The texts translated here may at first glance appear to be minor works in Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre. But as the careful reader will notice, their availability in English challenges the established image of their author as a nihilistic decisionist who embraced conflict and war for their own sake or out of a fanatical belief in an anti-bourgeois, agonistic ethos. This is not to say that ‘the real Schmitt’ was something completely other than or opposed to that figure. What needs more recognition within the reception of Schmitt’s work, however, is the fact that he made his theoretical choices not out of an embrace of war and struggle as such. Rather, his infamous fixation on enmity and the legal groundlessness of sovereignty emerges principally out of a concern with peace and order.

This concern appears clearly in Schmitt’s ‘Dictatorship’ from 1926, basically a short summary of the main theses of the book by the same name, which had been published in 1921 (the article appeared as an entry in the Staatslexikon of the Catholic Görres Society). Schmitt’s purpose in his study of the institution and concept of dictatorship was to demystify and rehabilitate what in his view had become a maligned and misunderstood term in modern political discourse. Schmitt’s emphasis on the need for a positive conception of what he described as a ’commissarial’ dictatorship, an idea inherent to Roman tradition and meant as a short-term solution to an ‘abnormal state of affairs’ (such as war or civil unrest) which requires the suspension of ‘certain legal barriers’ until a return to normality is possible. The tradition of the commissarial dictatorship contrasts with the modern phenomenon of ‘sovereign dictatorship’, under which the intervention is not intended to facilitate a return to established normality but to establish a new order.

One could say that Schmitt betrayed this doctrine of the commissarial dictatorship by making himself available to a revolutionary introduction of a new order following the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. His position up until then had been to secure extraordinary powers for the office of the president within the Weimar order (discussed succinctly in a passage in ‘Dictatorship’), but Schmitt did not hesitate to legitimize Hitler’s dictatorship by providing it with legal justification.

This did not mean that the basic concern with order and stability was rejected, though. Rather, together with Schmitt’s obvious antisemitism and opportunism, a concern with order may have been part of the motive behind his support for the new regime.

That stance is particularly clear in the short article ‘Politics’ from 1936, written while Schmitt was as at the height of influence and greatest closeness to political power. This is made manifest by the article’s final words on how it aligns with views of ‘the Führer and Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler’ and the inclusion of a quote from Joseph Goebbels in its third section. Schmitt had joined the NSDAP in May 1933, when the party reopened its admission of members for a short period. He quickly gained influence and positions in the movement but lost them when he was attacked by the SS organ Das Schwarze Korps in 1936. Though he later claimed to have feared for his life, Schmitt was allowed to continue to teach and publish. He would remain within the party until 1945 and is to this day, rightly or wrongly but somewhat deservedly, sometimes referred to as the ‘Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’.

The article ‘Politics’ appeared as an entry in Handbuch der neuzeitlichen Wehrwissenschaften (Handbook of Modern Military Sciences) and as such, it had an obvious target audience, one that Schmitt had already tried to court in his 1934 Staatsgefüge und Zusammenbruch des zweiten Reiches: Der Sieg des Bürgers über den Soldaten (State Structure and Collapse of the Second Reich: The Victory of the Citizens over the Soldiers). Here, Schmitt addressed a specific section of the Nazi state, something that partly explains his fall from grace that would occur the year he published ‘Politics’. Schmitt was not a Nazi insider and put too much trust in segments of the old state structures, such as the army, as guarantors not only of his own career but of political order itself. To this extent, ‘Politics’ exhibits Schmitt’s true allegiances in both theory and practice, particularly read in relation to ‘Dictatorship’.

‘Politics’ was written just before Schmitt began the serious work on Hobbes that resulted in the book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, finished in the summer of 1938. Schmitt’s essay ‘The Completed Reformation’ was published almost 30 years later, in 1965, and was formally a reflection on three recently published texts directly on or commenting on Hobbes (but referencing a whole host besides). In reality, the reflection turned into a restatement of his views regarding Hobbes’ importance.

In Political Theology from 1922, Schmitt described Hobbes as a ‘consequential representative’ of the abstract scientism of the seventeenth century. This assessment had changed somewhat in 1938, but Schmitt still regarded Hobbes’ political project as a failure based on its individualist premise and the impossibility of founding a unifying political totality on a mechanistic and positivist conception of the state. Schmitt also regarded Hobbes’ handling of the Leviathan as too unserious for the figure’s inherent mythological power, which would come back to haunt Hobbes’ reception. This is perhaps the most obvious change in perspective in ‘The Completed Reformation’. Here, Schmitt seems to regard Hobbes as a very conscious political theologian, potentially fully aware of the mythological power of the demonic imagery he put into play. What Schmitt most of all embraces in Hobbes, in both 1938 and 1965, is the struggle against indirect powers, potestas indirecta, that threaten the integrity of state power and its sovereign capabilities, by necessity absolute according to Schmitt.

If this sounds a bit obscure, one should remember Schmitt’s concern with Hobbes’ relation to the experience of totalitarianism (also explicated in ‘The Completed Reformation’). In the early 1930s, Schmitt had tried to elaborate a theory of what he called ‘the strong total state’, in opposition to the Weimar Republic’s ‘weak total state’. Strength and weakness of the total state here did not only relate to the state’s general capacities, but rather to the extent to which the state was able to project power over society and the level of social influence on the state itself. In Schmitt’s view, the pluralist multi-party state of mass democracy was ruled by groups of special interests and its authority degraded by constant attempts to answer popular demands for intervention in various sectors. The strong total state would be one that could fend off undue external influence and exert its authority in protection of society, including in particular private property. Schmitt’s portrait of Hobbes as an exemplary opponent of potestas indirecta, in 1938 as well as in 1965, corresponds directly to this theory. Today, when the liberal center’s gradual acceptance and sometimes embrace of far-right politics or even politicians accompany a growing recognition for the ‘need’ of the return of a strong state, this aspect of Schmitt’s political theory appears in a new light.

Quite insightfully, Leo Strauss had in 1932 observed that Schmitt for all his expressed anti-liberalism remained caught within a liberal intellectual framework. Strauss meant this as something of a gotcha, even if he himself recommended returning to the liberal origins of modernity to recover the tradition of natural law. However, the fact that Schmitt’s intellectual project is aligned to some fundamental aspects of liberal order is perhaps less of a problem for Schmitt than it is for liberalism. Readers of ‘Politics’ and ‘The Completed Reformation’ are invited to reflect on to what extent Schmitt’s theory corresponds to some basic, uncomfortable truths of the liberal-capitalist, bourgeois order.