In this work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism's basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state.

Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, Political Theology develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial ...

In this, his most influential work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism’s basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state—a critique as cogent today as when it first appeared. George Schwab’s introduction to his translation of the 1932 German edition highlights Schmitt’s intellectual journey through the turbulent period of German history leading to the Hitlerian one-party state. In addition to analysis by Leo Strauss and a foreword by Tracy B. (...) Strong placing Schmitt’s work into contemporary context, this expanded edition also includes a translation of Schmitt’s 1929 lecture “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” which the author himself added to the 1932 edition of the book. An essential update on a modern classic, The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

One of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt is a deeply controversial figure who has been labeled both Nazi sympathizer and modern-day Thomas Hobbes. First published in 1938, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes used the Enlightenment philosopher’s enduring symbol of the protective Leviathan to address the nature of modern statehood. A work that predicted the demise of the Third Reich and that still holds relevance in today’s security-obsessed society, this volume will (...) be essential reading for students and scholars of political science. “Carl Schmitt is surely the most controversial German political and legal philosopher of this century. . . . We deal with Schmitt, against all odds, because history stubbornly persists in proving many of his tenets right.”— Perspectives on Political Science “[A] significant contribution. . . . The relation between Hobbes and Schmitt is one of the most important questions surrounding Schmitt: it includes a distinct, though occasionally vacillating, personal identification as well as an association of ideas.”— Telos. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt, the author of such books as Political Theology and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, was one of the leading political and legal theorists of the twentieth century. His critical discussions of liberal democratic ideals and institutions continue to arouse controversy, but even his opponents concede his uncanny sense for the basic problems of modern politics. Political Romanticism is a historical study that, like all of Schmitt's major works, offers a fundamental political critique. In it, he defends a concept (...) of political action based on notions of good and evil, justice and injustice, and attacks the political passivity entailed by the romanticization of experience. The book has three strands. The first is an attack on received notions of the origins of the Romantic Movement. Schmitt argues that this movement represents a secularization, subjectification, and privatization in which God is replaced by the emancipated, private individual of the bourgeois social order. The second is an assault on political romanticism that includes a broader attack on the new European bourgeoisie, which Schmitt characterizes as the historical bearer of the movement. The third strand is a defense of political conservatism and a refutation of the view that political romanticism is intrinsically linked with romanticism. Here Schmitt argues that the political romantic is tied not to positions but to aesthetics, and can therefore as easily become a Danton as a Frederick the Great. Guy Oakes's introduction places the book in historical context and also suggests its continuing relevance through his discussion of the latest outcropping of political romanticism in the late 1960s, intriguingly brought out in his example of Norman Mailer as a political romantic. (shrink)

Distinctions among juristic ways of thinking -- Classification of juristic ways of thinking in the overall development of legal history.

I have experienced the tribulations of fate.Victories and defeats, revolutions and restorations.Inflations and deflations, bombings,Defamations, broken regimes and broken pipes,Hunger and cold, internment and solitary confinement.Through it all I have passed,And through me it all has passed.I am acquainted with the abundant varieties of terror,The terror from above and the terror from below,Terror on the land and terror from the air,Terror legal and extra-legal,Brown, red and checkered terror,And worst of all, the terror none dares to name.I am acquainted with them (...) all and know their grip. (shrink)

Even the thinking of professional revolutionaries progresses, as evidenced today in legal revolution. According to the German constitutional jurist, Rudolf Smend, who died in 1975, the German people suffer from a “touching need for legality.” Smend came to this conclusion not only as historian of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, but also as observer of the positivistic normativism of his own time. Recently an old and experienced Spanish revolutionary, Santiago Carrillo, put forward the same notion in a book (...) about Eurocommunism and the State. Akhough his “touching need for legality” is politically of a different nature, Carrillo is expressly convinced that die more violent mediods of Lenin's and Trotsky's illegal revolution of October 1917 are now antiquated, mat they were only justifiable in the instance of an agrarian (peasant) society breaking dirough to a modern (industrial) society. (shrink)

Kempner. You do not have to testify, Professor Schmitt, if you do not want to, and if you think you are incriminating yourself. But if you do testify, then I would be grateful if you would be absolutely truthful, would neither conceal nor add anything. Is that your wish? Schmitt: Yes, of course. Kempner: And if I come to something you might find self-incriminating, you can simply say you prefer to remain silent. Schmitt: I have already been interrogated by the (...) C.I.C. and in the camp. I would be glad to tell you all I know. However, I would like to know what I am being blamed with. (shrink)

Today, every attempt at a self-understanding ultimately proves to be a situating oneself by means of the philosophy of history or a utopian self-dislocation. Today, all human beings who plan and attempt to unite the masses behind their plans engage in some form of philosophy of history. They accept the existence of the means of extermination, which modern science provides to every person in power. But the question as to what kind of people these means are to be reasonably applied (...) to is obviously no natural scientific question. For a long time now, it is also no longer a moral…. (shrink)

The work that we have the honour to present here in its first Italian translation is a short essay published by Carl Schmitt in the first half of the ‘10s in the German Journal Die Rheinlande and titled Don Quixote and the public. A very brief but at the same time dense piece of literary criticism in which the future Kronjurist of the Third Reich, in those years still engaged in his legal practice, offers to the readers a juvenile proof (...) of his vastly and heterogeneous interests, trying to determine which is the proper interpretation of the renowned masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote of the Mancha. A juvenile work, therefore, in which Schmitt, as we will try to highlight in the introduction that accompanies the translation, offers an interpretation of the novel and particularly of its main character focusing on the contraposition between the level of the simple reading and that of erudite valorisation, applying a methodology similar to that he used in the coeval Law and Judgement that in some ways anticipate the critique of Romanticism that he will develop just a few years later in Political Romanticism. (shrink)

Quinto Aurélio Símaco Eusébio possui uma extensa obra, da qual chegaram à contemporaneidade mais de 900 cartas, 49 informes e 8 discursos. Suas obras de maior destaque são as Orationes I, II e III, proferidas entre 369-370, e sua Relatio III, escrita durante seu tempo como prefeito de Roma em 384. Tais obras lhe renderam a fama de melhor orador de seu tempo ainda em vida. Nosso trabalho tem como objetivo expor o impacto que as Orationes I, II e III (...) tiveram na carreira do orador e na relação entre o Senado e o reinado de Valentiniano I. A partir de suas Orationes, ressaltaremos a delicada missão do orador, enviado de Roma à Tréveris para servir como ponte entre o Senado e o imperador. (shrink)

James A. Diefenbeck, Wayward Reflections on the History ofPhilosophyThomas R. Flynn Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Volume 1:Toward an Existential Theory of HistoryMark Golden and Peter Toohey Inventing Ancient Culture:Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient WorldZenonas Norkus Istorika: Istorinis IvadasEverett Zimmerman The Boundaries of Fiction: History and theEighteenth‐Century British Novel.

ExcerptThe great dramatic work of art that bears the name Hamlet is, in the core of its action and the main character, nothing other than the dramatized story of a real king named James, James Stuart, son of Mary Stuart and her husband. James's father was murdered, and his mother married the murderer shortly afterward. What Mary Stuart, the mother of King James, did was bad, almost as bad “As kill a king, and marry his brother.” Shakespeare's Hamlet drama is (...) grounded then in a direct relation to the times. It contains the kind of dramatization that results from participation…. (shrink)

I. Au Congrès des juristes allemands de Leipzig, le 3 octobre 1933, le Führer a prononcé un discours sur l’État et le droit. Il a montré l’opposition entre un droit substantiel, non séparé de la moralité et de la justice , et la légalité..