About Schmitt.

• Author: Lind, Michael
• Position: Carl Schmitt: A Biography - Book review

Reinhard Mehring, trans. Daniel Steuer, Carl Schmitt: A Biography (Polity Press, 2014), 700 pp., $45.00.

Over the past few years, the conviction that the end of the Cold War inaugurated an era of great-power peace to accompany the inevitable spread of democratic capitalism has been shattered. In Georgia and Ukraine, thousands have died as Washington's attempt to fence in Russia with NATO allies and affiliates has been answered by Moscow's determination to rebuild a Eurasian sphere of influence. In East Asia, China's growing assertiveness has alarmed its neighbors and collided with America's determination to remain the dominant power in the region. Regime-change efforts sponsored by the United States and its allies in Iraq, Libya and Syria have created power vacuums and bloody regional proxy wars, to the benefit of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

In geoeconomics, too, the Pax Americana and the neoliberal version of capitalism are increasingly contested. China, with the help of India, Russia, Brazil and other countries, has sought to organize alternatives to global economic and development institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, which are still dominated by the Western powers. In different ways, Xi Jinping's China, Vladimir Putin's Russia and Narendra Modi's India represent an alternative economic model, in which free markets and state capitalism are blended under strong executive rule.

This moment of crisis for global liberalism coincides with the translation into English of a fresh appraisal of Carl Schmitt, a leading twentieth-century German thinker who, in the course of a long life, was a consistent critic of political and legal liberalism and American hegemony. In Carl Schmitt: A Biography, published in German in 2009 and published in English late last year, Reinhard Mehring, a professor of political science at Heidelberg University of Education, has provided the most thorough study yet of the anfractuosities of the political theorist known to his detractors as "Hitler's Crown Jurist."

Schmitt, who was born into a Catholic family in Westphalia in 1888, rose to prominence as a conservative legal academic in the 1920s. His discipline of Staatslehre is much more than narrowly technical "law" or "jurisprudence," including as it does elements of political philosophy and political science.

Schmitt's intellectual allies were, by and large, the conservative nationalists of the Weimar Republic, not the more radical Nazis. In his diaries after the Second World War, Schmitt not inaccurately described Hitler as "an entirely empty and unknown individual" who rose "out of the pure lumpenproletariat, from the asylum of a homeless non-education." However, following Hitler's seizure of power, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. Thanks to the sponsorship of Hermann Goering, Schmitt was appointed state councilor for Prussia, president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists, editor-in-chief of the German Jurists' Journal and a professor at the University of Berlin, where he replaced Herman Heller, a Jewish social-democratic legal theorist who had been forced into exile.

At the height of his brief prominence, Schmitt was even received by Mussolini. Schmitt would recall:

I had a longer conversation in private with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia on the evening of the Wednesday after Easter. We talked about the relationship between party and state. Mussolini said, with pride and clearly directed against national socialist Germany: "The state is eternal, the party is transient; I am a Hegelian!" I remarked: "Lenin was also a Hegelian, so that I have to allow myself the question: where does Hegel's world historical spirit reside today? In Rome, in Moscow, or maybe still in Berlin after all?" Schmitt did not consider the possibility that the world-historical spirit might have taken up residence in Washington, DC.

As Hitler consolidated his tyranny, Schmitt became more abject. He defended Hitler's Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934, and described the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws against Gentile-Jewish intermarriage as "the constitution of freedom," even though, according to Mehring, in his youth he had briefly hoped to marry a Jewish woman, Helene Bernstein.

Some of Schmitt's newly adopted "racial" rhetoric was so excessive--he proposed that the word "Jew" be placed next to the names of Jewish authors in footnotes in legal texts--that some hostile expatriates and devout Nazis alike believed they discerned in his writing not the zeal of the convert, but the cynicism of the opportunist. In...