Abstract

If the work that Carl Schmitt produced during the Weimar Republic is of interest today, it is in large part because of his insistence on the conceptual autonomy of the political. Like Hannah Arendt, Schmitt categorically distinguishes the political from the economic, the technological, and the legal; and, like her, he also criticizes liberalism for muddying and obscuring these distinctions.¹ As one might expect from an eminent jurist, he places particular emphasis on the last—the distinction between the legal and the political. The main lines of his argument are clear enough: the concept of law is defined by the criteria…