Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) studies never became a normal subfield. From the beginning, the study of Schmitt doubled as a test of the academy itself: how do universities handle a thinker of the first rank who put his gifts in the service of a criminal regime? Schmitt saw the weak points of liberal constitutionalism with more force than any jurist of his century. He also joined the Nazi Party, purged Jewish colleagues from his citations, and wrote legal cover for the total state. Every phase in the history of Schmitt studies works some version of the same question: can his diagnostic power be extracted from his political desires, or does the diagnosis carry the desire inside it?
The first phase was combat, not scholarship. In Weimar Germany, Schmitt wrote as a participant in live constitutional struggles.Political Theology (1922), The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), The Concept of the Political (1927, revised 1932), Constitutional Theory (1928), and Legality and Legitimacy (1932) were interventions in fights over parliamentarism, presidential emergency power under Article 48, and who would guard the constitution. His great antagonist was Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), whose pure theory of law treated the legal order as a self-contained system of norms. Against Kelsen, Schmitt argued that norms cannot govern their own suspension. Someone must decide when the situation is normal enough for law to apply. That is the force of the opening sentence of *Political Theology*: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Hermann Heller (1891-1933) and Rudolf Smend (1882-1975) fought him from social democratic and integrationist positions. The young Leo Strauss (1899-1973) wrote a set of notes on *The Concept of the Political* in 1932 that Schmitt admired and quietly absorbed into his revisions, a fact that would feed a scholarly industry sixty years later.
Schmitt’s Weimar power came from his ability to make liberalism look evasive. Parliamentary government, he argued, rested on a faith in government by discussion that the age of mass democracy had hollowed out. Legal formalism pretended that procedure could substitute for authority. The friend-enemy distinction sharpened the attack: politics reaches its highest intensity when a community identifies an existential enemy, and no amount of economics, morality, or law can dissolve that possibility. His brilliance lay in presenting this as a hard truth liberals refused to face. His danger lay in treating compromise, pluralism, and procedural restraint as evasions rather than achievements.
Then came the years that made every later reception morally unstable. Schmitt joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933. He became a Prussian state councillor, head of the university teachers’ section of the National Socialist jurists’ league, and editor of the *Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung*. He defended the Röhm murders of 1934 in an article titled “The Führer Protects the Law.” In October 1936 he convened a conference on Judaism in legal science and called for Jewish authors to be marked as Jewish in every citation. Two months later the SS journal *Das Schwarze Korps* attacked him as an opportunist and a Catholic careerist, and he lost his party offices, though he kept his Berlin chair until 1945. In these years he also worked out his Großraum theory of large-space international order, which supplied a juridical vocabulary for German hegemony in Europe. Any history of the field has to hold both facts at once: the regime eventually distrusted him, and he had served it with enthusiasm when service paid.
One strand of the Nazi-era work deserves more attention than it usually gets: Schmitt as a theorist of politicized administration. Liberal bureaucracy claims neutrality, regularity, and expertise. In Schmitt’s total-state vision, the distinctions among state, party, leader, law, and administration begin to collapse, and the administrative apparatus becomes an instrument of political unity. Later debates about the administrative state tend to treat bureaucracy as a technocratic problem. Schmitt’s Nazi jurisprudence stands as a reminder that administration can also become a weapon of decision.
After 1945 Schmitt became a pariah who never stopped mattering. American forces detained him, and Robert Kempner (1899-1993) interrogated him at Nuremberg in 1947, but no charges followed. He refused denazification, lost any hope of a university chair, and withdrew to his hometown of Plettenberg, which he styled, with characteristic self-pity, as the San Casciano of his exile, casting himself as a Machiavelli banished by lesser men. His memoir *Ex Captivitate Salus* (1950) compared him to Melville’s Benito Cereno, the captain forced to steer a ship he did not control. The pose was false. The notebooks he kept from 1947 to 1951, published in 1991 as the *Glossarium*, showed his antisemitism intact and in some passages intensified after the war.
