Books, Arts & Manners: Legality, Legitimacy, and Carl Schmitt

On April 7, 1985, the death of Carl Schmitt, at age 97, brought to an end the longest and stormiest career in the history of political thought. Schmitt’s hero, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), another explicit political realist, would probably place second among long-lived theorists of the state. Attacked for his belittling comments about the Weimar Republic and for his initial support of the Nazis in power, Schmitt spent the postwar years in semi-official disgrace. The West German government and most of the postwar German press studiously ignored a figure once called “Hitler’s Crown Jurist.” Released from American detention after the war, Schmitt went into permanent retirement at Plettenberg, the Rhenish village of his birth. There he received mostly foreign visitors, such as his French commentator, Julien Freund, his later American biographer, J. W. Bendersky, and a new generation of devotees from Latin Europe.

Germans were understandably more reluctant to recognize Schmitt, despite his pre-eminent standing among European political thinkers. Embarrassed by their recent past, they pretended that this celebrity of the Weimar period (to whom Leo Strauss devoted one of his earliest writings) had already departed, together with the Nazis he had briefly endorsed. Not until October 1986 did German academics call a conference, at Speyer, to discuss Schmitt’s achievements. These included 43 books and several hundred articles, which had inspired hundreds of dissertations in the last decade alone.

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Paul Gottfried

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On April 7, 1985, the death of Carl Schmitt, at age 97, brought to an end the longest and stormiest career in the history of political thought. Schmitt’s hero, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), another explicit political realist, would probably place second among long-lived theorists of the state. Attacked for his belittling comments about the Weimar Republic and for his initial support of the Nazis in power, Schmitt spent the postwar years in semi-official disgrace. The West German government and most of the postwar German press studiously ignored a figure once called “Hitler’s Crown Jurist.” Released from American detention after the war, Schmitt went into permanent retirement at Plettenberg, the Rhenish village of his birth. There he received mostly foreign visitors, such as his French commentator, Julien Freund, his later American biographer, J. W. Bendersky, and a new generation of devotees from Latin Europe.

Germans were understandably more reluctant to recognize Schmitt, despite his pre-eminent standing among European political thinkers. Embarrassed by their recent past, they pretended that this celebrity of the Weimar period (to whom Leo Strauss devoted one of his earliest writings) had already departed, together with the Nazis he had briefly endorsed. Not until October 1986 did German academics call a conference, at Speyer, to discuss Schmitt’s achievements. These included 43 books and several hundred articles, which had inspired hundreds of dissertations in the last decade alone.