The Making of a ‘58er 49
Viewed in his Weimar intellectual context, Schmitt was, like
Smend (1882–1975), Heller (1891–1933), and Hans Kelsen (1881–
1973), part of a generational revolt against the legal positivism of
the Empire. Schmitt and his peers rebelled against what they saw as
rationalism, formalism, and relativism in jurisprudence and sought
new substantive foundations for law.^99 He saw in the Nazi Party
a bearer of plebiscitary legitimacy that would give “substance” to
democratic structures that otherwise could provide merely “formal”
legality. Arguing for the legality of Chancellor Franz von Papen’s
coup against Prussia in 1932, (Prussia’s Social Democratic-led
coalition government was defended by Hermann Heller), Schmitt
became the Nazi Party’s ablest legal theoretician. The Concept of
the Political (1927) outlined a critique of pluralist democracy. In it,
Carl Schmitt argued that “... one seldom finds a clear definition
of the political.” Often it is used negatively, he argued, to distin-
guish it from economics, morality or law; only positive definitions
associate it with the state. “Where definitions of the political uti-
lize the concept of power as the decisive factor, this power appears
mostly as state power, for example, in Max Weber’s ‘Politics as a
V o c a t i o n. ’ ”^100 But Schmitt believed that “the political” had an “...
inherently objective [and] autonomous nature.” To him, the focus
on state power begged the question of a criterion: “The state thus
appears as something political, the political as something pertain-
ing to the state – obviously an unsatisfactory circle.”^101 Schmitt
blamed the hegemonic political and economic liberalism of the
nineteenth century for obscuring the true nature of politics. Only
where there is a “real possibility of physical killing” – of existential
negation of the enemy – can “politics” be said to exist. By failing to
recognize its economic and intellectual enemies, liberalism misun-
derstood them as mere competitors or debating adversaries, Schmitt
believed.^102 “With great passion, political viewpoints were deprived
of every validity and subjugated to the norms and orders of moral-
ity, law and economics.”^103 Liberalism thereby engaged in a series
99 Schlink, “Why Carl Schmitt?” 435.
(^100) Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political [1932], trans. George Schwab, with
a Foreword by Tracy Strong (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1996 ), 20.
(^101) Ibid.
(^102) Ibid., 28.
(^103) Ibid., 72.