REVIEW

carl schmitt: gone, but still

among us
montserrat herrero
Department of Philosophy, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
E-mail: mherrero@unav.es

doi:10.1057/eps.2015.73; published online 11 December 2015

Books reviewed:
Carl Schmitt: A Biography
Reinhard Mehring (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 749 pp., ISBN: 978-0745652245

Dictatorship from the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to

Proletarian Class Struggles
Carl Schmitt. Translated by Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity,
2014), 314 pp., ISBN: 978-0745646473

Dialogues on Power and Space

Carl Schmitt, Andreas Kalyvas, Federico Finchelstein (eds.) Translated with an
introduction and notes by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 110
pp., ISBN: 978-0745688688

etween the end of 2014 and early

B
2015, three new books related to
Carl Schmitt have become avail-
able in the English language. Two are from
Carl Schmitt himself, while one is about
him. The latter, the translation of Reinhard
Mehring’s original German book published
in 2009, is the most complete biography
of the German jurist that has been written
in any language. Before this biography,
the interested public was able to read
biographies such as those by Paul Noack,
David Cumin, Paul Gottfried or Joseph
Bendersky. Mehring’s new biography has
the merits of a book written by an author
with a 30-year, career-long interest in Carl
Schmitt. He began his career by inquiring
120 european political science: 16 2017
into the relationship between Schmitt’s
and Hegel’s positions, followed by the
publication of an introduction to Carl
Schmitt. All the while, he experienced an
increasing interest in Carl Schmitt’s per-
sonality, as this translated biography
shows. He has also published the corre-
spondence between Schmitt and Rudolf
Smend, Waldemar Gurian, Walter Jellinek
and other university professors during the
Weimar period, which corresponds to the
period that weighs most heavily in Mehr-
ing’s view of Carl Schmitt.
This enormous historical document
chronicles Schmitt’s life as much as it does
the history of Germany. The biographer’s
approach is worth examining in that he

(120–124) © 2016 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/17 www.palgrave.com/journals

