Carl Schmitt, Liberalism, and Post-Modern Conservatism
Matt McManus
...Schmitt was born in 1888 into a conservative Catholic family in the German Empire. While
he abandoned his personal religious convictions in the 1920’s, the
existential and theological contours of his prior faith always color his
work. Schmitt graduated
from Strasbourg in 1916 with a thesis on the relationship between the
individual and the state, and he later held a number of university
appointments in law throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. During this time period, he produced most of the seminal works for which he remains known, including Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and his dense magnum opus Constitutional Theory.
These
writings were deeply inspired by the shaky legal and political dynamics
of the Weimar Republic, which infamously struggled to contain radical
and anti-democratic political parties within a liberal democratic
framework. When the Nazi
Party took power in 1933, Schmitt served in a number of appointments,
until the SS eventually forced him to resign due to his alleged
“Catholicism” and Hegelianism. After the war, Schmitt lived until 1985 and continued to publish important works including The Nomos of the Earth and The Theory of the Partisan...link