Peter Uwe Hohendahl. Perilous Futures

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was one of the leading legal and political thinkers in the Weimar Republic, a theorist for the Third Reich between 1933 and 1939, and an unrepentant foe of the liberal democratic Germany that emerged in its western half after 1945. Schmitt’s political and legal writings have experienced a renaissance of interest in the West in the last twenty years due to their perceived relevance to contemporary political questions faced domestically and internationally since 1989, and to the War on Terror. In Perilous Futures: On Carl Schmitt’s Late Writings, Peter Uwe Hohendahl expresses a refreshing skepticism towards the enthusiastic appropriation of Schmittian ideas by many scholars on the left in the Anglophone world, especially in the field of international relations. The political theorist Chantal Mouffe and philosopher Giorgio Agamben helped create a “Europeanized Schmitt, largely freed from his German political baggage” (180). Schmitt’s postwar German critics and defenders “would not recognize the author in the more recent Anglo-American debate,” which “with only slight exaggeration . . . has created a distinct and novel version of Schmitt” (179–180). Hohendahl urges a return to questions of intent and the historical context for Schmitt’s writing since 1945.

Alienation · Appropriation · Context (archaeology) · Democracy · Epistemology · German · Nazi Germany · Political science · Politics · Skepticism · Theology · Weimar Republic · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · War, Ethics, and Justification