The public quarantine coexisted with a subterranean salon. Plettenberg became a pilgrimage site for younger scholars, jurists, Catholic intellectuals, and adventurers of the right and left. Ernst Forsthoff (1902-1974) organized seminars at Ebrach where Schmitt’s ideas circulated among students who could not cite him in polite company. Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006) built *Critique and Crisis* (1959) on a Schmittian reading of the Enlightenment. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930-2019) corresponded with Schmitt for decades, absorbed his questions about the preconditions of the liberal state, and carried them, transformed, onto the Federal Constitutional Court. Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) visited. Jacob Taubes (1923-1987), a rabbi’s son and a scholar of apocalyptic religion, conducted a long, tormented correspondence with him and later declared Schmitt the apocalyptician of the counterrevolution to his own apocalyptician of the revolution. Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) fought Schmitt’s secularization thesis in *The Legitimacy of the Modern Age*. The Federal Republic itself can be read as an institutional answer sheet to Schmitt’s exam: a constitutional court, entrenched rights, militant democracy, federalism, and structural suspicion of executive emergency power. The founders built against him, which is another way of saying they took him seriously.
There was also a left lineage older than any postwar fashion. Otto Kirchheimer (1905-1965) and Franz Neumann (1900-1954) both studied with Schmitt in Weimar, and both carried his questions about legality and legitimacy into the Frankfurt School and into American political science. Neumann’s *Behemoth* (1942) analyzed the Nazi state with categories partly learned from the man who had joined it. When later scholars expressed shock that leftists read Schmitt, they forgot that some of the earliest and best readers of Schmitt were socialists he had taught.
The English-speaking academy came late. For decades Schmitt appeared in American and British political theory as a footnote to Weimar’s collapse. George Schwab (1931-2022), a Latvian Jew whose father was murdered by the Nazis, changed that. His Columbia dissertation on Schmitt met fierce resistance and appeared as The Challenge of the Exception in 1970. His translation of The Concept of the Political (1976) and his MIT Press translation of Political Theology (1985), alongside Ellen Kennedy’s translation of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1985), gave Anglophone readers direct access to the core texts. Kennedy’s 1987 Telos article on Schmitt and the Frankfurt School, which traced Schmittian residues in Habermas and his predecessors, set off a fight that announced the revival.
The renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s ran on several tracks at once. Historians and political theorists put Schmitt back inside Weimar legal science, the conservative revolution, and Nazi jurisprudence. Joseph Bendersky‘s Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (1983) offered a contextual biography that critics found too forgiving. Stephen Holmes (b. 1948) placed Schmitt at the center of The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993) and warned against any reading that treated the antiliberalism as detachable. John McCormick‘s Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (1997) read him as a theorist of technology and myth. William Scheuerman‘s Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (1999) reconstructed the legal theory and its afterlife in American emergency-power thinking. David Dyzenhaus staged the Weimar debate as a three-way contest among Schmitt, Kelsen, and Heller in Legality and Legitimacy (1997) and argued that Heller, the least read, deserved the victory. Jan-Werner Müller (b. 1970) mapped the postwar European receptions in A Dangerous Mind (2003). A second track ran through political theology. Heinrich Meier (b. 1953) built a small industry on the hidden dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss, arguing that revelation, not politics, sat at the bottom of Schmitt’s thought. Taubes‘s Heidelberg lectures, published as The Political Theology of Paul, pulled Schmitt into debates about Paul, law, and messianism that would run through Agamben and Badiou.
The third track was the strangest: left Schmittianism as a program. Paul Piccone (1940-2004) and the journal Telos devoted a special issue to Schmitt in 1987 and kept returning to him for decades. The attraction was not his authoritarianism. It was his refusal of the fantasy that politics could dissolve into rational consensus, administration, or moral universalism. Chantal Mouffe (b. 1943) made the most sustained attempt at rescue. In The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (1999) and The Democratic Paradox (2000), she accepted that antagonism is ineradicable and proposed to tame the enemy into an adversary, contained within democratic contestation rather than abolished by it. Gopal Balakrishnan‘s The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (2000) gave the New Left Review orbit its own intellectual biography. Critics answered that the friend-enemy distinction resists domestication because it is not a strategy but an ontology, a definition of politics through the possibility of killing. On that reading, every left-Schmittian project smuggles in more Schmitt than it declares.
By the late 1990s Schmitt had become the standing counterargument to post-Cold War liberal triumphalism. The liberal order announced itself as the horizon of politics; Schmitt whispered that borders, enemies, and emergencies had not disappeared, only been redescribed in humanitarian and administrative language. Wherever scholars suspected that liberal universalism concealed power, his stock rose.
September 11 transformed his reputation again. The state of exception became a master concept for discussing detention, torture, surveillance, and executive war power. Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942), who had already placed Schmitt at the center of Homo Sacer (1995), published State of Exception (2003, English 2005) and gave the humanities a vocabulary that spread far beyond its evidentiary base: the exception, once temporary, had become a normal paradigm of government. In American law schools the debate took a different form. Eric Posner (b. 1965) and Adrian Vermeule (b. 1968) argued in Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts (2007) for judicial deference to the executive in emergencies, and Vermeule’s 2009 article “Our Schmittian Administrative Law” claimed that American administrative law already contained black holes and grey holes where legality runs out. Whether this was description or invitation became its own controversy as Vermeule turned to integralism.
The post-9/11 boom produced conceptual inflation. “State of exception” became too easy to say, applied to every executive order and every suspension of routine. The better work that followed distinguished Schmitt’s decisionist exception from rule-governed emergency regimes with statutory authorization, legislative review, judicial oversight, and sunset clauses. The field matured when it stopped asking whether a measure felt Schmittian and started asking who declares the emergency, in what legal form, under what limits, and whether the emergency normalizes itself.
A parallel expansion ran through international thought. G. L. Ulmen’s translation of The Nomos of the Earth (2003) arrived as American power waged wars in humanitarian dress, and Schmitt’s history of the European spatial order, land appropriation, and the criminalization of the enemy found readers among critics of intervention and global governance. Martti Koskenniemi (b. 1953) and other historians of international law engaged him as a flawed but serious historian of the *jus publicum Europaeum*. The same texts drew realists, theorists of multipolarity, and civilizational thinkers who wanted a jurisprudence for a world after American primacy.
That appetite drove the globalization of the field, the most consequential development of the past twenty-five years. Schmitt is no longer read as a German or even European figure. In China, translations sponsored by Liu Xiaofeng (b. 1956) from the late 1990s made Schmitt a fixture of constitutional debate. Jiang Shigong drew on him for a theory of China’s unwritten constitution and for the hard-sovereignty reading of Hong Kong’s status; Chen Duanhong used him on constituent power. In this setting Schmitt serves as a theorist of state power and constitutional identity against Western liberal models. In Russia, Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) recycled Großraum thinking into Eurasianism. Latin American, Indian, and Turkish receptions each found their own uses. The global Schmitt is not uniform. Sometimes he is a realist critic of American hegemony, sometimes a manual for concentrated state power, sometimes a postcolonial instrument for exposing liberal international law as empire in moral dress. None of this redeems him. It shows that his anti-universalism travels, and that it serves masters he never imagined.
At the same time, the scholarship turned back toward the thing earlier generations had bracketed: the antisemitism. The 1991 publication of the Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951 destroyed the excuse that Schmitt’s Jew-hatred was opportunism confined to 1933-1936, since the postwar notebooks seethe with it, including the line that the assimilated Jew is the true enemy. Raphael Gross (b. 1966) made the strongest case in Carl Schmitt and the Jews (German 2000, English 2007): antisemitism was structural to Schmitt‘s thought, woven into his concepts of the enemy, of law, and of the katechon, the restraining power that holds back chaos, rather than a biographical stain beside them. The debate over how far the concepts are contaminated continues, but no serious scholar can now treat the question as peripheral. Gross’s chapter on the true enemy sits inside The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (2016), edited by Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons, thirty chapters that mark the full institutionalization of the field. Reinhard Mehring‘s (b. 1959) monumental biography, Carl Schmitt: A Biography, German title Carl Schmitt: Aufstieg und Fall (2009, English 2014), and the ongoing publication of the diaries gave the field an archival foundation it lacked for decades. Institutionalization carries its own risk. Once a thinker becomes normal academic material, the shock of his commitments fades. The best current scholarship treats Schmitt as important without making him respectable.
The 2010s and 2020s pushed the field into debates over populism and democratic backsliding. His categories now organize analyses of leaders who claim to embody the real people against courts, bureaucracies, media, minorities, and international law. The pattern is recognizable: the people must be unified, the enemy must be named, legitimacy trumps legality, and obstruction becomes treason. Hungary, Poland, Turkey, India, Russia, Brazil, and the United States all appear in this literature. Schmitt is not the only instrument for understanding these cases, but he works as a warning label for the moment when democratic language turns against constitutionalism. The COVID-19 years briefly revived the exception debate in a new register. Agamben damaged his own standing by denouncing the pandemic response as a manufactured emergency, and the episode taught the field a lesson it had half learned after 9/11: Schmitt sharpens analysis when handled with institutional questions in view, and dulls it when he becomes a reflex.
His place in the genealogy of the contemporary right also moved from the margins to the center of the field. Alain de Benoist (b. 1943) and the Nouvelle Droite drew on Schmitt’s critique of liberal neutrality and his insistence that politics rests on identity and conflict; Schmitt fits their metapolitical strategy because he makes hostility to pluralism sound juridical rather than romantic. Éric Zemmour (b. 1958) works a different register, populist and republican, but his rhetoric of borders, sovereignty, and civilizational conflict moves through Schmittian terrain. American postliberals, integralists, and national conservatives cite him with varying degrees of candor. He is one source among many in this tradition, alongside Nietzsche, Sorel, Maurras, Donoso Cortés, Spengler, and Jünger, but he gives it something the others do not: a constitutional language, a theory of order rather than a mood of revolt.
The likely next phase concerns technology and the production of political perception. Schmitt theorized representation, myth, and the age of neutralizations; his complaint that liberalism flees the political into economics and technique reads differently in an era of algorithmic governance. Digital platforms reward antagonism, sort attention around shared enemies, and form communities through opposition. The friend-enemy distinction did not need social media, but social media runs on it. Early work connecting Schmitt to digital association suggests the field will ask whether technological systems now manufacture the appearance of spontaneous enmity while hiding the institutional choices that structure attention.
The trajectory, then: combatant, crown jurist, pariah, oracle of Plettenberg, recovered object of scholarship, fashionable theorist of crisis, overused shorthand, and now a mature object of contextual and critical study with a global reception no one controls. The recurring danger has not changed since Schwab fought his dissertation committee. The more the academy treats Schmitt as a technical analyst of legalism’s limits, the more it risks forgetting his intent. He did not want to repair liberal democracy. He wanted its fragility exposed so it could be overcome. The scholarly task is to read him without being recruited, which means preserving the distinction he spent a career trying to destroy: the distinction between understanding the fragility of liberal order and wishing for its defeat.
The Schmitt Market: Carl Schmitt Studies as a Bourdieusian Field
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) treated scholarship as a competitive game. A field, in his sense, is an arena with stakes, positions, and entry costs. Agents enter with capital of different kinds: academic capital in degrees, posts, and committee power; symbolic capital in reputation and consecration; social capital in networks; economic capital in money and time. They compete to accumulate capital, to convert one kind into another, and to change the rules of conversion in their favor. Institutions consecrate: they certify what counts as serious, who counts as qualified, which objects deserve study. And every field runs on what Bourdieu calls illusio, the shared investment in the belief that the game deserves playing. Homo Academicus (1984) applied this to the university. The Rules of Art (1992) applied it to literature and showed how avant-gardes convert refusal of official honor into a superior currency. Schmitt studies rewards this treatment better than almost any subfield in the humanities, because its founding asset is a liability. The field built a market on a Nazi.
Start with the founding condition. In 1945 Carl Schmitt holds negative capital. He has lost his chair, refused denazification, and become unciteable in the official German public law field. The Federal Republic stakes part of its legitimacy on his exclusion, so the German field enforces the ban with force: to cite Schmitt with approval in a West German law faculty in 1955 costs a career. Bourdieu’s first lesson applies here. A ban does not destroy value. It creates scarcity, and scarcity is the precondition of distinction. Every reader who engages Schmitt after 1945 pays a price in official standing, and the price of admission guarantees that whatever the reader acquires inside is rare. The forbidden text works like restricted production in Bourdieu’s market of symbolic goods: small audience, high initiation cost, high symbolic yield per reader. The ban makes Schmitt a luxury good.
Plettenberg is the institution of this counter-market, and it works as what Bourdieu describes in the artistic field: consecration through refusal of consecration. Schmitt cannot confer degrees, posts, or grants. He can confer something the official field cannot: the distinction of having sat with the banned master. The visit costs something, and the cost is the point. A young jurist who travels to Plettenberg risks contamination in the official field, and that risk certifies his seriousness inside the counter-field. Schmitt understands this economy and manages it. He styles his exile after Machiavelli’s San Casciano, casts himself as Benito Cereno, and curates his own pariah status as a brand. The self-pity reads as weakness only if you miss the market logic. A repentant Schmitt, denazified and rehabilitated, would hold the standing of a minor emeritus. The unrepentant exile holds a monopoly.
The counter-field then needs converters, agents who can move capital across the border into the official economy, and it finds them. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde takes questions formed in the Schmitt circle, strips their author’s name where prudent, and converts them into the most orthodox capital German law can mint: a seat on the Federal Constitutional Court and a dictum every German law student memorizes. Reinhart Koselleck converts a Schmittian reading of the Enlightenment into Critique and Crisis and then into the founding capital of conceptual history, a subfield he comes to own. Jacob Taubes converts in the other direction, spending his standing as a Jewish scholar of religion to certify that engagement with Schmitt can survive the front page. Each conversion launders a portion of Schmitt’s capital and raises the exchange rate for the next trader. Bourdieu calls this the alchemy of the field: stigmatized capital passes through a consecrated intermediary and comes out clean enough to spend.
George Schwab runs the longest conversion in the field’s history, and his case shows the machinery at full extension. In the 1950s he holds a weak position: a graduate student, a refugee, proposing a dissertation on an unciteable Nazi at Columbia, where the gatekeepers include men with every reason to block it. They block it. The battle costs him years and the dissertation appears in Germany in 1970 through Duncker & Humblot, Schmitt’s own lifelong publisher, the commercial house that has warehoused Schmitt’s capital through the ban. Then the position pays.Schwab translates The Concept of the Political in 1976 and Political Theology in 1985, and here Bourdieu‘s economics turn concrete. A translator of a classic holds monopoly rents. Every Anglophone scholar who quotes the famous first sentence of Political Theology quotes Schwab’s English and cites his edition. The man who could not get past a dissertation committee becomes an obligatory passage point for a subfield. His early stigma converts into founder’s capital, the most durable currency a field issues, and the fact that a Latvian Jew whose father the Nazis murdered performed the conversion adds a warrant no Gentile conservative could have supplied. The field never says this aloud. The field does not have to.
Telos plays a different game with the same asset. By the 1980s the journal holds heterodox capital: a position on the margin of American social theory, low institutional backing, high appetite for transgression. In Bourdieu’s account, agents rich in heterodox capital and poor in academic capital attack the orthodoxy at its point of maximum self-satisfaction, because scandal is the one currency the poor can mint. The orthodoxy of the moment is Habermasian: communicative rationality, deliberation, the unforced force of the better argument. Paul Piccone’s circle takes up the one thinker who treats that program as evasion, and the 1987 special issue buys the journal more attention than a decade of Frankfurt School exegesis. The content of left Schmittianism has been debated ever since, but the position-taking reads without strain. Citing Schmitt from the left in 1987 signals maximum distance from the liberal center at minimum research cost. Chantal Mouffe then performs the refined version of the trade: extract antagonism, discard the fascism, and package the residue as agonistic pluralism, a product that sells in seminar rooms where Schmitt’s own books cannot be assigned without a syllabus apology. The rescue operation is also an appropriation, in Bourdieu’s sense: she converts his capital into hers, and The Democratic Paradox circulates where The Concept of the Political cannot.
The critics belong to the same market, and this is where the Bourdieu frame earns its keep, because the field’s own self-description hides it. Stephen Holmes, William Scheuerman, David Dyzenhaus, and Jan-Werner Müller build careers on Schmitt while warning against him. Their position is border guard, and the border between engagement and rehabilitation is the field’s central line, the equivalent of the line between art and commerce in Bourdieu’s literary field. Guarding it pays. The denouncer needs the danger as much as the enthusiast does; a Schmitt safely dead as an intellectual force would fund no anatomies of antiliberalism. Every field, Bourdieu writes, rests on a complicity beneath its conflicts: the players fight over the stakes and agree the stakes are real. Holmes and Piccone disagree about everything except the proposition on which both their positions depend, that Schmitt is important enough to fight over. That agreement is the illusio of Schmitt studies, and no player can question it without leaving the game.
Raphael Gross’s intervention shows how a scholar changes the exchange rates rather than the game. Through the 1980s the field priced Schmitt’s antisemitism as biography: an ugly episode, separable from the concepts, a discount already reflected in the price. The 1991 publication of the Glossarium and then Gross’s Carl Schmitt and the Jews revalued the currency. If antisemitism structures the concept of the enemy and the katechon, then naive conceptual engagement carries a cost it had not been paying, and every existing position gets marked to market. Holders of the opportunism thesis suffer what Bourdieu calls hysteresis: their capital was accumulated under old rules and devalues under new ones. Bendersky’s contextual defense of 1983 reads differently after 2000. Gross, holding the position of a Jewish historian of German Jewry, spends capital only he can spend, and the field’s center of gravity shifts toward contamination scholarship. This is how fields move: an agent with the right holdings forces a repricing.
