Political Theology

Author: Carl Schmitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226738906
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 123

Book Description
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 political theorists of the twentieth century. Focusing on the relationships among political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues in Political Theology that legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign. According to Schmitt, only the sovereign can meet the needs of an "exceptional" time and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished. Convinced that the state is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict, Schmitt theorizes that the state exists only to maintain its integrity in order to ensure order and stability. Suggesting that all concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt concludes Political Theology with a critique of liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental political decisions.

Political Theology

Author: Paul W. Kahn
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231153414
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Annotation In a text innovative in both form and substance, Kahn forces an engagement with Schmitt's four chapters, offering a new version of each that is responsive to the American political imaginary.

Political Theology II

Author: Carl Schmitt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697100
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 119

Book Description
Political Theology II is Carl Schmitt's last book. Part polemic, part self-vindication for his involvement in the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), this is Schmitt's most theological reflection on Christianity and its concept of sovereignty following the Second Vatican Council. At a time of increasing visibility of religion in public debates and a realization that Schmitt is the major and most controversial political theorist of the twentieth century, this last book sets a new agenda for political theology today. The crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century led to an increased interest in the study of crises in an age of extremes - an age upon which Carl Schmitt left his indelible watermark. In Political Theology II, first published in 1970, a long journey comes to an end which began in 1923 with Political Theology. This translation makes available for the first time to the English-speaking world Schmitt's understanding of Political Theology and what it implies theologically and politically.

Race and Political Theology

Author: Vincent Lloyd
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781834
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
In this volume, senior scholars come together to explore how Jewish and African American experiences can make us think differently about the nexus of religion and politics, or political theology. Some wrestle with historical figures, such as William Shakespeare, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nazi journalist Wilhelm Stapel, and Austrian historian Otto Brunner. Others ponder what political theology can contribute to contemporary politics, particularly relating to Israel's complicated religious/racial/national identity and to the religious currents in African American politics. Race and Political Theology opens novel avenues for research in intellectual history, religious studies, political theory, and cultural studies, showing how timely questions about religion and politics must be reframed when race is taken into account.

Writings on War

Author: Carl Schmitt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697186
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
Writings on War collects three of Carl Schmitt's most important and controversial texts, here appearing in English for the first time: The Turn to the Discriminating Concept of War, The Großraum Order of International Law, and The International Crime of the War of Aggression and the Principle "Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege". Written between 1937 and 1945, these works articulate Schmitt's concerns throughout this period of war and crisis, addressing the major failings of the League of Nations, and presenting Schmitt's own conceptual history of these years of disaster for international jurisprudence. For Schmitt, the jurisprudence of Versailles and Nuremberg both fail to provide for a stable international system, insofar as they attempt to impose universal standards of 'humanity' on a heterogeneous world, and treat efforts to revise the status quo as 'criminal' acts of war. In place of these flawed systems, Schmitt argues for a new planetary order in which neither collective security organizations nor 19th century empires, but Schmittian 'Reichs' will be the leading subject of international law. Writings on War will be essential reading for those seeking to understand the work of Carl Schmitt, the history of international law and the international system, and interwar European history. Not only do these writings offer an erudite point of entry into the dynamic and charged world of interwar European jurisprudence; they also speak with prescience to a 21st century world struggling with similar issues of global governance and international law.

Political Romanticism

Author: Carl Schmitt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135149869X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
A pioneer in legal and political theory, Schmitt traces the prehistory of political romanticism by examining its relationship to revolutionary and reactionary tendencies in modern European history. Both the partisans of the French Revolution and its most embittered enemies were numbered among the romantics. During the movement for German national unity at the beginning of the nineteenth century, both revolutionaries and reactionaries counted themselves as romantics. According to Schmitt, the use of the concept to designate opposed political positions results from the character of political romanticism: its unpredictable quality and lack of commitment to any substantive political position. The romantic person acts in such a way that his imagination can be affected. He acts insofar as he is moved. Thus an action is not a performance or something one does, but rather an affect or a mood, something one feels. The product of an action is not a result that can be evaluated according to moral standards, but rather an emotional experience that can be judged only in aesthetic and emotive terms. These observations lead Schmitt to a profound reflection on the shortcomings of liberal politics. Apart from the liberal rule of law and its institution of an autonomous private sphere, the romantic inner sanctum of purely personal experience could not exist. Without the security of the private realm, the romantic imagination would be subject to unpredictable incursions. Only in a bourgeois world can the individual become both absolutely sovereign and thoroughly privatized: a master builder in the cathedral of his personality. An adequate political order cannot be maintained on such a tolerant individualism, concludes Schmitt.

Dictatorship

Author: Carl Schmitt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697143
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
Now available in English for the first time, Dictatorship is Carl Schmitt’s most scholarly book and arguably a paradigm for his entire work. Written shortly after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Schmitt analyses the problem of the state of emergency and the power of the Reichspräsident in declaring it. Dictatorship, Schmitt argues, is a necessary legal institution in constitutional law and has been wrongly portrayed as just the arbitrary rule of a so-called dictator. Dictatorship is an essential book for understanding the work of Carl Schmitt and a major contribution to the modern theory of a democratic, constitutional state. And despite being written in the early part of the twentieth century, it speaks with remarkable prescience to our contemporary political concerns.

Sovereignty in Action

Author: Bas Leijssenaar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108483518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
Sovereignty, originally the figure of 'sovereign', then the state, today meets new challenges of globalization and privatization of power.

Law as Politics

Author: David Dyzenhaus
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322443
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Articles previously published in the Canadian journal of law and jurisprudence.

Carl Schmitt Today

Author: Alain de Benoist
Publisher: Arktos
ISBN: 1907166394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 110

Book Description
Few names, apart from that of Leo Strauss, are invoked more often when discussing the American response to terrorism in recent years than that of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, who was part of the German school of political thought known as the 'Conservative Revolution, ' is widely regarded as having been one of the greatest legal minds of the twentieth century. He famously asserted that the most important function of the sovereign of a nation is not the drafting or enforcement of law, but rather his ability to decide when the law should be suspended in an emergency, and likewise his power to declare who the 'friend' and 'enemy' of a community is at any given moment. Alain de Benoist critiques those who claim Schmitt as an inspiration behind the American 'neoconservative' movement that held sway during the administration of President George W. Bush, showing that the politics of the 'war on terror' do not actually reflect Schmitt's ideas, in that American lack of respect for the traditional rules of war, and its determination to portray its enemies as embodiments of absolute evil rather than as representatives of legitimate polities, renders contemporary American politics thoroughly un-Schmittian. Benoist then goes on to analyse recent history from Schmitt's standpoint, showing that the efforts of the United States have been intended to preserve its global hegemony, whereas Schmitt believed that the world was developing into a multipolar one where many powers, rather than a single power, would dominate, a trend which is clearly at work in our time. Benoist demonstrates that Carl Schmitt was therefore a much greater visionary than the American neoconservatives, who failed to understand the geopolitical forces at work today. Alain de Benoist is the leading philosopher behind the European 'New Right' movement (a label which de Benoist himself rejects, perceiving himself to not fit into the usual Left/Right dichotomy), a metapolitical school of thought which he helped to found in France in 1968 with the establishment of GRECE (Research and Study Group for European Civilisation). He continues to write and give lectures and interviews. He lives in Paris. Arktos has previously made available his books The Problem of Democracy and Beyond Human Rights, both published in 2011.