Carl Schmitt

**Carl Schmitt** (11 July 1888 - 7 April 1985) was a German a politcal theoriest, theologist and member of the German Nazi Party.

## Publications 
### *The Dictatorship* 
In this essay, he wrote about the ideas of the constitution of the Weimar Republic, which was how Germany was often called between World War I and World War II. He liked the fact that there was a president because he thought that it was useful, while he thought that many other parts of the constitution were not useful. He believed the position of president was useful because the constitution let him break the rules and laws in case of emergency. This situation was called the *state of exception*. 

Schmitt believed that having a powerful president that could decide to rule as he wanted in emergencies was better than having to go through the trouble of getting the legislature to agree on how to do things at a time when there is a need to decide things quickly. Schmitt admitted that he was praising what most people would call a dictator, but he explained that dictators are not always bad. He explained that since the law of most places allows somebody to break the law in some special situations, then most places involve dictatorship in one way or another, and so dictatorship is not as bad and unusual as people say. He wrote more about this idea: he put into words that there is a difference between a person using violence because the government allowed that person to do so, and a group of people using violence for political purposes without permission from the law because they are angry with something in society. 

Schmitt also saw a difference between breaking the law in order to defend that law, and breaking the law in order to create a new or better law. This is how he explained why Hitler had so much power: Hitler used the power of the *state of exception* to break the law, and created new laws to replace the ones he broke, and these new laws gave him more power. Whenever the *state of exception* was going to end, Hitler declared it again, and so his power never ended.

### *Political Theology* 
Schmitt wrote more about the idea of the state of exception. In this essay, he wrote how he believed that the person or group of people that really hold *sovereignty* (the power to rule how they want) in a country is who has the ability to declare the state of exception and break the law with permission of the system. This would be something that would only happen when there was a big emergency and the normal process of law would not be convenient, but Schmitt was responding to other writers of his time, that believed that the person with power was the person that the law said had power, in all cases, without exceptions. 

### *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy* 
Schmitt later wrote a paper called *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy* in which he wrote how he disagreed with liberalism and democracy. He believed that liberalism and democracy were mistaken, because these ideas imagine that politicians decide how to do things with logic and trying to solve issues, while Schmitt thought that in reality the results of politics are decided by a few powerful people that want to help their own interests first, and then tell others what to do without always listening to logic or fairness. 

He thought that liberalism is wrong in other ways. First, he thought that unlike what liberalism says, in real governments power is not separated as clearly as liberalism wants. Second, he believed that democracy was an incorrect idea: democracy says that the opinion of everyone counts equally in deciding how to manage a country, but Schmitt says that in reality there has to be some people with more power telling other people with less power what to do.

### *The Concept of the Political* 
In this book, Schmitt writes about what it means for something to be "political". He believed that when we say something is political, it means that that thing makes us think of who is our friend and who is our enemy. Importantly, Schmitt said that it cannot be the friend or the enemy of one person in particular; it has to be the friend or enemy of many people. This is because if every person was allowed to decide who is a friend and who is an enemy, then every person would believe that they had the right to be violent against who they thought to be their enemy, and this would be bad for society as everyone would soon come up with a reason to be violent.

Schmitt came up with this idea of friend and enemy, which he calls the *friend-enemy distinction*, because he saw how in other situations we also divide things into two opposites: when we talk about money, we think of things that make money and things that lose money; when we think about beauty, we think about things that look good and things that look bad; when we think about religion, we think about things that God likes and things that God doesn't like; and so on. However, unlike those other situations, he thought that the things that are political are more important, because of what makes the enemy an enemy and what makes a friend a friend: an enemy is somebody that would kill you or end your way of life if he or she got angry enough at you, while a friend is somebody that will protect you and help you fight back. Since we care more about our life and friends than we care about other things, then the things that are political are more important. 

Other things that Schmitt says are that being a friend or an enemy has nothing to do with other opinions we have of them, like being beautiful or ugly, honest or liars, etc; a person can be beautiful and honest but still be an enemy, or a person can be ugly and bad, but be our friend. These things don't make someone a friend or an enemy by themselves, but we almost always associate these descriptions with friends and enemies. The enemy, as well, can be someone that is part of your same country, or someone that belongs to another country. He also thought that there were times when we get along more with the enemy and times when we get along less; fighting and killing your enemy only happens in very extreme cases. The more a thing makes us realize we don't get along with our enemies, the more political it is. However, Schmitt thought that *all* ideas are political in some way, and that political leaders use these ideas to inspire their followers and create a sense of identity. Schmitt thought, though, that we should determine who our enemies are not so much because of our moral positions, but instead based on the enemy's ability to hurt to the country. thought Schmitt. Some writers have criticized this book because they say that Schmitt doesn't care about what people want, and instead thinks of people as stupid and impulsive, who do not really know what they want or what is best for them, and so need someone to rule them to show them what is good and what is bad, and more importantly, someone that will tell them *who* is good and *who* is bad. 

Schmitt disagrees with Hobbes because Hobbes thought that the government is something created by a powerful person to bring order to society, and once created, it continues to bring order, and that what makes a government special is the people that control it; Schmitt believed that this was wrong, because a government is more important and even more special than the people that control it. He hated them because he thought that if you welcome different ways of thinking, you create a society where nobody shares an identity, as everyone does their own thing, and he thought this was bad. However, even though he disagrees with Hobbes, Schmitt still likes him as a writer. He wrote about how he thought that the way people go to war had changed. He looked at many famous military leaders like Napoleon, and saw how in addition to soldiers, there was now a new type of warrior called the *partisan* or the *guerrilla*. Partisans don't fight normally, like a soldier would do, but instead stay hidden most of the time and attack the enemy where they are not expecting an attack, using tactics that are not common, and that often rely on making the enemy feel scared and unsafe at all times. 

Schmitt thought this is very interesting because it made him rethink his work *The Concept of the Political*, as the partisan is an enemy that cannot be easily seen or fought in the way that he previously thought. Schmitt thought that partians were worse than normal soldiers because of the way they carried out violence, and thought that governments who wanted to fight partisans had to use the tactics of the partisans against them, even if it meant doing bad things. Schmitt saw how many people around the world became partisans to free their countries from colonial domination, but he thought that these partisans were barbaric. And so, he believed that being a partisan had less to do with how you fight a war and more to do with why you fight a war.

## References