‘seeks to avoid strong judgments and
retrospective projections and, instead, to
present the open possibilities and contin-
gencies of a life in, as it were, slow motion’
(xvi). He goes on to say that, ‘this biogra-
phy puts the work into the context of the
crises of its times and reads it, in particular,
autobiographically as a reflection of its
author’s life’ (xvii). The author follows
Schmitt’s identification of Germany’s fate
with his own even though, in February
1946, Schmitt wrote a testimony to Father
Przywara characterizing himself as ‘a
German who has had his legitimate parti-
cipation, total participation, in German
history of the last century without identi-
fying with it’ (in Nordrhein-Westfälischen
Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf RW
265-93. Mt. 6). This testimony, like many
others, is not included in Mehring’s
almost exhaustive collection of detail,
which is understandable since it is impos-
sible to include every detail of a person or
a nation’s life. The question remains
open, however, if this amount of detail
brings us closer to reality, or if it is simply
the condition for an apparently more
‘objective’ interpretation. There is always
a lingering suspicion about what would it
happen if the biographer would have
included events and testimonies that
were left out, as in the aforementioned
example. There is no definitive biogra-
phy, but this one attempts to be nearly
definitive.
Mehring wholly identifies Germany’s
twentieth-century decline with the decline
of Carl Schmitt’s ‘life, work and times’
(xvii). Mehring’s account is a story of
decline:
His life remained hectic and frenzied;
his texts became ever shorter and more
polemical. After The Guardian of the
Constitution, he did not write a longer
book for almost twenty years.
He moved further and further away
from the nineteenth-century ideal of
objective scholarship … the fall in his
life we mentioned in the preface, was
already visible in 2004, if not before’.
(251)
In my view, this opinion is not sustain-
able after reading Nomos of the Earth or
Political Theology II, which are master
pieces and pertain to Schmitt’s later pro-
duction, or after studying the people with
whom he associated in the latter period of
his life, such as Reinhard Koselleck, Ernst
Wolfgang Böckenförde and Álvaro d’Ors.
Indeed, these scholars were perhaps
some of the most significant intellectuals
of that fin de siècle.
Shadows emerge in Schmitt’s person-
ality in this almost one-to-one-scale
chronicle. Mehring’s methodology is
accurate in that he uses both published
material and new material found in dif-
ferent German archives (listed on pages
vii–viii), which makes the biography
highly interesting and offers many details
previously unknown to readers.
After the introduction, the biographer
divides the work into four parts and then
includes some very useful appendices.
The first part is dedicated to Schmitt’s
student years until his first professional
position in the Munich Graduate School of
Economics. There, he details Schmitt’s
early Catholic background and his enthu-
siasm for literature, his contact with the
poets Theodor Däubler and Konrad Weiss,
as well as his collaboration with Franz
Blei: ‘Against the bourgeois educational
canon he constructs an anti-canon
informed by the anti-modernism of the
youth movement and expressionism’
(34). The second part is devoted to the
Weimar Republic period, where, as a pro-
fessor within an important faculty in Bonn,
he spent what can be seen as his most
peaceful years (124). There, he collabo-
rated closely with the journal Hochland
and the Catholic avant-garde that sur-
rounded Karl Muth. He also sewed new
friendships with intellectuals such as Erik
Peterson, Karl Erschweiler and Jacques
carl schmitt european political science: 16 2 0 1 7 121
 Maritain. In this period, his opposition
to Hans Kelsen’s theoretical positions
emerged. He then moved to Berlin where
he made new friendships, like that of
Georg Eisler, which the biographer consid-
ers especially important. The end of this
period is marked by his apologia of the
rule by presidential decree in the Weimar
Republic, based in the Article 48.2 of the
Constitution – defended in Schmitt’s arti-
cle on the juridical validity of the regula-
tion of necessity – which is perhaps the
event that most fostered Mehring’s inter-
est in Schmitt (539). Part 3 is dedicated to
Schmitt’s involvement in National Social-
ism, which is perhaps the best-known part
of his life. The fourth and last part deals
with Schmitt’s post-1945 retreat to his
birthplace Plettenberg. In this last part,
Mehring reflects on the Nuremberg state-
ments Schmitt made as a ‘voluntary wit-
ness’, he relates the vicissitudes of his
Plettenberg asylum, and he explores the
network Schmitt rooted there and from
which he reached out to the entire world.
Throughout these pages, the biogra-
pher sketches an image of the kind of
person that everyone already associates
with Schmitt: arrogant, ambitious, Nazi,
anti-Semitic and authoritarian. Nothing is
surprisingly new, except lavish descrip-
tions of Schmitt’s adventures in love,
recounted in his diary entitled ‘God’s sha-
dow’ (133) and in a narrative on ‘the erotic
state of exception’ (210) in which Schmitt
lived from time to time. Mehring’s biogra-
phy adds sexual obsessions discovered
in the recent publication of some of
Schmitt’s diaries to the general image of
him as a kind of ‘raven’ (xv). Thanks to
Mehring, the German jurist’s weaknesses
and miseries are detailed beyond what we
once knew in a more general way. Perhaps
the idea of a person with a divided identity
– Mehring refers many times to his double
life – is an important point in this charac-
terization of the failed jurist.
To be honest, my theoretical perspec-
tives on Schmitt have always dismissed a
122 european political science: 16 2017 montserrat herrero
biographical account, and thus I have not,
until now, taken Mehring’s intellectual
effort into account in my research on
Schmitt. My interest has always been
related to Schmitt’s clever way of concep-
tualizing the political and coining phrases
such as friend–enemy, political theology,
political romanticism, exception, concrete
order, Groβraum, sovereignty and nomos
of the earth. I have not considered it an
important task to bring historical justice
to anyone. Perhaps as a ‘Christian Epi-
metheus’, Schmitt learned to confess his
sins to God rather than to his contempor-
aries and he attempted to shadow his own
sins with shorthand notes. Schmitt was
incapable of talking publicly about him-
self, let alone publishing something so
personal. He only did so once, in his auto-
biography entitled Ex Captivitate Salus, and
only by taking sufficient distance from him-
self, following Kant’s advice at the begin-
