support for the Nazi regime only as instrumental and attempt to separate his works from their historical context. According to them, his real goal is to pave a different and unique way for the modernization of Germany—precisely what makes him interesting for China. Generally speaking, the Chinese reception is ambivalent: quite diverse and dynamic, but also highly ideological. Other scholars are cautious when it comes to Schmitt's arguments for state power, considering the danger of totalitarianism, they assume at the same time that state power is necessary for the current transition and that a "dogmatic faith" in liberalism is unsuitable for China. By emphasizing the danger of social chaos, many of them agree with Schmitt—beyond their differences—on the necessity of a strong state.

Other countries

Among other things, his work is considered to have influenced neoconservatism in the United States. Most notably the legal opinions offered by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo et al. by invoking the unitary executive theory to justify the Bush administration's legally controversial decisions during the war on terror (such as introducing unlawful combatant status which purportedly would eliminate protection by the Geneva Conventions, the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program and various excesses of the Patriot Act) mimic his writings. David Luban points out that the American legal database Lexis.com has five references to Schmitt in the period between 1980 and 1990, 114 between 1990 and 2000, and 420 between 2000 and 2010, with almost twice as many in the last five years of the 2000s decade as the first five.

Several scholars have noted Schmitt's influence on Vladimir Putin and Russia, specifically in defence of illiberal norms and exercising power, such as in disputes with Ukraine. Timothy Snyder has asserted that Schmitt's work has greatly influenced Eurasianist philosophy in Russia by revealing a counter to the liberal order. Nomma Zarubina, who was accused by the FBI of being a secret operative of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), said in an interview that her father named her "Nomma" after Schmitt's work The Nomos of the Earth.