Carl Schmitt (11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist and political theorist. An authoritarian conservative theorist, 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.
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 Über Schuld und Schuldarten (On Guilt and Types of Guilt). In 1914, he obtained his habilitation at the University of Strasbourg with a thesis titled Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (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.
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 Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber.
In 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 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, "Der Begriff des Politischen" ("The Concept of the Political"), was based on lectures at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik 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 .
As a young man, Schmitt was "a devoted Catholic until his break with the church in the mid twenties". From around the end of World War I, he began to describe his Catholicism as "displaced" and "de-totalised". 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.
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:
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.
On 31 January 1933, Schmitt remarked that with Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, "one can say that 'Hegel died.'" Richard Wolin observes:
[I]t is Hegel qua philosopher of the "bureaucratic class" or Beamtenstaat that has been definitely surpassed with Hitler's triumph ... this class of civil servants—which Hegel in the Rechtsphilosophie deems the "universal class"—represents an impermissible drag on the sovereignty of executive authority. For Schmitt ... the very essence of the bureaucratic conduct of business is reverence for the norm, a standpoint that could not but exist in great tension with the doctrines of Carl Schmitt ... Hegel had set an ignominious precedent by according this putative universal class a position of preeminence in his political thought, insofar as the primacy of the bureaucracy tends to diminish or supplant the prerogative of sovereign authority.
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.