ning of the Critique of Pure Reason: de
nobis ipsis silemus, which Schmitt was fond
of repeating. As he believed, final judgment
is always a matter left to God. Absent God,
the world becomes open to every kind of
historical trial. While historical trials are
always dangerous, Mehring’s aim to
achieve a narrative of recent German his-
tory through the life of an intelligent witness
like Schmitt is worth the effort.
Schmitt was theoretically oriented; his
works were his testament and not his
deeds. Mehring’s biography shadows
this potential legacy in so far as he asserts
that Schmitt’s political views and concepts
are immediately related to his historical
context and cannot go beyond it. Mehring
seems to say that Schmitt is also dead
in a theoretical sense. By narrating the
history of his life he attempts to relegate
Schmitt’s life and his work to the past. But
this past is alive, as far as I can see, and
Schmitt’s texts, concepts and analyses
are still relevant.
Indeed, the recent editions and transla-
tions of Schmitt’s texts mentioned at the
beginning of this review refute a ‘preterit’
description of his work. The recent pub-
lication of Dictatorship and Dialogues on
Power and Space are clear examples.
While Dictatorship was published by
1921, the two dialogues gathered in Dia-
logues on Power and Space are from 1954
and 1958 respectively and belong to the
later period of Schmitt’s life. These two
works present the possibility of interpret-
ing Carl Schmitt’s position and concepts
as decisionist, that is, as defending the
strong state, or as order-keeping through
the idea of the nomos of the earth. While I
defend the latter interpretation, Mehr-
ing’s, as well as most mainstream scho-
lars, defend the former.
In Dictatorship, Schmitt studies the
legal history of dictatorship as a political
institution. This work was conceived dur-
ing his Munich years after the First World
War in a post-revolutionary situation
called the Republic of Councils. At that
time, he experienced right-wing extre-
mism that aimed to deter a revolutionary
introduction of Communism in Germany.
In 1919, he published Political Romanti-
cism. In this work, Schmitt not only fought
the subjectivism of his time, but he also
immunized himself against the romanti-
cism that gripped his generation, paralyz-
ing his contemporaries when making
decisions, incapacitating them from tak-
ing a political stance and abandoning
them to a bourgeois life dedicated
solely to esthetic enjoyment. In Munich,
Schmitt’s fear of chaos went from being a
feeling to being a theory. At this point, the
‘political spirit’ had taken root in Schmitt,
which became obvious in his subsequent
publications, guided by his discovery of
decision, opposed to the ‘eternal dialogue’
of aesthetic logic. Dictatorship opens up a
new theoretical path that he later followed
in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the
Concept of Sovereignty (2005), The Crisis
of Parliamentary Democracy (2000), The
Concept of the Political (2007a), Constitu-
tional Theory (2007b), The Guardian of
the Constitution (2015) and Legality and
Legitimacy (2004). At this point, before
his National Socialist period, he generally
described himself as a decisionist. Dicta-
torship’s main achievement is a clear nar-
rative on the transformations involved in
going from a commissary dictatorship to a
sovereign dictatorship. We have to under-
stand this research in the broader context
of Schmitt’s interests in differentiating
between order (normal situation) and
exception. In the English translation, the
editors have added the appendix to the
original text entitled ‘The Dictatorship of
the President of the Reich according to
Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution,’
which Schmitt included in Dictatorship
since the second edition. It supposes the
polemical nature of Schmitt’s legal inter-
pretation of the Weimar Constitution.
As de Benoist (2003: 38) informs
us in his bibliography of Carl Schmitt,
‘Dialogue on Power’ was conceived as a
response to Robert M. W. Kempner during
the Nuremberg trials on 29 April 1947.
Schmitt chose to answer the American
public prosecutor’s questions by writing
a set of articles, of which the ‘Dialogue on
Power’ is a part. Around 1950, he trans-
formed the text into a script for a dialogue
on power and access to the holder of
power that was broadcast for the first
time on 22 June 1954, year in which it
was also published. Then, in 1958,
Schmitt published another dialogue on
space and politics entitled ‘Dialogue on
New Space’, that has been also broadcast
on 12 April 1955. The first dialogue is a
reflection on the nature of power. It is not
technical or bureaucratic, but rather pro-
foundly human: homo homini homo.
His correspondence with Álvaro d’Ors
touches on this matter, saying that, ‘the
power that one man exerts over other
men originates from men themselves’,
which is a key sentence in their dialogue
and is a plea of the human conscience
(Herrero 2004: 160, also 117, 127).
The second dialogue is an ironic reflec-
tion on the power and scope of technical
carl schmitt european political science: 16 2 0 1 7 123
 means and must be read in connection
with the ideas expressed in The Nomos of
the Earth. As the editor’s introduction
notes, both are critical dialogues of ‘late
modernity’, the publication of which is
quite opportune in our political context.
By publishing these texts in English
translation, Polity invites us to reactivate
a discussion on the disputed intellectual
who was Carl Schmitt.

References

de Benoist, A. (2003) Carl Schmitt. Bibliographie seiner Schriften und Korrespondenzen, Berlin:
Akademie Verlag.
Herrero, M. (ed.) (2004) Carl Schmitt und Álvaro d’Ors Briefwechsel, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Schmitt, C. (2000) The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. trans. E. Kennedy, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Schmitt, C. (2004) Legality and Legitimacy. trans. J. Seitzer, Durham: Duke University Press.
Schmitt, C. (2005) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. trans. G. Schwab,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, C. (2007a) The Concept of the Political. trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, C. (2007b) Constitutional Theory. trans. J. Seitzer, Durham, N.C: Duke University Press.
Schmitt, C. (2015) The Guardian of the Constitution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

About the Author

Montserrat Herrero is Associate Professor at the University of Navarra and PI on the project
‘Religion and Civil Society’ at the Institute Culture and Society. She is author of The Political
Discourse of Carl Schmitt (2015).

124 european political science: 16 2017 montserrat herrero