Recommendations from our site
“Carl Schmitt was a legal scholar and jurisprudent from the interwar period in Germany. He wrote a lot about the administrative state, some really big texts and then a few narrow, sleek volumes that are quite gripping and attractive. He’s quite brilliant, but they’re extremely reactionary and explosive. What he was worried about during that period was that the constitutional order would never settle down, and that there was nobody in Weimar Germany who could make things happen. He had this deep unease with the disorder and the chaos of it. He ended up embracing a far more authoritarian politics with an executive emergency power mode. He was embraced by the Nazis and became a Nazi. He never recanted, so some people call him ‘the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.’ That’s exaggerated because he ended up being ousted from the actual regime, but it gives you a flavour of his politics.” Read more...
Laura Field, Political Scientist
