Carl Schmitt

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor--and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt shared an abiding interest in the fundamental problems of political theology, believing the great challenges of modern political theory were ancient in pedigree and, in many cases, anticipated the works of Judeo-Christian eschatologists. In this collection of Taubes's writings on Schmitt, the two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology. Taubes acknowledges Schmitt's reservations about the weakness of liberal democracy yet distances himself from his prescription to rectify it, arguing the apocalyptic worldview requires less of a rigid hierarchical social ordering than a community committed to the importance of decision making. In these writings, a sharper and more nuanced portrait of Schmitt's thought emerges, as well as a more complicated understanding of Taubes, who has shaped the work of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and other major twentieth-century theorists.

The writings of Carl Schmitt form what is arguably the most disconcerting, original, and yet still unfamiliar body of twentieth-century political thought. In the English-speaking world, he is terra incognita, a name associated with Nazism, the author of a largely untranslated oeuvre forming no recognizable system, coming to us from a disturbing place and time in the form of fragments. The Enemy is a comprehensive reconstruction and analysis of all of Schmitt's major works-his books, articles and pamphlets from 1919 to 1950-presented in an arresting narrative form. The revelation of his work is that, unlike mainstream Nazi ideology, Schmitt makes a strong philosophical claim for the necessity of confrontational politics within a democratic system; a claim that has resonance in today's hegemony of consensual politics.

A study of Carl Schmitt as a critic of modern liberalism and as a defender of the national state. The book addresses the major criticisms raised against Schmitt's understanding of politics, appealing to those interested in German politics, political theory and international relations.

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!

What does Carl Schmitt have to offer to ongoing debates about sovereignty, globalization, spatiality, the nature of the political, and political theology? Can Schmitt’s positions and concepts offer insights that might help us understand our concrete present-day situation? Works on Schmitt usually limit themselves to historically isolating Schmitt into his Weimar or post-Weimar context, to reading him together with classics of political and legal philosophy, or to focusing exclusively on a particular aspect of Schmitt’s writings. Bringing together an international, and interdisciplinary, range of contributors, this book explores the question of Schmitt’s relevance for an understanding of the contemporary world. Engaging the background and intellectual context in which Schmitt wrote his major works – often with reference to both primary and secondary literature unavailable in English – this book will be of enormous interest to legal and political theorists.

Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy principle is exposed to in-depth philosophical analysis and historical examination with the aim of showing that the political follows hostility, violence and terror as form follows matter. The book argues that the partisan is an umbrella concept that includes the national and global terrorist.

The aim of this book is to bring together geographers, and Schmitt experts who are attuned to the spatial dimensions of his work, to discuss The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (Schmitt, 1950 [2003]).

The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt collects thirty original chapters on the diverse oeuvre of one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was a German theorist whose anti-liberalism continues to inspire scholars and practitioners on both the Left and the Right. Despite Schmitt's rabid anti-semitism and partisan legal practice in Nazi Germany, the appeal of his trenchant critiques of, among other things, aestheticism, representative democracy, and international law as well as of his theoretical justifications of dictatorship and rule by exception is undiminished. Uniquely located at the intersection of law, the social sciences, and the humanities, this volume brings together sophisticated yet accessible interpretations of Schmitt's sprawling thought and complicated biography. The contributors hail from diverse disciplines, including art, law, literature, philosophy, political science, and history. In addition to opening up exciting new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt provides the intellectual foundations for an improved understanding of the political, legal, and cultural thought of this most infamous of German theorists. A substantial introduction places the trinity of Schmitt's thought in a broad context.