{"id":130373,"date":"2020-05-06T08:43:18","date_gmt":"2020-05-06T16:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130373"},"modified":"2020-05-06T08:58:17","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T16:58:17","slug":"the-end-of-law-carl-schmitt-in-the-twenty-first-century-second-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130373","title":{"rendered":"The End of Law: Carl Schmitt in the Twenty-First Century Second Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2019 book by William E. Scheuerman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* When I penned this volume\u2019s first edition over twenty years ago, the Carl Schmitt \u201cbug\u201d had just hit the Anglophone intellectual world, with many political theorists, jurists, and others suddenly paying close attention to Schmitt\u2019s ideas and their possible significance. In part by highlighting the ways in which Schmitt\u2019s theoretical agenda opened the door to his disastrous flirtation with National Socialism, I hoped to push back against the emerging Schmitt renaissance.<\/p>\n

By any standard, those efforts were a failure: Schmitt is now a household name in the English-speaking academic world, and his work is more popular than ever. Elsewhere as well (e.g., China) Schmitt has since garnered a significant collection of disciples. The worldwide rise of right-wing populism means that he is very much in the news, with many far-right intellectuals energetically advising would-be rightist demagogues about Schmitt\u2019s lessons.<\/p>\n

* Schmitt has no close relations in legal theory in the United States today, and no influential American legal theory even remotely resembles Schmitt\u2019s heinous Nazi-era ideas.<\/p>\n

* Schmitt very early endorsed ideas about legal indeterminacy that clearly took him well beyond traditional notions of the
\nlimited determinacy of law. In some contrast to contemporary North American defenders of both the underdeterminacy and radical indeterminacy theses, however, he believed that the critique of formalist jurisprudence necessarily pointed the way toward an assault on liberal models of deliberative parliamentarism (chapter 2), constitutionalism (chapter 3), the state\/society divide
\n(chapter 4), and international law (chapter 6). Schmitt exploited what he took to be the Achilles\u2019 heel of liberalism\u2014formalist jurisprudence\u2014in order to discredit liberalism altogether. Pace liberalism, legal decision making inevitably rests on untrammeled discretion: the inevitability of a constitutive \u201cpure decision\u201d at the basis of every legal act demonstrates the bankruptcy of
\n\u201cnormativistic\u201d liberalism as a whole. From Schmitt\u2019s perspective, the enigma of legal indeterminacy provided an effective intellectual weapon in the right-wing authoritarian assault on liberal democracy.<\/p>\n

* Schmitt\u2019s influence on some important voices within postwar American political and legal theory has been widely documented.34 Yet the story of Schmitt\u2019s impact on postwar political thought in the United States remains incomplete. Take Joseph A. Schumpeter\u2019s enormously influential democratic theory (chapter 7) or Friedrich A. Hayek\u2019s free-market critique of the welfare state (chapter 8): each was shaped by a more or less hidden debate with Carl Schmitt. Neither was a principled \u201cSchmittian\u201d in any sense of the term, and each opposed Schmitt\u2019s own political preferences and significant parts of his theory. Nevertheless, each author was ultimately influenced by Schmitt: Schmitt was more than a parochial \u201cGerman thinker\u201d lacking in significance
\nfor American political and legal thought.<\/p>\n

* Following the 9\/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and many subsequent attacks elsewhere, legal scholars quickly turned to Schmitt\u2019s ideas about emergency powers to begin rethinking how liberal states might best respond. Even more recently, Schmitt\u2019s ideas have loomed large in thinking about the 2008 financial and other \u201cglobal\u201d crises. Schmitt\u2019s theory of emergency powers, more than any other intellectual contribution he made, has ignited a massive political and legal debate; we need to pay careful attention to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2019 book by William E. Scheuerman: * When I penned this volume\u2019s first edition over twenty years ago, the Carl Schmitt \u201cbug\u201d had just hit the Anglophone intellectual world, with many political theorists, jurists, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42763],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carl-schmitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t