Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt (/ʃmɪt/; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, geopolitician and prominent member of the Nazi Party.
This article is about the German jurist and political theorist. For the American artist, see Carl Schmitt (artist). For New Zealand violinist and composer, see Carl Schmitt (composer). For people with a similar name, see Carl Schmidt.
Carl Schmitt
11 July 1888
7 April 1985 (aged 96)
"Crown Jurist of the Third Reich" (Nickname)
University of Greifswald (1921)
University of Bonn (1921)
Technical University of Munich (1928)
University of Cologne (1933)
University of Berlin (1933–1945)
Born in Plettenberg in 1888, Schmitt studied law in Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg. In 1916, he married his first wife, Pavla Dorotić, but divorced her after realizing that she had pretended to be a countess. Schmitt was Catholic but broke with the church in the 1920s. He married Duška Todorović in 1926. During this time, he taught in Greifswald, Bonn, and Munich and published Dictatorship and Political Theology. Schmitt taught in Cologne in 1932, published The Concept of the Political, and supported the Papen government in Prussia v. Reich. After the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party. He was an active jurist, a member of the Prussian State Council, and a professor in Berlin. Schmitt fell out of favour when the Schutzstaffel targeted him, but Hermann Göring protected him. After the Second World War ended, Schmitt spent over a year in an internment camp and returned to Plettenberg. He refused denazification, which barred him from academic positions. However, he continued his studies and frequently received scholarly visitors. In 1963, he published the Theory of the Partisan. Schmitt died on 7 April 1985 at the age of 96.
Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist,[4][5] he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism.[6] His work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism.[7]
Schmitt's work has attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Hayek,[8] Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Dugin, Reinhart Koselleck, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Jaime Guzmán, and Slavoj Žižek. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Schmitt was an acute observer and analyst of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. But there can be little doubt that his preferred cure turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease."[9]
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Schmitt was born in Plettenberg, Westphalia, German Empire. His parents were Roman Catholics from the German Eifel region who had settled in Plettenberg. His father was a minor businessman. Schmitt studied law at the Universities of Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, and took his graduation and state examinations in then-German Strasbourg during 1915.[10] His 1910 doctoral thesis was titled Über Schuld und Schuldarten (On Guilt and Types of Guilt).[11]
Schmitt volunteered for the army in 1916.[10] The same year, he earned his habilitation at Strasbourg with a thesis under the title Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual). He then taught at various business schools and universities, namely the University of Greifswald (1921), the University of Bonn (1921), the Technical University of Munich (1928), the University of Cologne (1933), and the University of Berlin (1933–45).
In 1916, Schmitt married his first wife, Pavla Dorotić,[12] a Croatian woman who pretended to be a countess. They divorced, but no annulment was granted by a Catholic tribunal, so that his 1926 marriage to Duška Todorović (1903–1950), a Serbian woman, was not deemed valid under Catholic law. Schmitt was excommunicated by the Catholic Church due to his second marriage.[12]
As a young man, Schmitt was "a devoted Catholic until his break with the church in the mid twenties."[13] From around the end of the First World War, he began to describe his Catholicism as "displaced" and "de-totalised".[14]
Academic career (1921–1932)[edit]
During 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 1926, when he became professor of law at the Handelshochschule in Berlin, and again in 1932, when he accepted a position in 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.[15]
In 1932, Schmitt was counsel for the Reich government in the case Preussen contra Reich (Prussia v. Reich), in which the Social Democratic Party of Germany-controlled government of the state of Prussia disputed its dismissal by the right-wing Reich government of Franz von Papen. Papen was motivated to do so because 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[16] and one of the counsel for the Prussian government was Hermann Heller. The court ruled in October 1932 that the Prussian government had been suspended unlawfully but that the Reich had the right to install a commissar.[16] In German history, the struggle resulting in the de facto destruction of federalism in the Weimar republic is known as the Preußenschlag.
Hitler's seizure of control[edit]
Schmitt remarked on 31 January 1933 that with Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, "one can say that 'Hegel died.'"[17] Richard Wolin observes:[1]
Publications[edit]
On Dictatorship[edit]
In his essay Die Diktatur (on dictatorship) he discussed the foundations of the newly established Weimar Republic, emphasising the office of the President of Germany. In this essay, Schmitt compared and contrasted what he saw as the effective and ineffective elements of the new constitution of his country. He saw the office of the president as a comparatively effective element, because of the power granted to the president to declare a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand). This power, which Schmitt discussed and implicitly praised as dictatorial,[24] was more in line with the underlying mentality of executive power than the comparatively slow and ineffective processes of legislative power reached through parliamentary discussion and compromise.
Schmitt was at pains to remove what he saw as a taboo surrounding the concept of "dictatorship" and to show that the concept is implicit whenever power is wielded by means other than the slow processes of parliamentary politics and the bureaucracy:[32]
Some of Schmitt's major works are: