Carl Schmitt (11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist and political philosopher. An authoritarian conservative, he was noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism.
In 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and used his legal and political theories to provide ideological justification for the regime. He held various positions on Nazi councils, including the Prussian State Council and the Academy for German Law, and served as president of the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals. By 1936, he had lost favour among senior Nazi officials and was removed from most of his official positions within the party. Schmitt and his work remain controversial for their association with Nazism.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes, "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." His ideas remain highly influential, with scholars arguing he has influenced modern governance in China and Russia, as well as various strands of modern American conservatism.
Early life 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 had three siblings: Auguste, Joseph, and Anna Margarethe. He studied law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and the University of Strasbourg between 1907 and 1910. He passed his first state law examination that same year. His 1910 doctoral thesis was titled (On Guilt and Types of Guilt). In 1914, he obtained his habilitation at the University of Strasbourg with a thesis titled (The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual). He completed a legal clerkship at the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court and in February 1915 passed the Assessor examination.
Schmitt volunteered for service with the Bavarian Army in February 1915 and served in the First World War. He was discharged from the military on 1 July 1919. Returning to civilian life, he embarked on an academic career that led to teaching positions at the Technical University of Munich (1920), the University of Greifswald (1921), the University of Bonn (1922), the Technical University of Berlin (1928), the University of Cologne (1933), and the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (1933–1945).
Before his Nazi party involvement, Schmitt maintained many Jewish friends and colleagues. In 1932, he helped arrange for Leo Strauss to receive a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation but he avoided communicating with Strauss after joining the Nazi Party. Schmitt was also close with the Eisler family, a Jewish family that supported Schmitt financially during an impoverished period as a student. Georg Eisler and Georg's sister, who worked with his secretary remained close with Schmitt until 1933 when he suspended his relationship with the Eisler family.
Academic career While in Munich, Schmitt attended Max Weber's lectures, "Politics as a Vocation", "Science as a Vocation", and the General Economic History. In 1923, he contributed to the second volume of Melchior Palyi's .
In 1921, Schmitt became a professor at the University of Greifswald, where he published his essay Die Diktatur (On Dictatorship).
In 1922, he published (Political Theology) while working as a professor at the University of Bonn. Schmitt changed universities in 1928, when he became professor of law at the Handelshochschule in Berlin, and again in 1933, when he accepted a position at the University of Cologne. His most famous paper, ("The Concept of the Political"), was based on lectures at the in Berlin.
In 1932, Schmitt was counsel for the Reich government in the case Preussen contra Reich (Prussia vs. Reich), in which the SPD-controlled government of Prussia disputed its dismissal by the right-wing Reich government of Franz von Papen. Papen was motivated by the fact that 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, and one of the counsel for the Prussian government was Hermann Heller. In October 1932, the court ruled that the Prussian government had been suspended unlawfully but that the Reich had the right to install a commissar. In German history, the struggle that resulted in the de facto destruction of federalism in the Weimar Republic is known as the Preußenschlag.
Views
Religion As a young man, Schmitt was "a devoted Catholic until his break with the church in the mid twenties".McCormick, John P. Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology. 1st paperback ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999:86–87. From around the end of World War I, he began to describe his Catholicism as "displaced" and "de-totalised".Müller, Jan-Werner. A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003:xxix. N. S. Lyons claims that something in Schmitt's interior life seems to have begun to shift around 1914, when his diary entries started to hint at a crisis of faith. According to Lyons, it was his troubled relationships with women that estranged him from the Faith.
According to political theorist Reinhard Mehring, Schmitt's involvement with Catholicism was mostly political rather than motivated by genuine belief in Catholic doctrine. He was known to be fond of the hierarchical structure and Roman law of the Catholic Church. Despite his lack of belief his works such as Political theology and Roman catholicism and Political form were heavily influenced by Catholicism. In his 1922 work Political theology, he argues that "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts". Schmitt particularly cites the idea of an all-powerful state or government is a secularized version of an all-powerful God. He also frequently quoted and was influenced by Christian thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Juan Donoso Cortés, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes.
Emergency powers
Schmitt's "state of exception" doctrine has enjoyed a revival in the 21st century. In his 1921 work The Dictatorship, he advocated for giving a state absolute power during crises and argued the law should not apply during times of emergency. Formulated 10 years before the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany, Schmitt claimed that urgency justified the following:
Special executive powers Suspension of the Rule of Law Derogation of legal and constitutional rights
Schmitt's doctrine helped clear the way for Hitler's rise to power by providing the theoretical legal foundation of the Nazi regime.
Support for the Nazi Party
On 31 January 1933, Schmitt remarked that with Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, "one can say that 'Hegel died. Richard Wolin observes:
The Nazis engineered the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933 in March, which changed the Weimar Constitution to allow the "present government" to rule by decree, bypassing both the President, Paul von Hindenburg, and the Reichstag.
Alfred Hugenberg, the leader of the German National People's Party, one of the Nazis' partners in the coalition government that was being squeezed out of existence, hoped to slow the Nazi takeover of the country by threatening to quit his cabinet position. Hugenberg reasoned that by doing so, the government would be changed, and the Enabling Act would no longer apply, as the "present government" would no longer exist. A legal opinion by Schmitt prevented this manoeuvre from succeeding. Well known at the time as a constitutional theorist, Schmitt declared that "present government" did not refer to the cabinet's makeup when the act was passed, but to the "completely different kind of government"—that is, different from the democracy of the Weimar Republic—that the Hitler cabinet had brought into existence.Evans, Richard J. (2003) The Coming of the Third Reich New York: Penguin Press. p. 371
Schmitt was the presiding legal expert at meetings during the early stages of the Third Reich that resulted in a formal decision to bypass the process of formulating a new constitution. An approach that would nominally maintain the former constitution was adopted, even though the Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) was given transcendent supra-legal status. Schmitt claimed that the adoption of the Leader Principle in place of a legal constitution was legitimized by the presumed "Völkisch" or racial composition of the German people and their identification with Hitler.
Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933. Within days, he rejoiced in the burning of Jewish authors' "un-German" and "anti-German" writings and called for a much more extensive purge, to include works by authors influenced by "Jewish" ideas. From June 1933, he was in the leadership council of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law and chaired the Committee for State and Administrative Law. In July, Hermann Göring appointed him to the Prussian State Council, and in November he became the president of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists. He also replaced Heller as a professor at the University of Berlin, a position he held until the end of World War II. He presented his theories as an ideological foundation of the Nazi dictatorship and a justification of the Führer state concerning legal philosophy, particularly through the concept of auctoritas.
In June 1934, Schmitt was appointed editor-in-chief of the Nazi newspaper for lawyers, the ("German Jurists' Journal").. In July he published in it "The Leader Protects the Law (Der Führer schützt das Recht)", a justification of the political murders of the Night of the Long Knives with Hitler's authority as the "highest form of administrative justice (höchste Form administrativer Justiz)".Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, 38, 1934; trans. as "The Führer Protects Justice" in Detlev Vagts, Carl Schmitt's Ultimate Emergency: The Night of the Long Knives (2012) 87(2) The Germanic Review 203. Schmitt presented himself as a radical antisemite and chaired an October 1936 law teachers' convention in Berlin at which he demanded that German law be cleansed of the "Jewish spirit (jüdischem Geist)" and that all Jewish scientists' publications be marked with a small symbol.
Nevertheless, in December 1936, the Schutzstaffel (SS) publication Das Schwarze Korps accused Schmitt of being an opportunist, a Hegelian state thinker, and a Catholic, and called his antisemitism a mere pretense, citing earlier statements in which he criticized the Nazis' racial theories. After this, Schmitt resigned as Reichsfachgruppenleiter (Reich Professional Group Leader) but retained his professorship in Berlin and his title "Prussian State Councillor". Schmitt continued to be investigated in 1937, but Göring stopped further reprisals.Bendersky, Joseph, W., Theorist For The Reich, 1983, Princeton, New JerseyNoack, Paul, Carl Schmitt – Eine Biographie, 1996, Frankfurt
During the German occupation of Paris, a "round-table" of French and German intellectuals met at the Georges V Hotel, including Schmitt, the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau, and Henry de Montherlant, and the publisher Gaston Gallimard.
After World War II