Carl Schmitt: Quotes about the decision

Carl Schmitt was German jurist, political theorist and professor of law. Explore interesting quotes on decision.

Carl Schmitt: 72 quotes5 likes

“It is striking that one of the most consequential representatives of this abstract scientific orientation of the seventeenth century became so personalistic. This is because as a juristic thinker he wanted to grasp the reality of societal life just as much as he, as a philosopher and natural scientist, wanted to grasp the reality of nature. He did not discover that there is a juristic reality and life that need not be reality in the sense of the natural sciences. Mathematical relativism and nominalism also operate concurrently. Often he seemed to be able to construct the unity of the state from any arbitrary given point. But juristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences that he, in the intensity of his scientific approach, should unsuspectingly have overlooked the specific reality of legal life inherent in the legal form. The form that he sought lies in the concrete decision, one that emanates from a particular authority. In the independent meaning of the decision, the subject of the decision has an independent meaning, apart from the question of content. What matters for the reality of legal life is who decides.”

Political Theology (1922), Ch. 2 : The Problem of Sovereignty as the Problem of the Legal Form and of the Decision

“That the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character.”

Carl Schmitt book The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political (1927)

“All law is "situational law." The sovereign produces and guarantees the situa in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.”

Political Theology (1922), Ch. 1 : Definition of Sovereignty

“The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.”

Political Theology (1922), Ch. 4 : On the Counterrevolutionary Philosophy of the State

“The inevitable lack of objectivity in political decisions, which is only the reflex to suppress the politically inherent friend-enemy antithesis, manifests itself in the regrettable forms and aspects of the scramble for office and the politics of patronage. The demand for depoliticalization which arises in this context means only the rejection of party politics, etc. The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state.”

Carl Schmitt book The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political (1927)

“To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.”

Political Theology (1922), Preface to Second Edition (1934)

“The state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies.”

Carl Schmitt book The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political (1927)