Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the State and the ‘Enemy’ This chapter grew out of a contribution to the Carl Schmitt Colloquium, which took place at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, organized by Bernd Rüthers, 15–16 June 1987. I have profited from the suggestions made by E. Flaig, H. Quaritsch, R. Söhnen and my brother Ecke Demandt. The original version of this chapter was published under the title ‘Staatsform und Feindbild bei Carl Schmitt’, in Der Staat, no. 27, 1988, pp. 23–32.

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blake Emerson

This chapter describes German state theory in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It describes this tradition in order to clarify the relevance of German ideas to the American context. American political scientists and legal scholars frequently rely on German thinkers such as Max Weber and Carl Schmitt to understand the state. But these divergent assessments lack a grounding in the longer trajectory and the institutional dilemmas of German legal theory. The chapter provides that broader context and directs readers’ attention to the most promising strand of German thought: the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel would have formative significance for the Progressive thinkers who developed the American administrative state. Hegel understood the state’s purpose to be the advancement of freedom. The chapter contextualizes this idea and shows its influence throughout the nineteenth century, in the Rechtsstaat theories of Robert von Mohl, Lorenz von Stein, and Rudolf von Gneist. It then shows how this normative concept of the state was emptied out with the turn to legal positivism at the end of the century. Weber’s formal-rational conception of bureaucracy then arrived at a particularly unstable moment in German constitutional history, in the transition from monarchy to democracy. Weber’s bifurcated conception of legal and charismatic authority paved the way for Schmitt’s proto-totalitarian theory of the state. The chapter concludes by showing how German theorists in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Jürgen Habermas, continued to rely on Weber’s instrumental conception of bureaucracy.


Author(s):  
Feisal G. Mohamed

A modern politics attaching itself to the state must adopt a position sovereignty, by which is meant the political settlement in which potestas and auctoritas are aligned. Three competing forms are identified: unitary sovereignty, divided and balanced sovereignty, and the view that sovereign power must be limited by universal principles. Each of these forms can be divided into “red” and “black” varieties, depending on the imagined relationship between sovereign power and modern conditions of flux. A chapter outline introduces the figures who will be explored in the book as a whole: Thomas Hobbes; William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele; John Barclay and the romance writers of the 1650s whom he influences; John Milton; and Andrew Marvell. Also described is the book’s sustained engagement of Carl Schmitt, and the ways in which his thought on sovereignty is an example of the competition amongst the concept’s three competing forms.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 882-887 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juana Perpiñá-Galvañ ◽  
Miguel Richart-Martínez ◽  
Maria José Cabañero-Martínez ◽  
Inmaculada Martínez-Durá

The goal was to describe the content validity of a short version of the state subscale of Spielberger's "State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)", based on the original version adapted to Spanish, in Spanish patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV). The sample consisted of 16 patients receiving IMV at the Alicante Hospital (Spain), who selected the items from the full Spanish version of the STAI-state that were most relevant to them. Items 1, 5, 9, 10, 12 and 20 from the original scale are the most relevant for the Spanish patients receiving IMV and 5 of these are included in the short version of the scale (83.3% agreement). The short scale has shown adequate content validity for Spanish patients receiving IMV.


Author(s):  
Marc de Wilde

AbstractThe article analyzes the debate on 'constitutional dictatorship' that took place at the first annual conference of the Association of German Constitutional Lawyers in Jena in 1924. In their keynote lectures, Carl Schmitt and Erwin Jacobi argued that Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution authorized the President of the Reich to derogate from the rule-of-law provisions of the constitution if this was necessary to save its 'political substance'. Advocating a 'doctrine of derogation', they implicitly criticized one of the main methodological assumptions of legal positivism, i.e., that legal norms and politics, law and power, had to remain strictly separated. They thereby set the stage for the emerging 'conflict of methods and directions' that was to haunt German jurisprudence in subsequent years.


1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde

The focus of this paper is not on the person, but on the work of Carl Schmitt, in particular the significance of Schmitt's concept of the political for an understanding of his legal and constitutional theory. Let me start with a short personal memory. When I was a third year law student, I read Carl Schmitt's Constitutional Theory. I came across the formulations that the state is the political unity of a people and that the rule of law component in a constitution is an unpolitical component. I was puzzled by these two remarks. I had learned from Georg Jellinek that the state, from a sociological perspective, is a purposeful corporative unit and, from a legal perspective, represents a territorially based corporation. I had also gathered some knowledge about “organic” state theories, especially that of Otto von Gierke who considers the state an organism and a real corporative personality rather than a mere legal fiction. On the basis of these theories, I felt unable to understand Schmitt's point that the state is the political unity of a people, because in those theories the political aspect is largely missing. It was only later that, by reading and studying Carl Schmitt's essay The Concept of the Political, I gradually learned to make sense of the above remarks. Thus I have discovered that that essay, and the understanding of the political elaborated in it, contains the key to understanding Carl Schmitt's constitutional theory in general. I would now like to explain this.


2008 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 784-801 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zenonas Norkus

This article is a case study of the recent impeachment of President Paksas of Lithuania, exploring the heuristic value of Carl Schmitt's extremalist methodology for research on the institutional dimension of democratic consolidation. This methodology considers the performance of the democratic regime under extreme or exceptional conditions as the test of its consolidation. As presidential and semipresidential regimes are predisposed to evolve into authoritarian regimes and delegative democracies, effective use of the impeachment procedure can be considered to be the positive Schmittean test of the state of democratic consolidation for a political system involved in democratic transition.


Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly

This book offers a broad-ranging re-interpretation of the understanding of politics and the state in the writings of three major German thinkers, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. It rejects the typical separation of these writers on the basis of their allegedly incompatible ideological positions, and suggests instead that once properly located in their historical context, the tendentious character of these interpretative boundaries becomes clear. The book interprets the conceptions of politics and the state in the writings of these three thinkers by means of an investigation of their adaptation and modification of particular German traditions of thinking about the state, or Staatsrechtslehre. Indeed, when the theoretical considerations of this state-legal theory are combined with their contemporary political criticism, a richer and more deeply textured account of the issues that engaged the attention of Weber, Schmitt and Neumann is possible. Thus, the broad range of subjects discussed in this book include parliamentarism and democracy in Germany, academic freedom and political economy, political representation, cultural criticism and patriotism, and the relationship between rationality, law, sovereignty and the constitution. The study attempts to restore a sense of proportion to the discussion of the three authors' writings, focusing on the extensive ideas that they shared rather than insisting on their necessary ideological separation. It is a detailed re-appraisal of a crucial moment in modern intellectual history, and highlights the profound importance of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann for the history of European ideas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-143
Author(s):  
Anthony Carty

Abstract The Western international law of territory starts from a standpoint of the priority of the State over its population. The latter is merely an object of the ownership of the State. Title to territory rests on dominant evidence of State activity. The activity of so-called private individuals or economic activity of peoples do not count towards title to territory in the case law of international tribunals. This article contests the foundations of such a perspective. The so-called Western law of territory was devised by Western States to divide up among themselves the territory of non-Western ‘non-peoples’, culminating in the racist Island of Palmas Arbitration. Carl Schmitt provides the makings of an alternative history of the law of territory. It is, and should be, the law of the homelands of peoples, historically located on particular spaces. Peoples precede States, which are merely institutions used by Peoples to protect and administer their homelands. Whatever the difficulties of locating the homelands to which Peoples belong, escape into the so-called Western law of territory as a way to ‘Peace through the Rule of Law’ is an illusion – described contemptuously by the political theorist Raymond Aron as a Law of empty spaces. Without justice, there is no law.


Author(s):  
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde ◽  
Mirjam Künkler ◽  
Tine Stein

In this article, Böckenförde tries to determine the proper means of conducting political theology. After dismissing juridical political theology in the vein of Carl Schmitt as not so much theological but rather sociological in its discussion of how original theological terms such as ‘sovereignty’ were transposed to the state, people, or government, he turns to two other models: Böckenförde sees a shift away from classical institutional political theology à la Augustine, which explores what Christianity has to say about a state’s status, legitimation, and structure, to what he calls appellative political theology. Immediately concerned with action, the latter manifests itself inter alia as liberation theology and tends to run the risk of dissolving into theologically justified, and ultimately arbitrary, politics. As an alternative model, Böckenförde extols the political theology of Pope John Paul II. By focusing on the words of Jesus and the Gospel and other topics that appear ‘nonpolitical’ at first glance, the pope makes the case for dignity, liberty, and the purpose of man, taking the side of the weak and rejecting violence. In Böckenförde’s view, such a political theology is not about to be rendered obsolete by modernity. Since politics is essentially concerned with relations between individuals and groups, religion cannot avoid being drawn into the political field and raise its voice there as well.


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