scholarly journals Carl Schmitts „Grossraumlehre" im kontext des nationalsozialismus

2021 ◽  
pp. 906-936
Author(s):  
Peter Techet

The debates on how Europe can be organized as a unity took place in the National Socialist Germany too. The aim at that time was to unite Europe under German hegemony – as a “large space” around a German empire. Carl Schmitt provided with his “Großraumlehre” one of the best-known theories of a National Socialist Europe. Carl Schmitt developed his theory against the possibility of “world law” as well against state sovereignty. In this paper, the “Großraumlehre” will be analysed, on the one hand, in the context of Schmitt's anti-universalistic and anti-pluralistic legal theory as an alternative to the universalistic and pluralistic legal theory of Hans Kelsen. (I.) On the other hand, Schmitt's theory will be linked to other – clearly racist – National Socialist European plans. (II.) At the end of this paper, I also address the question of whether and why Schmitt's theory – despite the context in which it came out – could remain compatible with today's debates on Europe and global politics. (Ausblick) Enviado el (Submission Date): 07/02/2021 Aceptado el (Acceptance Date): 16/04/2021

Author(s):  
John P. McCormick

Public lawyers in the Weimar Republic conceptualized the law as a novel means of performing the following pressing tasks that confronted state and society in the twentieth century: the regulation of an industrial economy, the amelioration of economic inequality, and the negotiation of cultural disagreement. During the Kaiserreich, monarchically legitimated elites unilaterally executed comparable tasks. However, in the Weimar Republic, previously excluded social groups—for instance, those represented by the Catholic, Social Democratic, Communist and National Socialist parties—now vied with traditionally represented social forces in electoral and parliamentary fora to formulate and direct regulatory, redistributive, and socially integrative policy. This chapter focuses on the fraught but not necessarily hopeless relationship of law and the welfare state or Sozialstaat. It traces the way liberal and social democratic lawyers like Richard Thoma and Hermann Heller attempted to constitutionally legitimize novel efforts at political regulation, economic redistribution and social integration while avoiding the intellectual either/or's insisted upon by the dominant legal theorists of the epoch, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.


2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Morse

How to respond justly to the dangers persistent violent offenders present is a vexing moral and legal issue. On the one hand, we wish to reduce predation; on the other, we want to treat predators fairly. The central theme of this paper is that it is difficult to achieve both goals without compromising one of them, and that both are being seriously undermined. I begin by explaining the legal theory, doctrine and practice governing dangerous offenders (DO) and demonstrate that the law leaves a gap in the ability to confine them. Next I explore the means by which the law has overtly or covertly sought to fill the gap. Many of these measures, especially the new form of civil commitment for sexual predators, dangerously conflate moral and medical categories. I conclude that pure preventive detention is more common than we usually assume, but that this practice violates fundamental assumptions concerning liberty under the American constitutional regime.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.


Author(s):  
Patricia Mindus

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics, and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the Web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics who warn that cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This chapter sets the problem, “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?,” into the broad context of practical philosophy by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy.” The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. The chapter's claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fail or succeed. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work.


Author(s):  
Özsu Umut

This chapter argues that it was partly through engagement with the Ottoman Empire, particularly its tradition of extraterritorial consular jurisdiction, that nineteenth-century European and American jurists came to view China, Japan, and a number of other states as ‘semi-civilized’, setting them against ‘civilized’ states on the one hand and ‘savage’ peoples on the other. These states on the ‘semi-periphery’ exercise a greater degree of agency in international law, given their closeness to dominant centers of economic and intellectual production that had come under their influence, as well as their possession of national traditions and state institutions resilient enough to resist formal colonization. These traits are especially evident in the case of the Ottoman Empire, a powerful state that made a point of modifying its profile for different audiences.


1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-153
Author(s):  
Brian Langille

It is not transparently obvious why legal theorists are increasingly attracted to the ideas and methods of Ludwig Wittgenstein. After all, Wittgenstein’s writings are notoriously difficult and he said almost nothing, and certainly nothing sustained, about law. And why would self-proclaimed legal theorists be attracted to someone who was quite explicitly hostile to “theory”, who viewed philosophy as a sort of therapy, and who said, famously, “philosophy leaves everything as it is”? But a still more interesting question is, why has Wittgenstein received such curious and conflicting treatment at the hands of the critical legal theorists? On the one hand critical legal theory celebrates Wittgenstein’s work as a key to the dismantling of traditional jurisprudence, but on the other hand critical scholars bemoan his alleged debilitating endorsement of the status quo. It is this last question upon which this essay is focussed.


1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-493
Author(s):  
Helen Silving

The state of our “criminal law” in 1905 was described by William H. Taft as “a disgrace to our civilization”. This state had not changed much almost half a century later, when Justice Frankfurter quoted Mr. Taft's statement. Several major modern reform projects formulated since 1952 introduced some noteworthy modifications. I have in mind particularly the American Law Institute Model Penal Code, on the one hand, and the German Draft of a Penal Code, both of 1962, on the other. In the former I should like to draw attention to the serious attempt at a systematization of punishment scales, and in the latter to the effort at a systematic structuring of the “guilt principle”. The German Draft incorporated results of various revisions introduced since the collapse of the National Socialist régime, by either statutory or judicial legislation—revisions born out of the growing concern in Germany with “guilt”. Prominent among these revisions, of course, is adoption of the defence of “error of law” of ancient origin, derived from biblical, talmudic and canon law teaching. Nevertheless, these two projects have but touched the surface of the profound problems that are involved in formulating truly modern penal legislation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cotterrell

AbstractThe work of the Polish–Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This paper asks how far Petrażycki's theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The paper starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki's radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about the role of law in multicultural societies, the nature of developing transnational law, and the significance of law as an aspect or expression of culture.


1893 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 127-292
Author(s):  
I. S. Leadam

In the ‘English Historical Review’ for April (1893) Professor Ashley offers some criticisms upon the ‘Introduction to the Inquisition of 1517,’ contributed by me to the ‘Transactions of the Royal Historical Society’ for 1892. One object of that Introduction, it may be remembered, was to disprove the assertion of Professor Ashley that at the time when the evictions for inclosure began, and until ‘towards the end of the period,’ ‘the mass of copyholders’ had no legal security. In my view, the manorial records, the compilations of laws in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the practice of the courts, even the treatises of the jurists when critically scrutinised, led to the conclusion not merely that copyholders enjoyed protection in legal theory, but that their predecessors in title, the villeins, had done so before them. I drew no distinction in this matter between customary tenants and copyholders, as Professor Ashley appears to suppose, but showed that security extended even to villeins by blood, or ‘nativi,’ on custo-mary lands. Professor Ashley's proposition that ‘customary tenants’ and ‘copyholders’ were equivalent terms was never doubted by me, and is irrelevant to my argument. Indeed, it is assumed by me on the very pages to which he refers. ‘Mr. Leadam,’ he says, ‘draws a sharp distinction between “copyholders” on the one side and “tenants at will” on the other—a distinction which one may doubt whether the men of the sixteenth century would have felt so keenly.’ The distinction, as those who turn to the passage will see, is between ‘copyholders,’ used in Fitzherbert's sense as equivalent to customary tenants, who were ‘tenants at will according to the custom of the manor,’ and ‘tenants at will at Common Law.’


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