Carl Schmitt is a key figure in modern political thought, but discussion of his work often focuses upon specific elements or themes within his texts. This book provides a wide-ranging discussion of Carl Schmitt’s discourse and provides a new perspective on his contribution, presenting the idea of Nomos of the Earth as the key idea that organizes his political and legal discourse This book creates a ‘reverse genealogy’ of Schmitt’s theoretical system, starting from his legal and political concept of nomos so as to reconstruct his understanding of order. It connects the different topics the Carl Schmitt developed along his intellectual trajectory, which have generally been approached in separate ways by scholars: the legal theory, the concept of the political, the theory of international relations and political theology. The text considers the whole of Carl Schmitt’s work including writings that have been previously unknown to the English speaking academy; old journals with just three or four pages, newspaper articles, manuscripts of conferences, and Festschrifts.Itprovides a balanced examination of the whole complex of Carl Schmitt’s political discourse.

This is the first full-length study in English of twentieth-century Germany's most influential authoritarian right-wing political theorist, Carl Schmitt, that focuses on the central place of his attack on the liberal rule of law. This is also the first book in any language to devote substantial attention to Schmitt's subterranean influence on some of the most important voices in political thought (Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Hans Morgenthau) in the United States after 1945. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Schmitt's thought serves as a warning against the dangers of complacency entailed by triumphant liberalism. In this collection of essays Schmitt reminds us that the essence of politics is struggle.

Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World: Reorienting the Political examines the reception of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in China and Taiwan. The legacies of both Schmitt, the German legal theorist and thinker who joined the Nazi party, and Strauss, the German-Jewish classicist and political philosopher who became famous after his emigration to the United States, are highly controversial. Since the 1990s, however, these thinkers have had a powerful resonance for Chinese scholars. Today, when Chinese intellectuals debate the Chinese state, the future role of China in the world, the liberal international order, and even the meaning of Confucian civilization, they often employ Schmittian and Straussian concepts like “the political,” “friend–enemy,” “state of exception,” “liberal education,” and “natural right.” The very possibility of a genuine Chinese political theory is often thought to be tied to the legacy of these two thinkers. This volume explores this complex phenomenon with a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach. The twelve essays in this volume are written from a range of perspectives by philosophers, political theorists, historians, and legal scholars from China, Germany, Taiwan, and the United States.

A pioneer in legal and political theory, Schmitt traces the prehistory of political romanticism by examining its relationship to revolutionary and reactionary tendencies in modern European history. Both the partisans of the French Revolution and its most embittered enemies were numbered among the romantics. During the movement for German national unity at the beginning of the nineteenth century, both revolutionaries and reactionaries counted themselves as romantics. According to Schmitt, the use of the concept to designate opposed political positions results from the character of political romanticism: its unpredictable quality and lack of commitment to any substantive political position. The romantic person acts in such a way that his imagination can be affected. He acts insofar as he is moved. Thus an action is not a performance or something one does, but rather an affect or a mood, something one feels. The product of an action is not a result that can be evaluated according to moral standards, but rather an emotional experience that can be judged only in aesthetic and emotive terms. These observations lead Schmitt to a profound reflection on the shortcomings of liberal politics. Apart from the liberal rule of law and its institution of an autonomous private sphere, the romantic inner sanctum of purely personal experience could not exist. Without the security of the private realm, the romantic imagination would be subject to unpredictable incursions. Only in a bourgeois world can the individual become both absolutely sovereign and thoroughly privatized: a master builder in the cathedral of his personality. An adequate political order cannot be maintained on such a tolerant individualism, concludes Schmitt.

Carl Schmitt is the last thinker to provide a complete, original definition of politics. His work influences many debates in contemporary political theory through a collection of concepts he created: political theology, the katechon, friend and enemy. Despite how influential his ideas are, they tend to be employed metaphorically, and sometimes incorrectly. This miscalculation is due to Carl Schmitt himself, who never gave us a final, complete version of his political thought, or even of some of his most famous concepts. In this book, I aim to reconstruct his political thought using three key concepts: political theology, the concept of the political, and the theory of modernity. To do so, I have consulted all his published works, but also the archival documents, in particular those with ties to Spain, which had previously received little attention. This reconstruction offers readers a qualitative introduction to Schmitt’s political thought that aims to blend logical clarity with document-based evidence.

Groundless Existence discusses the implicit phenomenological and existential foundations of Schmitt's political philosophy. The book's unique contribution lies in its claim that Schmitt decisively breaks with the metaphysical tradition and predicates the political on the 'groundless' categories of existence, including risk, decision, and agonism. This argument is substantiated by both tacit and explicit existentialist and phenomenological underpinnings of Schmitt's work, discussed here for the first time in book form.The book provides an insight into the implications of Schmitt's thought reconceptualized in the light of contemporary political developments. An essential text for anyone interested in the political theory of Carl Schmitt, it offers a new reading of Schmitt's work against the double background of phenomenology and existentialism.