Then consecration completes, and the field enters the phase Bourdieu charts at the end of every avant-garde cycle. University presses issue the translations: MIT, Chicago, Duke, Cambridge, Polity. Jeffrey Seitzer translates Legality and Legitimacy and Constitutional Theory for Duke. The diaries appear in critical editions. Reinhard Mehring writes the monumental biography, a genre reserved for consecrated figures, and his position illustrates a capital form the field rarely names: archival monopoly. The Schmitt Nachlass sits in the state archive in Düsseldorf, access mediated by editors and heirs, and the scholar who commands the papers commands rents no theorist can match. The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt in 2016 performs the rite of institution. An Oxford handbook does for a thinker what a museum retrospective does for a painter: it certifies that the scandal has become a syllabus. Thirty chapters, standard apparatus, tenure-line contributors. The field now mints normal academic capital, dissertations and hires and conference panels, from a Nazi jurist, and the minting requires no courage at all.
Consecration carries its price, and Bourdieu predicts it. The scarcity premium falls. When everyone can cite Schmitt, citing Schmitt distinguishes no one. The transgression yield that funded Plettenberg pilgrims and Telos issues approaches zero; a graduate student who writes on the state of exception in 2026 takes no risk and therefore earns no risk premium. The post-9/11 boom accelerated the devaluation by flooding the market: “state of exception” became a currency printed faster than its backing, and the phrase now buys less analysis than it did in 2005. Older players whose standing rested on the danger of the object feel the hysteresis. The moves available to the ambitious young are the moves Bourdieu’s model generates in any mature field: find the underpriced positions. Two stand out. The global receptions, above all the Chinese, offer virgin territory where language skills form a steep entry barrier and early movers will hold founder’s capital for a generation. And the application of Schmitt’s critique of neutralization to algorithmic governance offers a new conversion, old concepts into a new market, before the crowd arrives.
The global market also confirms Bourdieu’s point that capital trades at national exchange rates set by each field’s relation to power. The German field priced Schmitt low for decades because the state’s legitimacy depended on his exclusion; the field’s autonomy was limited by a political stake it could not disown. The American field entered late with no such stake and low switching costs, which is why the boom happened in English. The Chinese field runs the reverse configuration. There, proximity to state projects raises rather than lowers a jurist’s price, and Schmitt’s stock trades at a premium because constitutional theorists can convert him into arguments the party-state can use. Liu Xiaofeng’s translations function as founder’s capital in that market on the Schwab model. The same texts, four fields, four prices. Nothing in the texts changed.
One feature of the field remains, the one Bourdieu would examine first: its interest in disinterestedness. Schmitt scholars describe their work as duty. We must understand antiliberalism to defend against it; we read the enemy to know him; engagement is not endorsement. Bourdieu reads such statements as the denial every field requires, the collective agreement to describe the pursuit of position as the pursuit of truth. The description can be sincere and the market can run underneath it; the two facts coexist in every field he studied. Schmitt studies differs only in the rawness of the material. Here the asset is a man who served a regime that murdered millions, and the field has spent eighty years converting his stigma into chairs, editions, handbooks, and careers, while describing the conversion as vigilance. The frame does not say the vigilance is false. It says the vigilance pays, and that a field which understood its own economy might guard the border between engagement and rehabilitation with more suspicion of its guards.
The Plettenberg Chain: Schmitt Studies through Randall Collins
Randall Collins (b. 1941) builds his sociology on a simple claim: ideas live in gatherings. In Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), he takes the ritual theory of Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), runs it through the micro-observation of Erving Goffman (1922-1982), and produces a model with four ingredients and four outputs. The ingredients: bodies assembled in one place, a barrier that marks off outsiders, a mutual focus of attention, and a shared mood. When the ingredients combine, the gathering produces group solidarity, emotional energy in the participants, sacred objects that carry the group’s charge, and moral standards that defend those objects. Emotional energy, the confidence and drive a man carries away from a successful ritual, is the currency of social life. In The Sociology of Philosophies (1998) Collins applies the model to intellectual history across two and a half millennia and concludes that thought moves through chains: teacher to student, circle to circle, face to face, with texts serving as charged objects that carry ritual energy across time. Ideas that no gathering charges go dead on the page.
