Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 to April 7, 1985) was a German jurist and political theorist whose work on sovereignty, the state of exception, the friend-enemy distinction, and political theology made him one of the most influential and contested thinkers of the twentieth century. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and became known as the "crown jurist" of the Third Reich, providing legal justification for the regime before falling from official favor in 1936. His writings were rehabilitated in the postwar decades and underwent a marked revival on the contemporary right; Peter Thiel drew on Schmitt in his 2007 essay "The Straussian Moment" and on Schmitt's concept of the katechon in his 2025 lectures on the Antichrist.¹²

Life and Career

Schmitt was born in Plettenberg, in Westphalia, into a Catholic family, and studied law at Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, taking his doctorate at Strasbourg in 1910 and his habilitation in 1916. He held chairs at Greifswald, Bonn, the Handelshochschule in Berlin, Cologne, and from 1933 the University of Berlin, and he became one of the leading constitutional lawyers of the Weimar Republic. During the republic's final crisis he advised the presidential governments of Heinrich Bruning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher on the use of emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, and in 1932 he argued the government's side in the Preussenschlag case, defending the Reich's removal of the elected Prussian state government.¹³

After Adolf Hitler took power Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, was appointed a Prussian state councillor by Hermann Goring, and became president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists. He wrote in defense of the regime's lawless violence, most notoriously in the 1934 article "The Fuhrer Protects the Law," which justified the extrajudicial killings of the Night of the Long Knives, and he organized a 1936 conference on purging German law of Jewish influence. In December 1936 the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps attacked him as an opportunist whose Catholicism and earlier associations made his conversion suspect, and he lost his Party offices while retaining his Berlin chair and state councillorship. Interned by the Allies after the war and questioned at Nuremberg, he refused to undergo denazification and was barred from teaching, returning to Plettenberg, where he continued to write and receive visitors until his death in 1985.¹⁴

The State of Exception and Sovereignty

Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) opens with the sentence "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception," locating the essence of sovereign power not in the normal operation of law but in the authority to suspend the legal order in an emergency, the Ausnahmezustand or state of exception. On this decisionist account the validity of law rests ultimately on a concrete decision rather than on an impersonal norm, and the genuine sovereign is whoever can determine that an exceptional situation exists and what is to be done about it. The argument was a frontal assault on the liberal and positivist legal theory, associated with Hans Kelsen, that sought to dissolve sovereignty into a self-sufficient hierarchy of norms.⁵⁶

The same book advanced his thesis of political theology, that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts," both in their historical origin, where the omnipotent lawgiver replaced the omnipotent God, and in their structure, where the exception stands to the legal order as the miracle stands to the laws of nature. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) he attacked liberal parliamentarism as a system of endless discussion incapable of decision, and in Legality and Legitimacy (1932) he argued that the Weimar constitution's neutrality toward its own enemies left it unable to defend itself, an analysis later read as preparing the ground for the regime that followed.⁵⁷

The Concept of the Political

In The Concept of the Political (1927, expanded 1932) Schmitt held that the specifically political distinction, irreducible to the moral, aesthetic, or economic, is that between friend and enemy. The enemy, the hostis, is the public adversary, the other with whom conflict can in the extreme case mean physical killing, and the reality of this possibility is what gives political life its seriousness. Liberalism, he argued, tries to dissolve the political into the spheres of ethics and economics and so cannot grasp it, yet the friend-enemy grouping persists beneath the liberal surface. Strauss's 1932 "Notes" on the book pressed exactly this point, arguing that Schmitt's affirmation of the political remained dependent on the liberalism it opposed, and Schmitt revised passages of the third edition in response.⁸⁹

Schmitt's later The Nomos of the Earth (1950) developed a theory of international order grounded in the appropriation of land and the historical jus publicum Europaeum, the European law of nations that he argued had once "bracketed" war by treating the enemy as a legitimate equal rather than a criminal to be annihilated. He lamented the dissolution of this order into a moralized, total enmity, a theme that runs into his late reflections on partisan warfare in Theory of the Partisan (1963).¹⁰

The Katechon

Drawing on the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, in which the Apostle Paul writes of "the one who now restrains" the coming of the lawless one, Schmitt made the figure of the katechon, Greek for the restrainer, a recurring element of his thought. In the essay "Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History" (1950) and in The Nomos of the Earth he treated the katechon as the power that holds back the Antichrist and the end of history, identifying it variously with the Roman Empire, the medieval German emperors, and other concrete bearers of order, and he called it the only Christian conception that made historical action possible by giving a meaning to the interval before the end. The concept supplied a theology of the restraining state for a thinker who saw chaos as the alternative to order.¹¹¹²

In his postwar notebooks, published as Glossarium, Schmitt returned repeatedly to the katechon and wrote that he believed in it as the only way a Christian could make sense of history, adding that for every age one must name its bearer. Later scholarship has read the idea as the theological core of his politics: an account of authority whose task is to delay catastrophe rather than to achieve perfection, and which therefore justifies the sovereign who maintains order against the forces of dissolution. Rene Girard's late Battling to the End (2007) likewise turned to the Pauline drama of restraint and apocalypse.¹⁶

The Postwar Revival

Schmitt's reception broadened far beyond the right after the war, taken up by thinkers as varied as the Marxists Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, whose State of Exception (2003) made Schmitt central to debates over post-September 11 emergency powers, the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and, on the contemporary right, the editor Curtis Yarvin and writers associated with Neoreaction and with Nick Land. The German scholar Heinrich Meier reconstructed Schmitt's exchange with Strauss in Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (1995).¹³

Thiel's "The Straussian Moment" enlists Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction to argue that the West, after the September 11 attacks, had to recognize a real enemy that the optimistic Enlightenment anthropology of Hobbes and Locke could not name. In the four-part Antichrist lectures Thiel delivered in San Francisco in September 2025, audio of which was reported by the Washington Post and Reason, he framed his argument through Schmitt's katechon, casting the American imperium as at once the natural candidate for the restrainer that holds back the Antichrist and a candidate for the one-world tyranny he equated with the Antichrist itself; he named Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, and Greta Thunberg among those he called legionnaires of the Antichrist for advocating global governance to halt technology.¹⁴¹⁵