Carl Schmitt

Today was the first I had heard of Carl Schmitt, an early (1933) Nazi convert who was almost immediately under suspicion by the Nazi Party in Germany, who is being rediscovered and read recently.  From what I can tell, political theorists like Derrida, Habermas, Hayek, and Strauss have been familiar with his work and influenced by him in one direction or the other.

N.S. Lyons, who seems to be some sort of conservative writer but not fully mainstream there, has a substack The Upheaval, which includes The Temptations of Carl Schmitt. Because Schmitt had lived through insurrection, riots, and civil war in Bavaria post WWI, he was deeply concerned with order and the norms of civilisation being in place.

Either way, to Schmitt a dictatorship can be democratically legitimate if it fulfills the state’s obligation to protect, even if it acts beyond the law in making necessary decisions, given that, as he would later explain elsewhere: “The endeavor of a normal state consists above all in assuring total peace within the state and its territory. To create tranquility, security, and order and thereby establish the normal situation is the prerequisite for legal norms to be valid. Every norm presupposes a normal situation, and no norm can be valid in an entirely abnormal situation.” In theory, the dictator reestablishes the normal situation, and therefore legal norms.

What Schmitt was most interested in at this time, however, was the broader concept of sovereignty. Who is truly sovereign? Who is the one who actually has the power to decide to act?

It's easy to see what can go wrong with that, but we see it from a position of great privilege, of having always lived at peace, with even our long-past civil war having taken place largely in border states, with great swaths of the country not witnessing any direct violence. 

Anyway, I put Lyons's essay forward because it was new to me and might be new to you. It's long, and I am already seeing gaps you could drive a truck through, but I thought this should be out there.