No history of ideas explains the survival of Carl Schmitt after 1945 as well as this model does. The standard accounts treat the postwar Schmitt revival as a story of arguments: liberalism had weaknesses, Schmitt had described them, and honest scholars had to engage. The Collins account starts elsewhere. It starts with a house in a small Westphalian town, a banned old man, and a stream of visitors who came away charged.
Begin with the ban, because the ban supplied the ritual ingredient that ordinary academic life lacks. Collins holds that rituals need a barrier to outsiders, and that the intensity of a gathering rises with the cost of entry. Most academic interaction runs at low intensity: open seminars, printed journals, careers built on attendance rather than risk. The West German prohibition on Schmitt changed the arithmetic for anyone who approached him. To visit Plettenberg, to correspond with Schmitt, to cite him with sympathy, cost standing and sometimes friendships. The cost built the wall, and the wall built the charge. Transgression, in Collins’s model, is a ritual intensifier of the first order. The forbidden gathering generates more emotional energy than the permitted one because the participants have staked something to be there, and the shared risk deepens the shared mood. The Federal Republic, by banning Schmitt from official academic life, did for him what no publisher could have done. It made every encounter with him an event.
Plettenberg ran as a ritual site for three decades. The ingredients were all present. Bodily co-presence: Schmitt received visitors at his home for hours of face-to-face talk, and those who came recorded the experience as an encounter rather than a conversation. A barrier: the trip cost reputation, and everyone in the room knew it. Mutual focus: one man, one voice, the master performing his ideas for a small audience. Shared mood: the mix of danger, secrecy, and intellectual event that visitors describe in nearly identical terms across forty years of memoirs. Alexandre Kojève stopped in Plettenberg in 1967 and told people that Schmitt was the only man in Germany worth talking to, a sentence that did as much for the site’s charge as anything Schmitt wrote. Jacob Taubes conducted a long correspondence, resisted visiting for years because he understood what a visit would cost him, and then went in 1978. The two men sat and read Romans 9 through 11 together, a rabbi’s son and the crown jurist of the Third Reich bent over Paul. Collins could not invent a better illustration. Two bodies, one text, total focus, and an emotional charge that Taubes spent the rest of his life discharging in lectures, letters, and the seminar on Paul he gave in Heidelberg in February 1987, weeks before his death. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde came as a young jurist and left with questions that powered a career. Reinhart Koselleck came. Julien Freund (1921-1993) came from France and built a school on the visit. Armin Mohler (1920-2003) served as a gatekeeper and courier for the circle. Günter Maschke (1943-2022) arrived as an ex-revolutionary of 1968 and stayed a Schmittian for life. Piet Tommissen (1925-2011) devoted himself to the bibliography, the collector’s form of devotion. Nicolaus Sombart (1923-2008) had known the wartime Berlin circle as a young man and kept its memory in print. Ernst Forsthoff ran the Ebrach summer seminars, where the ideas circulated in a second gathering place among students who could not cite their source. The pattern is the one Collins finds around every charged thinker: a central site, satellite sites, couriers between them, and a population of participants whose energy rises with proximity to the center.
Schmitt himself ran on the same fuel. Collins treats emotional energy as the reward that keeps the chain going, and the postwar Schmitt is a study in energy management. The official world had cut him off from lectures, students, and honors, the standard energy sources of an academic life. He replaced them with the salon. Every pilgrim who made the trip confirmed his centrality; every risk a visitor took proved that Schmitt remained worth a risk. His self-dramatization, the San Casciano pose, the Benito Cereno pose, reads in this frame as stagecraft for the ritual: the master supplies the visitor a drama to enter, and the drama raises the temperature of the encounter. A rehabilitated Schmitt giving guest lectures in Bonn would have generated polite applause. The banned Schmitt in his study generated disciples.
The gatherings charged objects, and the objects carried the charge outward. Collins holds that sacred objects store ritual energy and transport it to people who never attended the gathering. The Schmitt corpus became a set of such objects. The first sentence of Political Theology works as a charged formula in the Collins sense, a string of words that members repeat to each other as a sign of membership and that produces a small jolt on each repetition. The vocabulary functions the same way: friend and enemy, the exception, the katechon, nomos. To deploy these words in a seminar in 1985 marked the speaker as a member of a knowing circle, and the mild scandal of the marking delivered energy to speaker and audience alike. The physical objects held charge too. Dedication copies, the letters, and above all the Glossarium, the postwar notebooks whose publication in 1991 worked like the opening of a reliquary, releasing a concentrated dose of the founder’s presence, in this case a toxic one, into a field that had to absorb it. Raphael Gross’s scholarship on the antisemitism drew its force in part from that release: the notebooks put the reader in the room with Schmitt’s hatred, and the encounter carried an emotional charge no summary could match.
