In 1932 political philosopher Leo Strauss published a critical review of The Concept of the Political that earned him Schmitt's respect and initiated an extremely subtle interchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt's critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, in the third edition of his book he changed key passages in response to Strauss's criticisms without ever acknowledging them.

Carl Schmitt, one of the most influential legal and political thinkers of the twentieth century, is known chiefly for his work on international law, sovereignty, and his doctrine of political exception. This book argues that greater prominence should be given to his early work in legal studies. Schmitt himself repeatedly identified as a jurist, and Hugo E. Herrera demonstrates how for Schmitt, law plays a key role as an intermediary between ideal, conceptual theory and the complexity of practical, concrete situations. Law is concerned precisely with balancing the extremes of theory and reality, and in this respect, Schmitt associates it with philosophical thinking broadly as being able to understand and explain the tensions in human experience. Reviewing and analyzing prevailing interpretations of Schmitt by Jacques Derrida, Heinrich Meier, and others, Herrera argues that the importance of Schmitt's legal framework is both significant and overlooked.

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor--and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt shared an abiding interest in the fundamental problems of political theology, believing the great challenges of modern political theory were ancient in pedigree and, in many cases, anticipated the works of Judeo-Christian eschatologists. In this collection of Taubes's writings on Schmitt, the two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology. Taubes acknowledges Schmitt's reservations about the weakness of liberal democracy yet distances himself from his prescription to rectify it, arguing the apocalyptic worldview requires less of a rigid hierarchical social ordering than a community committed to the importance of decision making. In these writings, a sharper and more nuanced portrait of Schmitt's thought emerges, as well as a more complicated understanding of Taubes, who has shaped the work of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and other major twentieth-century theorists.

Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy principle is exposed to in-depth philosophical analysis and historical examination with the aim of showing that the political follows hostility, violence and terror as form follows matter. The book argues that the partisan is an umbrella concept that includes the national and global terrorist.

This is the first full-length study in English of twentieth-century Germany's most influential authoritarian right-wing political theorist, Carl Schmitt, that focuses on the central place of his attack on the liberal rule of law. This is also the first book in any language to devote substantial attention to Schmitt's subterranean influence on some of the most important voices in political thought (Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Hans Morgenthau) in the United States after 1945. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World: Reorienting the Political examines the reception of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in China and Taiwan. The legacies of both Schmitt, the German legal theorist and thinker who joined the Nazi party, and Strauss, the German-Jewish classicist and political philosopher who became famous after his emigration to the United States, are highly controversial. Since the 1990s, however, these thinkers have had a powerful resonance for Chinese scholars. Today, when Chinese intellectuals debate the Chinese state, the future role of China in the world, the liberal international order, and even the meaning of Confucian civilization, they often employ Schmittian and Straussian concepts like “the political,” “friend–enemy,” “state of exception,” “liberal education,” and “natural right.” The very possibility of a genuine Chinese political theory is often thought to be tied to the legacy of these two thinkers. This volume explores this complex phenomenon with a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach. The twelve essays in this volume are written from a range of perspectives by philosophers, political theorists, historians, and legal scholars from China, Germany, Taiwan, and the United States.

Groundless Existence discusses the implicit phenomenological and existential foundations of Schmitt's political philosophy. The book's unique contribution lies in its claim that Schmitt decisively breaks with the metaphysical tradition and predicates the political on the 'groundless' categories of existence, including risk, decision, and agonism. This argument is substantiated by both tacit and explicit existentialist and phenomenological underpinnings of Schmitt's work, discussed here for the first time in book form.The book provides an insight into the implications of Schmitt's thought reconceptualized in the light of contemporary political developments. An essential text for anyone interested in the political theory of Carl Schmitt, it offers a new reading of Schmitt's work against the double background of phenomenology and existentialism.