The article analyzes the work of Hanno Kesting, Reinhart Koselleck, Roman Schnur, and Nicolaus Sombart—four young followers of Carl Schmitt in postwar Germany. Their “intellectual Schmittianism” was less than a full commitment to Schmitt’s political positions, yet had more than an arbitrary similarity with them: it pertained to assumptions, categories, and modes of thought. Drawing on Pocock’s terminology, I identify a particular “language” of intellectual Schmittianism, introduce its key components, and analyze their interaction. I focus on six categories derived from (...) Schmitt’s narrative of European political modernity: discrimination, historical parallels, secularization, global civil war, open/latent civil war, and category blurs. The analysis shows that these categories were interlinked argumentative devices rather than mere rhetoric and that they systematically upheld the postwar scholars’ arguments. While the Schmittian language enabled the young scholars to express their political skepticis... (shrink)

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On the occasion of Koselleck’s hundredth birthday, this article examines the history of the reception and impact of the book that established the historian’s fame from 1973 onward. It argues that Koselleck pursues a new-right strategy of cultural hegemony in more than one respect, which has been largely overlooked so far.

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Pese a los enormes esfuerzos que han hecho renombrados filósofos políticos e historiadores intelectuales por estigmatizar el estudio de la obra de Carl Schmitt, el interés por el razonamiento político-jurídico schmittiano ha logrado resistir a un punto tal que, hoy en día, cualquier interesado por la filosofía política o jurídica difícilmente pueda resistir la tentación o la necesidad de explorar la obra y el pensamiento schmittiano. Frente a este panorama, en esta ocasión me gustaría ofrecer algunas razones para sostener que (...) la célebre y breve implicación política de Schmitt con el nacionalsocialismo (1933-1936), desde cierto punto de vista, debería quedar al margen o, en el mejor de los casos, considerarse una cuestión incidental para aquellos que se sientan interesados por el razonamiento político o jurídico schmittiano en _stricto sensu_. A tal efecto, luego de llevar adelante unas breves consideraciones sobre la trayectoria de la reputación de Carl Schmitt, quisiera ofrecer cuatro ejemplos que ilustran algunas buenas razones para creer que la teoría política y jurídica de Schmitt corre por un carril paralelo a las consideraciones biográficas y, por lo tanto, quisiera tratar de contrarrestar la idea según la cual existe una conexión directa o necesaria entre sus desacertados compromisos políticos y el valor que, eventualmente, puede llegar a tener su razonamiento político y jurídico. (shrink)

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Carl Schmitt’s radio broadcast ‘Hegel and Marx’, aired on 13 November 1931, and newly translated here, recapitulates the account of Marxism that Schmitt started to develop in the 1920s. Beginning from Schmitt’s early theory of adjudication inLaw and Judgement, the concepts of decision, representation and the friend/enemy distinction are analysed, connected, and shown to structure Schmitt’s critique of Marxism, both in the broadcast, and in his other writings during this period. Some concluding remarks are offered on the substantive issues Schmitt’s (...) critique raises for Marx’s political theory. (shrink)

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How can we explain the positive references of René Capitant, an anti-fascist jurist who observed the destabilization of the Weimar republic from Strasbourg, to Carl Schmitt, a critic of the Weimar constitution who would rally to nazism in 1933? Is it a reversal use? This article documents the fact that while opposing Schmitt on the conception of democracy and the values of equality and respect for the individual on which it is based, Capitant is sensitive to some of the strategic (...) arguments of the author of Legality and Lgitimacy on the limits of legalism in the face of enemies who seem to play the game of legality only to bring it down. (shrink)

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