Now follow the chains, because the chains are the finding. Collins maps intellectual history as lineages of face-to-face contact, and the Schmitt lineages run further than those of any other twentieth-century jurist. One chain runs Schmitt to Böckenförde to the Federal Constitutional Court and into the doctrinal bloodstream of German public law. One runs Schmitt to Koselleck to conceptual history and the Bielefeld school. One runs Schmitt to Taubes to the Heidelberg Paul lectures to Giorgio Agamben, whose The Time That Remains answers Taubes and whose State of Exception carried a Schmittian formula to the largest audience it has ever had. One runs Schmitt to Freund into French political science. One runs Schmitt to George Schwab to the English translations and the Anglophone field. And one chain predates the ban: Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann sat in Schmitt’s Weimar seminars, carried the charge into the Frankfurt School and then to Columbia, and passed Schmittian questions to American political science under other names. Collins’s law of small numbers says an intellectual attention space holds three to six live positions at a time, and a thinker survives by anchoring one of them. Schmitt anchors the antiliberal position in legal and political theory. The position cannot go unfilled, because the liberal positions define themselves against it, and no rival occupant has matched his texts. The chains persist because the attention space keeps a chair open for him.
Telos shows the model working in a journal. A journal looks like paper, but Collins would direct attention to the gatherings behind the paper: the editorial meetings in Paul Piccone’s apartment, the conferences, the circle of contributors who knew each other face to face and fought face to face. The 1987 Schmitt issue was a ritual event before it was a publication. A left circle took up a forbidden rightist, the transgression spiked the group’s energy, the scandal drew attention from outside, and the attention recharged the group. Members of such circles report the mood in Collins’s terms without knowing his vocabulary: excitement, embattlement, the sense of being where the live conversation is. Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism then carried the charged symbols into settings the originals could not enter, the standard second-generation move in any chain, where a disciple repackages the founder’s emblems at a lower risk and a wider circulation.
The post-9/11 boom is the model’s set piece. Collins wrote on the attacks themselves and described the months that followed as a national surge of ritual density: flags, vigils, assemblies, a population synchronized in focus and mood. The academic profession went through its own version of the surge. A shocked discipline needed a shared object to focus on, and the object had to fit the mood: emergency, danger, the suspension of the normal. The phrase “state of exception” was sitting in the storehouse, pre-charged by fifty years of transgressive circulation, and Agamben’s 2003 book arrived at the moment of maximum demand. What followed was a cascade of charging rituals: conference panels, special issues, lecture tours, seminar after seminar with the same words at the center of attention. Each gathering recharged the formula and pumped energy into the participants. Collins also predicts the crash. A symbol circulated without fresh ritual charge, repeated secondhand by people who took no risk and shared no gathering, loses its jolt. By 2010 “state of exception” had been said too many times by too many people in too many low-intensity settings, and the phrase went flat. The field’s own complaint about conceptual inflation is, in Collins’s terms, a report that the symbol had been spent faster than the rituals could recharge it. Agamben’s pandemic interventions completed the discharge: the old master invoked the sacred formula, the gathering failed to form around him, and a symbol without a circle is noise.
Institutionalization is a cooling. The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt represents the lowest-intensity ritual academic life performs: thirty contributors who mostly never met, a reference format built for consultation rather than assembly, no barrier, no risk, no mood. The handbook secures the symbols and drains them. The energy has migrated to new sites, and the sites are where Collins would send a researcher now. In China, the reception began as reading circles, Liu Xiaofeng’s groups working through translations together, face to face, with the added charge of handling a thinker whose uses touch state power. On the online right, Schmitt circulates as a membership emblem in circles that have rebuilt the old ingredients in digital form: barriers of jargon and pseudonymity, mutual focus in group chats and podcasts, a shared mood of embattlement, and the transgressive jolt of quoting a Nazi jurist at the respectable world. The academy spent eighty years discharging the energy the ban had stored. The circles now recharging Schmitt sit outside the academy, past the edge of its standards, and they are running the Plettenberg reaction again with new bodies. The chain has not ended. It has changed rooms.
